by Jack Wallen
“I know, I know…we don’t have their numbers.”
Sally had no idea, but I was staring in disbelief that a seemingly ditzy TV personality type had arrived at such a simple, yet brilliant plan ahead of me. That’s right, even amid the Apocalypse, ego was still capable of driving the human being forward into dark, angry places.
“Do you know something I don’t?” Sally asked, seeing the smile creeping across my face.
“I know there are computers here that probably have HR records stored on their drives. I also know how easy it can be to get around HIPAA compliance. That phone list is as good as ours.” As soon as I finished the last word, I turned to leave Susan’s room, but not before I flashed a smile and offered up a thank you to the woman.
I had to admit it was nice to finally do something. Even though we’ve only been here a few days, I feel like I’ve done nothing. That is not my style. As I said, I’m a hacker…I have a compulsion to always feel like I am accomplishing something, anything. And while Sally watches over our ward, I will gather intel on the doctors that are - or rather were - employed at Val de-Grace hospital in Paris, France and drag one of them back.
It didn’t take long to find a PC begging to be cracked. The nearest nurses’ station had four little desktops haphazardly arranged on a large U-shaped desk. Each PC had power and had a password-protected screen saver – thank you HIPAA. Passwords are so funny. You would think that by now the population would have wizened up and used a bit more logic in the choice of passwords. But no, a hacker can crack the average password in no time. It was usually a date, a name, a phone number, or (in some really sad cases) just the word “password”. I generally try the latter first and fifty percent of the time I hit pay dirt.
I sat down at the first desktop and began typing the word password when all hell broke loose. From Susan’s room an ear-splitting scream slashed through the air space between us. Without hesitation, I stood and ran back to the room.
When I arrived at the room, what I saw nearly dropped me to my knees. A moaner was standing in the middle of the room. Instinctively, I reached for my gun but it was nowhere to be found.
“Oh my God! Where’d that thing come from?” I asked Sally.
“I don’t know…just help me!”
The monster didn’t even acknowledge my entrance, it just continued on toward Sally and Susan.
“Hey, over here! Yeah you, dumb fuck!” I had no idea if the undead French moaner understood English, but I didn’t have time to shoot for a translation.
“What are you going to do?” Sally screamed.
“I don’t know. Find me a weapon.”
“Where’s your gun?”
“If I knew I wouldn’t be asking you for a weapon.”
Sally was near a mental breakdown. “I don’t know how to kill those things.”
“Just watch Susan. If he tries to get near her, move her or something.” I had to get between that thing and Sally, but first I had to find a weapon.
In my periphery I noticed a tray of surgical tools, on which remained a single scalpel.
“A scalpel? You’re going to…” Sally questioned the only idea I could come up with.
“You have a better idea?” I didn’t, so I was sure she wouldn’t. She didn’t answer. “Come here you son of a bitch!”
I did it. I killed the fucking monster. The scalpel easily slid into the eye socket of the monster. It only took a few extra twists and jabs to bring the moaner to a sudden, final death. I will never forget the sound the scalpel made as I scooped around the inside walls of his skull. That sound (and the ensuing silence) marked my first real zombie kill. I knew it would be the first of many. This moment changes things…cements the reality of the situation firmly in my heart. And with that moment, something inside of me snapped, twisted, turned cold. Where fear had once simmered, anger now boiled. Before this moment I feared I couldn’t survive the new freak show called life. Now? Now I’m just another part of it, another cog in the wheel of Hell’s engine.
The silence that overcame the room was profound. In all the ugliness I have witnessed, even with Jacob dying by my own hand, nothing has yet to be so defining. That briefest of moments proved to anyone willing to believe that I had it in me to protect, to defend, to kill. Yes I took Jacob’s life, but that was nearly preordained…premeditated. This time around it was all out war. No preparation, no plan, no time to even think.
I’m not really sure where the moaner came from, but when I entered the room he was there, longing to permanently silence the song in Sally’s cerebellum. Before the man became a card-carrying member of the undead, he had to be in his late sixties, so I had a bit of an advantage.
“Where was your gun?” Sally had to ask the same question buzzing around my skull.
I wasn’t sure where it was, but not having that little peace of mind with me made me realize how hard it was to find a zombie-grade weapon in a hospital.
“I can’t do this.” Sally’s thin voice pulled me from my internal empowerment. The sound was so frail it begged for human contact. When I looked toward her, Sally was on the floor beside Susan’s bed in a near fetal position. Goddamn I was torn. Half of me wanted to shake the woman into understanding that weakness would only serve to get us killed; the other half remembered I was human and did, in fact, have a heart. The only logical conclusion was to comfort Sally. Too much tough love too soon would do more damage than our small group could handle. So instead of insisting she “man up” I responded like a woman and wrapped my arms around her quivering body. We remained like that for a few minutes, the only sound Sally’s weeping.
“You have…stuff…on your face,” Sally said between quiet gasps.
I hadn’t even thought about the splattered gore that had sprayed from the moaner’s eye socket.
“Oh shit!” Naturally, paranoia shook all reason from my mind and injected enough fear to have me scrambling for a mirror. The closest thing I could find was the shiny surface of a surgical instrument tray. Sure enough, I looked like an extra from a splatterpunk film. Bits of gray matter and gore were still adhering to the side of my blood-stained face. I stood, in mild shock, unsure what to do. My paranoia evolved into fear with the realization that we had no way of knowing if a bite was the only way to transmit the virus. Doctor Godwin had never mentioned it and I had no way of knowing if I could now be infected.
“I’m sure you will be okay.” Sally’s voice gently preceded her handing me a towel and some alcohol. “If nothing broke the surface of your skin you will be fine.”
“How do you know? How can we know?” I managed to pull my eyes away from the mirror-like surface and stare Sally’s way.
“The only way a virus can be transmitted is through contact with infected blood or other body fluids, right?” Sally wanted to believe her proclamation, but wavered in the end.
“Wrong! Viral transmission can also be airborne. If I so much as inhale a drop of that blood…oh what the fuck have I done?” I wanted to re-create Sally’s fetal position.
“Bethany, it’s going to be okay. You’re growing a child inside of you that has DNA from a man who was infected. If you haven’t shown any signs of infection from that, a little zombie shrapnel isn’t going to take you down.”
Sally could tell the tactic wasn’t working. My fear was building fast.
“Why don’t you find a bathroom and take a long, hot shower. Wash all of that…what’s left of that…” She couldn’t say it. Not with me in my present state. This woman was hysterical a moment ago and now she’s doing her best to comfort me. In that moment, between breaths and heart beats, I realized I was in charge. I had taken Jacob’s place as the leader of our tiny crew. Sally knew this and knew she had to bring me back to the land of the coherent if we were to continue on.
I couldn’t afford to lose what was left of my will or my sanity. I had to be mentally, emotionally, and physically able to lead us out of Hell, through the river Styx, and back to safety.
“You�
�re right. I’ll go clean up and get back to finding a doctor.” I turned to head for the door, but before I did, I spun around to face Sally again and hugged her. “Thank you.”
That was my perfect exit and I took it. I knew those two words did more for Sally than anything else I could say. Those words forced a bond between Sally and me that very well might carry us through this nightmare.
Before I could make it out the door, however, I realized I had left a dead zombie (not an undead zombie, mind you) in the middle of the floor. What in the fuck could we do with a corpse? We couldn’t chop it up and turn it into Soylent Green, so before I left the room I did the only thing I could think of; I pulled out a clean bed sheet and covered up the corpse.
“We have to figure out what to do with this thing. If you think the smell is bad now, just wait until decomposition burrows its way in deep. And we can’t ignore the fact that there will be others.” The last word traversed the space between Sally and me, leaving us to stare at one another as if our eyes were following the sound waves traveling between us. The truth was, we were searching for some hidden strength within one another.
“It’s going to be okay. We’ll make it.” I know my words were mostly hollow, but they seemed to have at least some effect. Sally took a deep breath and sat down in the chair next to Susan’s bed. She placed a hand on the young girl’s shoulder as I turned to leave the room.
The hallway was silent, save for the buzzing of the fluorescent lighting. I welcomed the lack of noise. Jacob’s experience with the lack of sound had been a roller coaster. When he first woke from the blast of the Quantum Fusion Generator, he was surrounded by a silence that nearly did him in. The ride hit an all-time high soon after he was infected by a moaner. Eventually, that silence was the only relief he enjoyed. It was that same blissful peace, he had realized, that drove all zombies to dig into the brains of the living. Jacob swore they were actually trying to help out their fellow man. I wasn’t sure if there was irony or bullshit there, but eventually Jacob’s theory proved dead on.
Jacob’s theory also proved one other critical point: A head-full of silence was a sure sign of zero infection. It was the oscillating sound emanating from some blackened, dead space within the center of the infected brain that drove moaners and screamers down darker paths. So yeah, I welcome you, silence, my friend. Besides, silence was an acquaintance I made long ago. Spending the better part of my adult life locked in front of a computer monitor, the one constant (and often only) sound in my life was the clicking and clacking of keyboard keys. So I was good with silence.
With the lack of screaming, moaning, and gunshots propelling me forward, my destination was the nurses’ station. If we didn’t get a doctor here soon, Susan didn’t stand a chance, and putting a scalpel through that girl’s eye was the last thing my psyche could take.
NOTE TO SELF: Find a damned weapon that doesn’t require death to get so up close and personal.
The computer I was working with before the screams filled the hall had gone back to screen-saver lock in. I wiggled the mouse, sat down at the chain-store desk chair, and typed “password” without hesitation or thought. I hit the Enter key and was not even slightly surprised when I was greeted with the desktop.
“God, people can be so lame!” The ever-familiar phrase slipped out between my lips with little conscious effort. “In what universe the word password makes for a secure password I will never know.” Although the scenario frustrated the hell out of me, I realized that same ignorance on the average user’s part was, at this moment, my golden ticket to finding salvation for our sick little Susan.
My first task was to find a list of contacts. The address book was the obvious first choice. When the application opened, I narrowed the list by searching for the string “Dr.” which happily rewarded me with a list of twenty or so entries. This was going to be too easy. Surely my old friend Murphy would pay a visit and throw his mighty wrench into the works any minute.
The list of possible doctors oozed out of the closest printer, ready for me to begin dialing phone numbers, one after another, until someone living picked up. Hopefully one of those doctors would be glad to find shelter and companionship in a familiar location.
The chair spun me around to face the phone and the receiver seemed to magically leap into my hand. Should I dial Mr. Murphy first, just in case he wanted to fuck everything up right away? I’ll take a pass on that one. Instead, my fingertips punched out the first number on the list. As the phone rang, one little hurdle peeked its ugly face out of the recesses of my brain when I realized how little French I could speak. I was given a reprieve from that problem when the first number rang on and on. Nothing. Since that doctor had only one number listed, on to the second entry; and then on to the third, and fourth, and fifth. I counted the number of doctors. Seventeen. I had already burned through over a quarter of the list before I remembered how deserted Paris was when we first arrived. The city of love was nothing more than a city of ghosts.
The thought of our arrival jarred my memory, reminding me we had another member of our party along for the ride. I was afraid Gunther wouldn’t want to stay, but he had agreed. I guess the empty world wasn’t nearly as inviting as staying with two women who could possibly turn out to be the only women left in the country who love you for more than just your brains.
I finally managed to work through my building frustration, pick up the receiver, and dial the sixth number, that of a Dr. Jean Chavenel. The name summoned up an image of the consummate Frenchman; a too-long scarf wrapped cautiously and fashionably around a giraffe-like, upstanding neck, a cigarette gracefully hanging from overly-large lips whose only purpose was for speaking and kissing.
“’Ello?”
A voice beckoned from the other end of the phone line.
“Hello? Hello? Dr. Chavenel?” If my voice seemed desperate, indeed it was.
“Oui?”
Damn the language barrier.
“Je ne parle pas Francais.” That sentence alone revealed the extent of my grasp of the French language.
“You speak English?” The man must have picked up on my oh so subtle American bastardization of the French phrase I lobbed his way.
“Yes…yes…my name is Bethany Nitshimi. I am at Val de-Grace with three others and we need a doctor. I know you work here and I need you to make it back to the hospital as soon as possible.” I tried to be as efficient with my words as possible.
“I am sorry, it is too dangerous. I cannot.” Dr. Chavenel’s voice held a very definitive tone. I somehow had to convince the man otherwise.
“The streets are empty, so it’s safe. Please, we’re desperate.” As far as I knew it was all true. Of course no truth is absolute now. Hell, for all I knew the streets could be filled with legions of moaners and screamers tearing at one another, flinging shards of bone and flayed flesh in a grim game of last man standing.
There was a discernible pause that could have easily been interpreted as consideration. I decided to not give up, go for the throat.
“I have what I believe to be the means to a cure for the virus. I need someone who can help me save the human race. Please.” I hoped my words were convincing, because I wasn’t quite sure how else to convince the man.
“How do I know I can trust you?” The question hung in the middle of the air, a ridiculous essay on the current state of the planet.
Trust? Is there really such a thing now? Could one human trust another when everything now fell under the law of chaos? Have we managed, within the span of a few weeks, to degenerate back down the social ladder to “every man for himself”?
“Dr. Chavenel, I am human. I’m speaking in complete sentences. What more do you need right now?”
I understood his fear of going out into the streets where havoc has become as common as traffic once was. But fear of a fellow, uninfected…that realization pretty much hit me like pepper spray on a mugger’s face. The question of trust was not about the cure or my intention, it was about my
state of health and humanity.
“I’m clean, Dr. Chavenel. I’m not infected. Please trust me.”
“How do you know you’re not infected?” His suspicion was getting on my nerves. The more time we spent on the phone, the further back my forward progress was pushed.
“Trust me, I know. Look, I have a list of all the doctors employed at Val de-Grace. If you are not interested in helping me develop the cure, I will move down to the next name in line. I don’t really care who comes to help, only that someone does. I’m not going to check your resume or your stats, I just need a goddamn doctor here to help me save the world. Are you in or not? If you’re not then you’re just wasting very precious time.” I decided the direct approach was the only way to get to the punch line of this drawn-out, horrific joke,
“Okay, I’ll come. I live close, but it may take me some time. I will be there,” Chavenel promised, his resolve finally broken. I wasn’t sure if it had been my convincing words, or if the man was as desperate to reconnect to humanity as we were.
“And doctor, bring weapons. Whatever you can find. Hatchets, axes, knives, guns, shovels, anything.” I felt a little dirty asking a man of medicine to bring weapons of undead destruction along with him, but the reality of the situation begs for extreme measures.
Jean promised to bring whatever he could find that might serve as a weapon. I would prefer to avoid guns, or anything else that would make noise enough to draw attention to our location. But to be honest, whatever it takes to save our asses would do just fine.
After I hung up the phone, I stared at the monitor and just breathed in the air of even the slightest success. My mind drifted back to the conversation with Jean and it hit me that I had no idea what was actually going on outside the walls of the hospital. Even though it has only been a few days since we were caged up inside a government installation with a full-blown media room, I felt totally disconnected from the world. I decided to peruse a few websites to hopefully gather some facts. I started off with the standard news sites to get a panoramic view of just how fucked the world was. I was not disappointed. CNN had estimated the global population had been reduced by almost seventy-five percent. If the world’s population was at five billion, that would leave roughly 1.2 billion. Although that sounds like a sizable figure left on the planet, what the news wasn’t saying was how many of those “no longer living” 3.8 billion people are actually dead and how many are undead. Let’s say only ten percent of those reported dead are now card-carrying members of the Zombie nation; that means three hundred and seventy-five million moaners are walking the planet. With those kinds of numbers, the outcome of the human race cannot be good. Even if a single member of the 3.8 billion is one of the undead, we are not safe. And from what I’ve seen so far, we have more to worry about than stopping a single undead human being.