Three Zombie Novels

by David Wellington

  “I need your entire staff here. Wake them up if you have to and bring them in. The next twenty-four hours are going to be crucial in containing this. We need everyone who might have been exposed to stay locked down here in quarantine until we know we aren’t going to spread it.” He turned to the technician who had turned on the lights. The man at least knew how to do something useful. “Glynne here was described to me as an Assistant Warden. Where is the actual Warden while all this is going on?”

  The technician glanced at Glynne.

  “On vacation. He went to visit his family in California,” the Assistant Warden announced.

  Vegans Go Home: This is Meat Country! [Billboard outside of Grand Junction Colorado, leased by the Colorado Beef and Buffalo Cattlemen’s Association, 05]

  The nurse in the panda bear coat came back, finally, wheeling an EKG machine into Nilla’s cubicle. She looked tired, near exhaustion, and sweat had soaked through the armpits of her coat. Without a word she dragged her cart to Nilla’s bedside and started tearing open plastic bags and unsealing tubes of gel. When she pulled Nilla’s shirt up, nearly exposing her breasts, something had to be said.

  “What’s going on?” Nilla demanded. “I’ve been lying here for hours in these restraints. Surely if I was rabid I’d be foaming at the mouth now or something.”

  The nurse stared at her with a pained look. “Rabid? Who said you had rabies? This is ridiculous. I’m in the middle of a double shift I got assigned with no warning and no lunch break. I’m hungry and tired and I want to go home and now I have to listen to patients who’ve seen one episode of ER and think they can diagnose themselves. Rabies, for fuck’s sake. Can I just do my job, huh? Do you think I can just do my job? I don’t have time for this.”

  Nilla couldn’t help but be chastened. She understood what it was like to be hungry and tired, after all. She was pretty much nothing but. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  The nurse just shook her head. She squeezed a tube over Nilla’s stomach and icy cold gel dripped on her skin, making her wince. Next came a series of electrodes that had to be patted down. Finally the nurse switched on her machine and turned a few knobs.

  “Come on. Come on,” the nurse muttered as the EKG warmed up. “Come on already.”

  The screen of the EKG finally lit up and simultaneously an alarm tone sounded. On the screen a flat line etched its way from left to right with no deviation whatsoever.

  “Jesus,” the nurse swore, and thumped the machine hard. Nothing changed. She switched off the alarm. “Another malfunction!”

  “What—what did that mean?” Nilla asked, suddenly terrified. “I don’t have a heartbeat? What’s going on?”

  The nurse swore again and yanked the electrodes off of Nilla’s body. “It means my machine is fucked, and now I have to get another one from the other side of the hospital, and that I don’t get my smoke break for another half hour! That’s what it fucking means. Jesus, would you calm down?” She grabbed for Nilla’s bound wrist and shoved her index finger into the pulse point. After a few seconds her mouth jerked in bewilderment and she shoved her palm underneath Nilla’s nose, trying to feel her breath.

  The anger drained out of her face, taking all the color with it. Her eyes softened and her mouth trembled a little.

  “Oh, God. Doctor!” she screamed. “Code blue, code blue!” She turned to run out of the cubicle just as one curtained wall twitched back. The two police officers who brought Nilla in—Emerson and Pankiewicz, she remembered—stood there. They didn’t look so good. Their skin looked positively blue in the fluorescent light and their eyes were vacant, all but rolled up in their heads. Emerson’s shirt was badly torn and Pankiewicz was missing his hat.

  “Please,” the nurse said, “please get out of my—”

  Emerson grabbed her by the head and bit off her nose. Pankiewicz staggered forward and into her stomach, knocking her against the bed. The three of them fell to the floor in a heap, a writhing, spasmodic heap that screamed sometimes, but not for very long.

  This station is conducting a test of the emergency broadcast system. This is only a test. [KCNC-TV, Denver, 3/19/05]

  In her bed Nilla imagined she was about to die. She felt as if her soul had already left her flesh. She screamed and her consciousness fluttered above her body, her mind detaching to spare itself from the shock. She writhed on the bed, her muscles convulsing wildly as she watched her arms and legs flex and release, kick and shove and shake trying to get free of her restraints.

  From the foot of the bed she heard a sound like air being let out of a balloon and then a noise of bubbles forced out of a soft enclosure. Occasionally she heard teeth gnashing together.

  They were going to kill her, they were going to eat her, too. Any second now.

  Above herself, floating where she could see her tattoo and the bite mark in her shoulder and the greasy mess her hair had become Nilla felt very little fear or concern. She did notice inefficiency. For instance, her arms were in danger of overextending themselves and possibly tearing ligaments the way the kept straining and pulling at the restraints. If she just arched her back so, and brought her forearm up as high as she could, like this, it would be so much easier. She could simply use her teeth to pull at the Velcro closure of the strap. It would be easy.

  No, no, no, her body told her. Limbs and backs don’t bend like that. Normal bodies can’t. Was her body not normal? Was she different somehow?

  A jet of hot blood shot up and splattered the soles of Nilla’s feet. She could see Emerson’s back bobbing up and down—seizing, moving spasmodically as it might during the moment of orgasm. She understood what that meant. He was swallowing chunks of meat whole, the way a snake does.

  Her mind grunted in exasperation and ordered her body to move. Twisting on the bed, forcing sinews that were far stiffer than they should be she managed to get her arm up, her back twisted around so she could just turn her head and touch the end of the restraint with her mouth. Just a little further, she demanded, but her body complained: any further and she’d tear a muscle in her back. Her mind pointed out what the alternative would be.

  She jerked her head forward and got her teeth into the nylon strap. She felt the smoothness of it, the texture of the weave with her tongue. She shouldn’t have been able to do that. Had she been a yoga instructor before she lost her memory? She didn’t have time to think about it. Her head jerked back, unable to maintain the awkward position, and the strap tore open with a noise as loud as a lawnmower starting up.

  Pankiewicz looked up, his blood-soaked face peering over the edge of the bed, clearly alerted by the sound. A moment later he disappeared again, distracted by his feast. With one arm free Nilla grabbed at her other wrist and tore away the binding there, then hastily did her ankles, too. She was free, she was out, her mind flew right back into her body and she realized she had achieved very little. The cops were still eating the nurse alive right in front of her. She was still in danger.

  Get out—her mind and body agreed—get out! She pulled her feet underneath her on the bed and swiveled up to a kneeling position. She expected a head rush but instead it was her entire body that convulsed, her muscles vibrating like plucked rubber bands. She was not in good shape and these gymnastics weren’t helping.

  Just one more stunt to pull, though, she told herself, and leapt right over the heads of the cops. She hit the cold tile floor on the far side, rolled to a stop, and looked up, her arms sheltering her head, her legs tucked as best she could.

  Emerson didn’t react at all. He kept feeding, his face buried in the mid-section of the now dead nurse like a vulture looking for entrails. Pankiewicz noticed her, however. He turned around, still on his knees on the stained hospital floor, and stared at her. Only his eyes were visible. The rest of his face was dripping gore.

  He stumped toward her on his knees, his head drifting to one side. He moved slowly, so slowly but she couldn’t stop shaking with fear, couldn’t get up. She closed her eyes, not wanting to se
e her own death creeping ever closer.

  She could still see him. Right through her eyelids.

  Maybe… maybe seeing was the wrong word, more like she could sense him, maybe the hairs on the back of her neck were shivering—maybe it was just like the phosphor afterimage you saw when you looked at a bright light and then closed your eyes but… she saw… right through him, saw the inside of him. A kind of x-ray vision. She saw a darkness in him, a roiling cloud of dulled energy that fumed away like fog coming off of dry ice. It filled his shape, made him a figure of shadowy smoke floating on a background of pure white.

  What the hell? She glanced over at Emerson and the nurse. The other cop had undergone the same transformation, his body rendered into a boiling silhouette of hazy dimness that sizzled and spat. Nilla saw the nurse, too but not the same way. The nurse’s energy oozed from her and run away across the floor in wide rivulets. It wasn’t dark, either, but a beautiful radiant gold that shimmered and gleamed and dazzled Nilla’s eyes so she almost had to look away. She didn’t want to, though. Whereas before the nurse’s rent and bloody body had horrified her, in this perspective the dying woman had been transformed into a thing of almost perfect beauty. Nilla wanted to get closer, to touch the nurse. To bask in that warm effusion of light. To drink of it. To consume it.

  She realized she was salivating. She quickly looked down at her own hands, needing to know. Somehow she wasn’t surprised to see darkness there, filling the shapes of her fingers, swirling madly in her palms. She looked up at Pankiewicz again and showed him her hands.

  No words passed between them. She was pretty clear the policeman would not have understood if she spoke to him. Still, a kind of communion was possible. He could see her dark energy as well as she could see his, she knew that without questioning how she knew it. They shared an awareness. She sensed his mood, his hunger, his confusion. He moved closer to her, half a step, but then sat back on his haunches. He radiated indifference at her. Irrelevance. She was neither food nor threat. He turned around and headed back to the corpse of the nurse.

  Nilla sat very still, holding her head with both hands, and watched as they feasted. As she watched the nurse’s energy changed, the golden fullness dimming out like a dying candle, shifting through a last flaring shade of blue. Her flame went out and dark smoke billowed up inside her.

  The horribly mutilated woman sat up with a wet tearing noise as she unstuck herself from the floor tiles. She looked around for a minute and then pushed the two policemen away. They had lost interest in her the moment her energy changed anyway. Rising on legs of slaughtered meat and gnawed bone the nurse slumped against a wall and started walking, leaning against the wall for support, dragging a blood stain along the plaster. The cops followed close behind. Where they were headed Nilla didn’t know. She didn’t dare follow. There were too many questions left unanswered.

  What did it mean? What did the different kind of energies signify? What, most importantly, did it mean that her energy was dark? Reluctantly she circled one hand with the fingers of the other and pressed her index finger against the vein in her wrist, trying to find a pulse.

  “He’s crawling toward me… no, on his arms, his legs don’t seem to work anymore, listen, I don’t have time—oh my God—his eyes—his eyes—please! Please tell them to hurry!” [911 Emergency Response System call, Gabbs, NV, 3/20/05]

  In the shadows of the spruces and the firs Dick and Bleu Skye (her legal name, she assured him) crunched through snow that would never melt even in high summer.

  “I suppose that some people would call us freaks,” Bleu said, the words distorted by her lip wound but he could at least understand her now. Not that he was really listening. Her voice was a rough melody in harmony with the scrunching down of snow and the squeak of pine needles he made with every step. “And I suppose I don’t mind so much, we were trying to build something, is all. A quiet life in a pretty noisy world. Me and Tony, that was my husband, and our boy Stormy.”

  Dick’s feet were numb with the cold. His brain was numb with implications, meanings, ramifications. He’d just participated in the butchering of another human being. Oh, it had been self defense, sure, and no, Dick was no peacenik. He owned guns, just like half of Colorado. A couple of target pistols and a hunting rifle and yes, he had used it to kill. To kill white-tailed deer. The idea of hurting a human being intentionally, of true violence, of murder… that he’d never even contemplated before.

  “That was nigh on twenty years ago, back when Stormy was just a passenger, you know, when I was carrying him. We built all this with our hands and we loved it, just loved it, no matter if we were hungry. No matter if we didn’t know how to do something—we could learn. And all we had to do was walk outside and look up and we knew why we came up here and why we didn’t want to go back.”

  A half-visible path, a little more clear of snow than the surrounding terrain, went snaking through the trees and they followed it. Dick was lost on that path as he followed Bleu and he couldn’t let go of the ice axe. It was like a talisman, some proof that he wasn’t an evil man, that he wasn’t a killer. Exhibit A in the trial going on in his head. Bleu’s voice was just the soundtrack to that groundbreaking bit of courtroom drama and when she started sobbing it was just another instrument in the orchestra. On some level he realized that he wasn’t thinking straight.

  “I always worried that I couldn’t teach Stormy enough. I worried he wouldn’t know enough to make it in this life and now… oh God, now…”

  She stopped, and so did Dick. They’d reached their destination, a wooden structure that had to be a century old. Just a shack really, with one wall open to the elements. Inside the trail lead downward, into the earth. An old abandoned mine entrance. The mountains were riddled with them, leftovers from the gold rush. The wind tore out of it, colder than the outside air, and it made a hollow sound. Dick stepped closer and Bleu took his arm, holding him back. There was something moving down there.

  “He died quick. My son died quick. Tony took his time about it. And now… I guess maybe… maybe you should just look. Here.” She handed him a flashlight. He clicked it on and peered down into the darkness.

  “How many do you see?” she asked, her voice flinty again. He couldn’t see anything.

  Then he could. The beam caught on something wriggling, something dark but recognizable. A pair of human legs in snow pants and tan Timberland boots. The legs kicked fitfully. Dick scanned upward with the light, saw a heavy winter jacket. Arms and a head. The face tilted upward and he felt vomit rush up his throat. The skin of the face was red and black and white and yellow. The eyesockets were empty and half of the skin was missing from the jaw. The hands clutched at the slope of the tunnel, digging in until the knuckles stood out like walnuts. The person, because it was a person, yes, was trying to climb out of the tunnel but it was too steep or something.

  “How many?” Bleu asked again.

  “Two,” Dick said, sweeping the light back and forth. “No, three. And—are those bones? Skulls. Hu.” He cleared his throat. “Human.” He clicked off the light and shoved it in his pocket so he could wipe his palms on his jeans. “I saw two—two skulls.”

  “My big strong men,” Bleu rasped. “They just wanted to help and they’re torn to pieces.”

  It took her a while to collect herself before she could speak again. “We found them two days ago and didn’t know what we oughta do. We thought they were dead at first, well, why wouldn’t we? They probably got caught in a storm and went in there looking for shelter. Climbers get themselves lost up here all the time. Nobody ever finds them till summer. When they started moving we decided they were just hurt. They don’t never talk, not even when you yell questions at them.” She took a pistol out of her pocket and cocked it. “There were more yesterday. Maybe six, and maybe seven.” She pointed her weapon down into the tunnel. “They’re getting out.” She fired and the high-caliber shot echoed all around the valley, rolling along the mountains like an endless series of door
s slamming shut.

  “Wait!” Dick shouted, scampering backward, away from the gunshot. “Wait! They need medical assistance, you know, like a doctor, you can’t just—” She fired again and he winced. “I’ve got to—I’ve got to call the police,” he stammered. He had his cell phone in his hand.

  “Good idea,” she said. She aimed carefully, lining up her shot with the forehead of the third—the third person—the third creature? Dick didn’t know what to call them. She pulled the trigger and then let her arm drop, the pistol still in her hand. “We can use the help. We should head back to the house before dark.”

  He followed her back, not knowing what else to do.

  BAD MOON RISING: Top Psychologists Explain the Recent Outbreak of Violence in America [“Home Front” magazine, March 05]

  Nilla scrubbed at her hands and her throat, scraped at her skin with rough paper towels, trying to get the blood off of her body. She had discarded her white clothes. They were hopelessly stained. She had found a doctor’s white coat that smelled like disinfectant and some loose-fitting scrub pants. It would have to be enough.

  She kept staring in the women’s room mirror though she told herself to stop.