Brink of Extinction

by Nicholas Ryan

  * * *

  “You brought me here? To a museum?”

  “Yes,” the man said.

  The boy looked appalled. “Why?”

  “Because it’s important.”

  The hostile defiance came back in the boy’s eyes, the flame of his loathing re-kindled suddenly. His expression turned churlish. “We could have ridden on to Chicago,” he seethed, his voice rising and becoming strident. “There would have been food, maybe even work and somewhere to live. Instead, you brought me out into this wasteland to see a bunch of old relics?”

  “It’s history,” the tone of the man’s voice became defensive.

  “Not mine,” the boy shot back cruelly. He flung an arm at the doors of the museum in a furious gesture. “This is not my history. I wasn’t even born when the apocalypse happened. How can you think this has anything to do with the life I’ve been left to live, or the future I have ahead of me?”

  “What happened during the apocalypse shaped your world,” the man said with bleak patience. “This museum was built as a permanent reminder, and as a tribute to the suffering of the American people, and the sacrifice of our soldiers.”

  The boy shook his head, stubborn and defiant. “You’ve wasted your time,” he said. “We’ve come all this way for no reason. There’s nothing inside this building I want to see, and nothing about it that is relevant to me. All you’ve done is give me another reason to resent you. You’re my father… and you don’t know me at all.”

  * * *

  The man pushed one of the dark glass doors open and they entered a wide somber foyer area. The floor was of the same dark marble as the sign above the entrance, and the lighting in the ceiling was discreet from yellow bulbs, casting light and shadow upon the walls. Across the foyer was a reception desk – a high curved wooden stand behind which the man could see the face of a woman. She wore an expression of wide-eyed surprise that she quickly masked.

  The man went across to the desk and left the boy standing remote and truculent in the middle of the floor, his shoulders hunched, hands thrust deep into his pockets. The man smiled at the receptionist and set his heavy canvas bag down at his feet.

  “Hello,” he said. “We’ve come to see the exhibits.” He glanced to his left and right. He had expected to see others – people wandering in and out of the foyer and the hubbub of hushed respectful voices. Instead the entire museum seemed empty, left hollow with nothing but echoes and memories.

  The receptionist nodded. She was in her late forties with a pleasant face and a kind of superficial smile that masked some deep lingering sadness. There were lines at the corners of her eyes and again at the edges of her mouth, disguised by artfully applied make-up. Her hair was short and blonde, cut into a no-nonsense bob.

  “Welcome,” she said. The top of her workspace was uncluttered. She rose out of her chair and reached to her side where a pile of printed papers were stacked. She picked up the top page and handed it across to the man. It was a floor plan of the museum; the paper was slightly faded yellow with the patina of age. The man studied the diagram quickly.

  The entrance was through another set of dark glassed doors to his right, and from there the museum exhibits formed a U shape around the foyer area. The exit was on the far side of the building, opening up onto a square quadrangle of concrete and gardens that faced to the west. When the man looked up again, the receptionist was waiting for him.

  “Do you know anything about the history of this museum?” she asked politely.

  The man nodded. “A little.”

  She came around from behind the high counter and the man was surprised how tall she was. She stood to the height of his chin, a slim figured woman wearing a knee-length dark blue dress and flat shoes. She moved towards the boy as though to include him as she began to speak.

  “The museum was created during the two years after the end of the zombie apocalypse,” she said, her hands clasped neatly before her like a tour guide from an art gallery. “The building itself was donated by the American government and many of the exhibits were funded by private corporations. Collectively, the armed forces and American citizens worked, as one to create something unique that will stand as a timeless reminder to all mankind of the atrocity, the horror, the sacrifice and the hardship that we, as a nation, endured.” The woman spoke easily, her voice friendly. “Since the time of the apocalypse, the exhibits on display have been constantly added to, so that now we can show a complete – and quite confronting view – of what life was like when America teetered on the very edge of extinction.”

  The man listened attentively, frowning slightly. When the woman had finished her introduction, the man made a perplexed face. He cast one last quick glance around the foyer and then leaned a little closer to the woman, his voice lowered discretely as if the question he was about to ask might be considered disrespectful.

  “I thought there would be more people…” his voice went to a whisper. “Have we come at the wrong time? Are you about to close?”

  The woman shook her head and a grey shadow passed behind her eyes. The smile on her lips faded. She shrugged her shoulders. “Unfortunately, it seems as though the people who survived the horror of the zombie apocalypse don’t want to remember those dark, dark days,” she said. “It’s too sad, too confronting. Perhaps, as a people, we’re not yet strong enough or recovered enough to look back on that time. We’re still too traumatized.”

  “And yet the government keeps the museum open?”

  The woman smiled again, but this time without any trace of humor. “The government funds the upkeep of the building,” she said carefully, “but the museum is staffed entirely by volunteers. They – we – keep the museum open, the exhibits on display, and the lessons that can be learned from the apocalypse every day of the year… and we have for almost two decades.”

  The boy interrupted then, his face pinched with thinly veiled scorn. “How come this place is still standing?” he muttered. “It’s a lawless world filled with dangerous people. Why hasn’t your museum been burned down or destroyed?”

  The receptionist turned to the boy and her face was surprisingly kindly with some sort of instinctive understanding. “Because you only see a building – a museum,” she explained. “But the people who lived and survived through the apocalypse were all like war veterans. To them – to us – it’s not a museum at all. It’s a shrine, a temple… a holy sacred place.”

  * * *

  The boy gave the woman a bland, derisive look but the man cut him off abruptly before he could say more. He indicated his canvas bag and the duffel bag hanging on the boy’s shoulders. “Is there somewhere we can leave these?”

  The woman pointed to a discreet alcove set into the side wall. “All bags must be left in one of the lockers… and you must also leave any weapons you are carrying.”

  The man nodded. He shoved the boy in the direction of the alcove. When they came back into the foyer, a stranger in a somber dark suit was waiting for them, the smile on his face artificial and fixed. He held out his hand.

  “Hi, my name is Bill,” he said. “I’ll be escorting you through the museum today.

  He was a darkly tanned figure in his sixties, his face scholarly, the eyes behind the lenses of his spectacles bright and intelligent, and blue as sapphires. He was tall and gaunt, the suit hanging off the bony stoop of his shoulders so that the garment draped almost shapelessly. His hair bristled cropped close to his skull, black turning quickly to grey. He glanced at the man and his eyes narrowed for a curious moment… and then the expression on his face became fixed once more as he smiled in the direction of the boy.

  Bill clasped his hands together and then turned on his heel. “Okay,” he said over his shoulder to the man and the boy. “The exhibits begin right through those glass doors. Follow me. We begin at the beginning… with a look back at the origins of the apocalypse, and how the infection first came to America.”

  * * *

  They walked into another world �
�� a place of nightmares and horror contained within the walls of the first exhibition space. It was a large room with a single door to the left. The walls were painted black, the lighting so subdued that it took several moments for the man’s eyes to adjust. When at last his vision became clear, he felt himself flinch, and a cold chill ran down the length of his spine.

  The room began to fill with smoke, boiling up from somewhere along the perimeter of the floor space, and a single spotlight flared into dazzling light.

  The far wall of the space suddenly seemed filled with the undead, as if they had broken through the brickwork and were pouring into the museum. The man felt the blood drain away from his face and his body strung tense. Beside him the boy stared wide-eyed with macabre fascination. There were a dozen wax zombie figures, each one rendered with finite patience, to recreate shockingly real effigies of the undead. The spotlight had been carefully located to highlight the central figure, with the light filtering to the edges of the wall so that those far models were made just as frightening by their indistinct detail – appearing as ghostly terrors in the tendrils of swirling smoke.

  The boy took a couple of tentative steps closer and the man edged forward with him. They went towards the central figure. It had been rendered as a man, the head grossly distorted so that the flesh from one cheek had been torn away and one of the wild, insane eyes, hung free of its socket. The teeth of the ghoul were exposed, the lips peeled back into a hideous rictus of a snarl.

  The boy paused, awed and hushed. He leaned slowly closer to the figure, his eyes locked and shocked.

  The ghoul’s chest had been torn open so that he could see several exposed ribs through the tatters of the filthy shirt that hung from the shoulders, and the grey waxen flesh was criss-crossed in lacerations that seeped blood. Low down, inside the chest cavity, he could see the bulge of purple organs, the cords of intestine that spilled from the zombie’s guts in glistening ropes.

  The boy reached out a tentative hand and touched the undead figure’s outstretched and clawed hand. It felt cold and dead, the same texture as marble. He drew his hand back and stared for a long moment at the yellow maddened eyes and then the long filth-encrusted fingernails, broken and ragged like a predator’s talons.

  He turned slowly to the tour guide and his voice rasped scratchy in his throat.

  “Is this what they really looked like?”

  Bill nodded solemnly. “Yes,” he said. “They died and then became re-animated. Their flesh corrupted and the bodies wasted away. They became single-minded marauders.”

  The boy walked slowly past all the figures. Some of them were modeled as women, and one as a child. They had been sculpted in poses of rage, their bodies hunched, arms extended, mouths agape and snarling as if at any second they might lunge forward and strike.

  Beside the boy, the man had become quiet and introspective. His face was drawn tight, his expression thin-lipped and grim. His eyes had become a far-away stare.

  The smoke boiled around their legs, swirling and writhing so that it seemed they were walking through a mist. The boy’s foot stubbed something unseen on the floor. He paused and glanced down. On the ground, between the rampaging effigies, lay broken skulls and bones, twisted bodies and severed limbs. He took an alarmed leap backwards and fell against the man.

  “The undead were a plague that swept across the southern states of America,” Bill’s voice came out of the smoky darkness like a disembodied apparition. The boy had to search the gloom for him until he saw the tour guide’s shape, still standing just inside the doors they had entered. The man had his hands clasped behind his back, and for the first time the boy noticed a bank of monitors that were dark flat screens built into a side wall, and the box shape of sound speakers concealed in the corners of the ceiling.

  “It all began in the deserts of the Middle East – a gruesome plot by a foreign government to destroy the United States. The plague was released in Florida, and the infection spread so quickly that within just a couple of days, the entire State was overrun.”

  On cue, one of the monitors came to life and the spotlight above the undead figure faded to black. The light in the room became a ghostly green glow, like the vision through night goggles – strangely surreal and made eerie by the writhing coils of smoke. The single screen suddenly filled with light and images, and the ground beneath their feet seemed to tremble with rumbling bass from the speaker system. Then the air filled with the sound of a thousand ghouls, screeching and snarling, their voices maniacal and gnashing amidst a riot of desperate pleas and the clamor of glass and timber shattering.

  The boy clamped his hands over his ears and felt himself cringe. Even the man appeared cowered by the sound of the piercing shrieks that seemed as overpowering as a crushing weight. The noise was an assault on the ears, painful and debilitating. It lasted for just thirty seconds and then stopped abruptly. In the sinister silence afterwards, the haunting shrill snarls still seemed to echo in their ears.

  “That was a recording of a zombie attack,” Bill said, thin and alien in the green light. His face was grave. “The sound was captured by a family in Orlando, and was recovered by an Infection Clearance team five years after the outbreak. You might not have heard it, but there were police sirens in the background. What you just witnessed was the audio record of a family’s death and mutilation. No one survived the assault.”

  As one, all the monitors switched on, their screens becoming a single massive panel that stretched the full width of the side wall, from floor to ceiling. On a dark background appeared the title, ‘Outbreak of the Infection’. It stayed on the screen for several seconds and then shaky images of a Florida street exploded across the monitors, the camera lens jerking and swaying erratically as if the person recording had been running.

  The man and the boy turned, fascinated. Now the light in the room became a strobe of different colors that flashed upon their faces as the television images faded into a series of urgent live news reports. The tour guide seemed to melt discreetly into one of the darkened corners as the man and the boy watched a montage of frantic coverage, each clip more graphic, more terrifying than the last as the horror of the infection was broadcast to the people of America.

  The room became swamped with the sounds of wailing sirens. Frightened, stunned faces flashed across the screens, people shaking their heads bewildered, their eyes haunted, their faces grey as ash. They were covered in spattered blood, talking directly to the camera, telling their tales of incredible escape, or their stories of heartbreaking tragedy. The footage cut to a clip of a man lying on a sidewalk, and hunched over him snarled two dark and terrible shapes. The camera zoomed close and caught a gush of bright red blood that sprayed from the victim’s chest. An instant later there was the resounding ‘crack!’ of gunfire, and the two ghouls turned their heads and fled towards the direction of the shots. The camera crept close to the man on the sidewalk, as around the body, a shaken white-faced crowd of bystanders gathered. The footage focused on the dying man’s face and there was a rush of voices, caught on audio.

  “Get a doctor! For Christ sake, find a doctor.”

  “Jesus, he’s bleeding out!”

  “Did you see that? Did you see what they did?”

  “He needs help.”

  “Leave him. He shouldn’t be moved.”

  “Did anyone see where those things went?”

  “He… he’s getting up. He’s not dead.”

  “What the fuck…?”

  “Jesus! Get a gun. Shoot the fucker. Shoot him!”

  At last the monitors faded out for a few seconds and the man and the boy stood, seeming to sway and shiver, as if they had paused on the edge of a beach and been battered by ice cold waves.

  It was a sensory overload – an assault on the ears and the eyes and emotions. The horror in the faces of the people was chilling. They had looked like survivors of an earthquake, dusty and dirty, bleeding and dazed with their fear.

  The man glanced surreptitiou
sly at the boy and saw the pale set of his face, and the clench of his jaw. He was staring at the bank of monitors intently as the screens came out of the fade, dissolving into a map of the United States, and the calm measured voice of a narrator began to speak. The man tore his gaze away from the boy’s face and turned back to the images.

  “The terrorist attack that brought America to its knees began in a football stadium,” the disembodied voice rumbled, “and spread quickly through the streets of Florida.” As the narrator went on, a bright red spot bloomed on the map over the city like a gunshot wound. “Police and emergency authorities were overwhelmed. The undead raged through the streets and in the panic to flee the horror, thousands… and then tens of thousands became infected.” The map changed then, the red circle creeping quickly out towards neighboring cities, gushing from the red center circle like arterial blood.

  “There was nothing America could do, no way we could respond,” the narrator’s voice softened. “We had been targeted by terrorists, backed by an abhorrent regime that had vowed to bring death to America. They succeeded. The outbreak of the infection swept across Florida and spread north into our southern states. Millions died in the chaos, and millions more became infected.”

  The narrator’s words trailed into silence, and Bill’s voice filled the void. “The undead infection was something the likes of which the world had never seen before,” Bill intoned gravely. “Ebola and all those other infectious diseases of the twentieth century were incomparable. The zombie infection spread like a blazing fire, driven on by a turbulent gale. There was no incubation period, no chance to quarantine and contain. Everyone bitten or scratched – everyone whose blood became contaminated, died. The virulent poison killed them, then re-animated them within sixty seconds.”

  Displayed on the bank of monitors, the red tide was now flooding the lower eastern states, creeping inexorably north as the plague broke over containment barriers, and the armed forces of America massed behind a ragged line of trenches and barbed wire. Bill’s voice overlaid the stark, confronting diagram that detailed the spread of the virus.