I didn’t worry about whether I’d ever have to look Mark’s little sister in the eye again. I certainly didn’t worry about the fate of the world. Yes, there were zombies, I had that information, and it would have been unforgivable not to share it; but it was just like having information important to cancer research. It might save some lives, but in the grand scheme, not much would change either way. Not much ever did. People did their best for worthy causes, we had to, but it was only ever just enough to keep the world as mediocre as always. If all my efforts fell flat, things would be no worse than they had been before my discovery, and if I succeeded beyond my wildest dreams, a new threat would arise before anyone could decide how to celebrate.
I knew that night that the dead could rise, maybe they always had under freak circumstances, creating and encouraging the zombie stories I knew so well. It hadn’t ever occurred to me that they’d start making a habit of it. They couldn’t because the world as I knew it was something that was always there the next morning when whatever else I was worried about had blown over.
Just like my parents.
That’s why I didn’t worry about their sudden unreachability either. At least, not the first night.
So let’s skip ahead to when something happens outside of my limited imagination.
“Cassie, isn’t it?”
It was eleven in the morning when a cop I didn’t recognize asked me this, three hours after they’d brought me the drive-through breakfast biscuit and too early for lunch, so I sat up instantly to listen, scared and relieved at the same time, expecting real news.
“Come on,” he said. “We’re moving you to the family room.”
“Why?” I asked. “Is my family here?”
“No.”
“When are they coming?” I demanded. I knew it wasn’t his fault if they still weren’t answering, but I wasn’t going to miss the rare opportunity to demand information from someone.
“No idea,” he said. “But it’s about to get a little crowded in here for you.”
Aleman and Easton were among the four officers corralling a group of three men, all late college age, all built like horses, all looking scared out of their minds. One of them kept trying to push his way back to the door. I thought at first that they’d just been celebrating spring break too loudly and were freaked out about getting caught. Then the skittish one turned again, and I saw at least as much blood on his hands as I’d had to scrub off my own.
I didn’t argue with the move any further.
The family room smelled a little less like liquor than the drunk tank, and just as much like bodily fluids. The naptime cot wasn’t designed for someone of even my meager height and weight. At least the baby powder smell made it easier to avoid imagining the swarms of microbes it was probably crawling with.
There were two wide, sunny windows with bars on the outside, not that they were necessary. I gave up trying to figure out the child locks to let in some air after the first fifteen minutes anyway.
The ancient black and white TV in the corner could pick up three stations with some fiddling, allowing me the choice of a Korean soap opera, a small claims court, or a guy in a bright green rabbit suit singing about the importance of oral hygiene.
Halfway through the February issue of Highlights from 1992, I began to debate whether the room change qualified as an upgrade.
The little window in the door didn’t let me see as much of the hall outside as the barred cell front had, but it was a twist of the corridor closer to the front desk, more frequently trafficked, so I was able to overhear snippets of conversation.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to notice this advantage.
It’s a funny thing. Worries and unfamiliar surroundings can make it almost impossible to sleep through the night, but they don’t do anything to stop you from dozing off in the middle of the next day, or having really intense dreams when you do, so the historic day I spent listening to the world end sounded not so much like a bang or a whimper as like this:
“This old man, he played one, he played knickknack on my thumb . . . .”
“One person left standing. Mark? Mark!”
“Nan dangsin-eul salang haeyo. Nan eonjena dangsin-eul salang haess-eoyo!”
“. . .never seen so many domestic disturbances in one day . . . disturbances of the peace . . . in broad daylight.”
“. . . not sayin’ he did it on purpose, but them bills ain’t gonna pay themselves.”
“Just let me talk to her, Greg. She seems to be the start of all of this. She has to know something.”
“Even we’re not allowed to question her without representation.”
“But I’m not one of you!”
“Run it without comments, Jan.”
“You can’t keep pretending the situation is normal!”
“Mark? Mark!”
“. . . can’t just hold her here like this much longer.”
“The parents aren’t picking up, and the child advocate’s having some sort of family crisis. What do you suggest?”
“Dangsin mom-i jjogaejineun geoya!”
“. . . gotta be some new drug, right?”
“Mark? Mark!”
Around the time the sunlight from the window turned that golden, late afternoon color, the channel with the court shows and the occasional sound bite of local news cut out into a technical difficulties screen, relieving me of the still image of Mark’s yearbook photo and his mother’s quote, “When will he be laid to rest?”
I flicked groggily back to the Korean channel, which was playing a breaking news broadcast of a riot in Seoul, and suddenly, I was wide awake. Even through the fuzzy, copter-borne camera, I recognized the same thoughtless, deliberate way of moving that Mark had demonstrated for me in those critical few seconds after his first death. The picture was even more degraded in the zoomed attempts at close-ups, the features indiscernible, but there was no question what those people were doing to each other.
There was definite biting going on.
That’s when I finally realized what you already know, unless you found this book lying in a ditch, missing the back cover and most of the first two chapters, after escaping from a particularly strict isolationist cult compound on the moon.
My world didn’t just contain zombies, it was overrun with them.
“Gina?”
That was Aleman’s voice, answering her phone. This time I listened to every word.
“News? What? No, don’t tell me you’ve lost another one! You’re serious? No, of course, someone will be right out.”
“Gina Clark again?” Easton asked her, and I recognized the name of the local hospital when she verified it. “Another vanishing terminal case or another rampaging junkie?”
Aleman paused long enough to make it clear that she was serious.
“First one, then the other.”
For the first time, I checked that my door was, in fact, locked from the outside.
“They’re not junkies!” I called out, pounding on the glass out of pure optimism that someone would take notice. No one did.
I turned my attention back to the old TV, searching for any more information it could give me.
The news channel never returned, and the children’s channel continued with its regularly scheduled programming. Maybe they weren’t set up to change it, or maybe they thought they’d get better ratings keeping the kids calm while parents watched the other channels in other rooms.
The Korean channel didn’t translate much into English, but at least the images were useful. More useful than test patterns, anyway. The riots in Korea itself were inter-spliced with similar scenes against different skylines. I recognized New York, London, Tokyo, Dubai, and what I think was Moscow.
I tuned out the eerie familiarity of the different flavors of the scenes and focused on the unfamiliar constants. That mechanical determination of movement was one of them. That low, animal throat scream was another, like they needed to make noise but couldn’t be bothere
d to open their airways properly.
I paid special attention to the few kills I could identify in the background of the recycling shots. Almost everything was zombie on human, not the other way around, except for one old Japanese lady driving her cane through one of their eyes. It supported my best theory, but it wasn’t proof.
That sound.
I was getting a little hazy again from too many hours staring at the grainy screen, and from the time of day and the darkness. I had been conscious for fewer than ten straight hours, but it was well past midnight, I wasn’t exactly well rested, and I hadn’t bothered to go looking for the light switch when the sun had set. For a second or so I thought something funny had happened to the volume, or to my ears.
When I heard it again, I scrambled off the cot so fast that its frame finally buckled.
It was coming from the hallway outside.
“. . . never stopped fighting from the moment we arrived. Nurse said he couldn’t even lift his own spoon yesterday. Hasn’t said a single word.”
I could barely make out Aleman’s voice through the continuing, echoing, throat screams.
“You think he somehow got his hands on this new PCP?” a separate, authoritative voice asked.
“No.” I must have been pretty desperate for a friendly voice because even Easton’s was comforting. “I mean, yes, he’s like the ones we encountered on the streets, but it’s not PCP. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before. The eyes . . . they respond almost normally, but they don’t look like they should.”
From my tiny window, I watched them drag the thrashing, moaning cadaver along the hall, and I could hear in his voice that Easton knew the look in its eyes as well as I did, but hadn’t been able to understand it yet.
My sympathy for him was cut short by the beep of his keycard, reminding me what he naturally planned to do with the thing.
“Stop!” I yelled. As usual, no one listened. The inhuman shrieking coming from the space between me and the officers this time wasn’t helping. “Don’t let it near them! Check its pulse, its pulse!”
Just out of sight, around the corner, I heard the cell click shut again.
Unlike me, I guess the dozen guys who’d accumulated inside it over the course of the day were supposed to be big enough to take care of themselves.
For anyone wondering how a small, coddled, fifteen-year-old girl (with no more remarkable tools or talents than an encyclopedic recollection of every Mythbusters episode ever aired) managed to survive to tell a story that involves almost no one else managing to do the same, this is an excellent example of one of those times when it’s actually been really useful to be me.
I listened to the screams, both living and undead. I heard when each distinct voice in the first category went silent, and when it returned as part of the second. I listened to the false confidence of the orders to “settle down in there,” thinly veiling the confusion of the officers who could see the unusual brawl I was almost glad I couldn’t.
Easton’s voice was coming from just in front of the cell at the same time the keycard reader beeped.
“Don’t open that door!” I shouted uselessly.
The zombies poured out into the empty hallways of the station. The calls that night had been more demanding than any emergency response organization was ever meant to handle, so there weren’t a lot of other cops standing by. The three who were trying to subdue the zombies made a tactical retreat in my direction, far enough that I could see the flash of a taser gun in one of their hands and observe its effect. Not that it was much to observe.
“Stop where you are!” Aleman commanded and then drew her gun. The force of the two bullets passing through its chest took the first zombie off its feet. For a few seconds.
“Go for the head!” I yelled.
Easton did, and the first zombie went down. The other twelve didn’t seem to mind stepping on it to overtake the trio of cops.
Easton caught my eye through the little window while one of them bit off his ear. He didn’t nod, didn’t waste the time to tell me I had been right, just held up the ring of keys with the card hanging from it, and threw it underhand at the gap beneath my door.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Legend of Suprbat
A childproof, soft-edged, weaponless room, a writhing hallway full of zombies, an almost-as-hostile world waiting just out of reach, and there, at my feet, a glimmer of hope. Freedom. It’s one of those defining moments that you remember whenever you’re trying to remind yourself what you’re made of.
There was never going to be a better time to make a break for it. I seriously doubted that the zombies would leave while I was alive so nearby, and with nothing to fight them with, my best chance for getting past them would be to do it while they were occupied with the cops.
You know, occupied eating them.
So why did I stay crouched behind that door, listening until there were no more sounds of human protest, nothing but the precious, finite soundtrack of the ripping and cracking of flesh and bone, winding ever closer to its last note?
Had my nerve failed me, the loss of all that was normal and familiar finally sunk in, the twin guns of cynicism and good, old-fashioned denial finally expended their last rounds? Had the secret substance of my character at last been called out into the light to be measured and fallen short?
No, it’s just really, really difficult to pull a well-stocked keychain through the gap under your average door.
The key card had slid under first, pretty easily, lucky for me, but the ring and most of the real keys, including the one that would unlock the family room door, were still stuck on the other side of it.
I pulled, hard but carefully, afraid the plastic would rip before I made any progress. After jerking the card back and forth a few times with negligible results, I dragged the ruined cot over to the door and jammed the bent part of the frame into the gap, trying to pry it a little wider. It sort of worked. After some pretty horrifying creaking sounds, which I guess don’t even bear mentioning next to the sounds that were coming from outside, I was finally able to get my fingers around a metal part of the keychain. I thought it might snap before I could get hold of anything more useful, but after a few moments of yanking, readjusting my hands and the bracing of my legs, and yanking again, the lumpy tangle of steel came free, along with a sizable hunk of splinters.
After that much effort to get them, it was actually pretty easy not to think twice about using those keys.
The zombies outside were still mostly distracted, their throaty noises replaced by chewing and something close to the sound of taking apart pieces of fried chicken, so that’s what I pretended they were doing as I pushed past them. I pictured the crispy, golden, deliciously not-human limbs, the salt and grease and clear, well-cooked juices, and discovered probably the worst possible time ever to realize just how hungry you are.
One of them reached for my ankle, and I kicked out, breaking its nose, not that it seemed to notice. It gave me time, at least, to run down the hall to the confiscated goods room where I’d watched the college guys get their stuff sorted, fumble it open, and shut myself inside. I didn’t stop there because I couldn’t have made it to the door by the front desk in time. I could have. I stopped there to look for my cell phone, and I didn’t stop for my phone because I’m that hopelessly addicted to Angry Birds. I did it because I wanted to contact someone, anyone I knew, and I don’t actually know any phone numbers by heart other than the three (home, Mom’s cell, Dad’s cell) that the cops had already tried a hundred times.
Make all the jokes you want about the curses of technology. Go on, really, I can take it, because I’ve seen how society crumbled, and it wasn’t because of the failing attention span of first-world youth.
My phone wasn’t there. One of the cops probably had it in a desk drawer somewhere, but when I turned on the light in the little, utility-sized room I almost forgot what I’d been looking for. The phone would have been nice. It could have been pretty useful for the
next couple of days. The things that were in there, however, promised to come in handy for a much bigger chunk of my new life.
I took a few luxurious seconds to examine the array of blunt and bladed weapons.
Claw hammer. Too short.
Chainsaw. Too unwieldy.
Katana. Too flashy. Whoever it had been confiscated from had probably ordered it from a collector’s catalog, and they hadn’t even bothered to have it sharpened.
Baseball bat.
Perfect.
It was old but perfectly intact, and the weight of the wood felt divine in my hands. The brand name had been scraped off, and burned into the side of it, probably with a magnifying glass, were the words, “Suprbat 2000 2001 2002.”
I don’t know what “Suprbat” was used for in 2002 that got it confiscated. I don’t know if its previous owner is still out there somewhere, knocking off mailboxes and zombie heads alike, or if he gave up crime, stayed in school, won the national spelling bee, and then got bitten on the way to work one day. Wherever he is, I’d like to thank him for making a special appearance on the ever-expanding list of people who’ve saved my life. In fact, he’s probably in the lead for sheer volume.
There wasn’t much else there that could do anything but slow me down. There were a couple of phones, but the batteries were shot, and like I said, who would I call anyway without my own contacts folder?
I did grab a couple of the many, many Swiss Army knives and Zippo lighters, some road flares, and a large, grey knapsack. The flesh-eating bunny printed on the side probably wouldn’t be funny for much longer, but the fireworks inside, including bottle rockets and some long garlands of firecrackers, had the potential to be pretty useful.
Confessions of the Very First Zombie Slayer (That I Know Of) Page 3