by Joe McKinney
Okay, so what do you need to know?
Introductions first, I guess.
My name is Mark Wellerman—though I suppose you already know that, my name being what it is. These days, I run a small farm in Georgia. It’s not much, but I grow all my own food, raise my own livestock, make my own bullets. I can take care of myself. That’s a far cry from the plans I had growing up, but don’t think for a minute that I’m a failure. Like I said, this farm makes all the food a man could ever need, and there is no fortune greater than that.
Believe me. I know that better than anyone.
I’m twenty-four now, but I was twenty-two when this story I’m about to tell you happened. I was a senior at Harvard, majoring in journalism. I had the world by the balls, every door ahead standing wide open. And that’s how I landed in Beijing that summer. I was one of two dozen college students from across the United States selected to take part in an exchange program to China called Our Best, Your Best.
Our group was called the Young Americans. We were supposed to represent the best and brightest of America’s up-and-coming generation. We were a cross-section of this once great country, our own mini melting pot. We had Brad Owens, our Young Democrat from Columbia; Jim Bowman, a Young Republican from the University of Texas at Austin; and Sandra Palmer, a junior Tea Party Patriot from the University of Nebraska; all three of them were intent on becoming president one day. But we had a lot more than politics going for us. We had a cop from a junior college in Texas, a West Point cadet, a teacher’s assistant working on her master’s degree at Florida State, a UAW assembly lineman from Michigan doing an online graduate degree in pension fund management, computer programmers, rich kids, poor kids . . . we had it all. Hell, we even had a guy who was attending UC Berkley illegally, but got to go with us anyway because of the DREAM Act. Between the twenty-four of us, we were America.
For better or for worse.
Most of the trip up to that last night in the hotel was mindless arguing, everybody talking and nobody listening. I had plenty to write about, but it still wore me down. I remember feeling irritable every time Brad or Jim or Sandra opened their mouths. The bickering just seemed so pointless.
But all that changed later that night. I hadn’t taken off my clothes. I was standing at my window, looking across downtown Beijing twenty stories below, every now and then catching the wail of a siren or the muffled sound of a nearby scream, when the Chinese cops burst through the door. One of them went for me, the other for my luggage. As I watched, the cop tossed my iPhone, my iPad, even my headphones into the trash. Then he crammed some clothes into my backpack and threw it at me.
“But, my phone . . .” I said.
He said something in Chinese and pointed to his partner, who pushed me outside.
Everyone else was already standing there, trying to get somebody to tell them what was going on. Jim Bowman was yelling, and it wasn’t hard to see why. The cops had pulled him and Sandra out of bed without even giving Sandra a chance to put on her pants. She was standing behind him, tugging her jeans over her hips and looking embarrassed as hell.
Those of us who could speak a little Chinese tried to get answers out of the cops, but they weren’t talking. They hustled us downstairs and out the back door.
As soon as the doors to the parking lot opened, we could hear the sound of screams and gunshots and sirens in the distance. I saw what looked like military helicopters sprinting overhead. I watched them race over the heart of the city, and when I looked back down to street level, I saw a group of burned and bleeding people limping toward us. One of them was so badly burned I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. The poor devil was black as charcoal, and still trailing wisps of smoke. The others behind were less burned, but each of them were terribly wounded and their clothes dark with coagulated blood.
One of the girls in our group let out a scream and the cops hurried her onto the bus. Then, while the rest of us watched in horror, one of the cops went over to the crowd and shot those wounded people one by one with deliberate head shots. I couldn’t believe it. The cop never even gave them a chance to run away. He just shot them. And weirder still, not a single one of that crowd bothered to so much as flinch, even with a rifle pointed at their faces. It was like they didn’t know what was happening.
The next moment, we were on the bus. Our driver, a thin, terrified-looking man in shabby clothes, turned the bus toward the street with a lurch and built up speed. The shooting we’d just witnessed had left us all stunned and silent. Cowed, I guess you’d say. We sat in our seats, staring out the windows at the destruction and the insane crowds banging on the sides of the bus, and I don’t think any of us even thought to ask where we were being taken.
Just like I don’t think any of us thought to use the word zombie.
At least at that point.
From our hotel they drove us to the Beijing West Railway Station. Let me say this first and foremost on the behalf of the Chinese.
They took care of us.
They never once forgot that we were their guests. They could have left us in that hotel to die along with everyone else. I’m pretty sure, if this was the US, that’s probably what would have happened. But the Chinese had a sense of obligation that was so strong, so ingrained, that even in the face of a zombie apocalypse, they took real pains to get us out of harm’s way. They had no idea the hell they were condemning us to, and I cannot fault them for what came afterwards.
They tried to be good hosts.
They really did.
The railway station was a mad, screaming hive of humanity. Hundreds of thousands of people were surging toward the platforms, trying to board the trains. We lost Virginia Wilder, our professor from Florida, and Wade Mallum, our UAW representative, somewhere in that mad scramble to the trains. I don’t know how it happened, but I saw Jim and Sandra running away from where Virginia and Wade went down.
“Those crazy yellow bastards are eating each other,” Sandra said.
“What?” I said. I had only known Sandra for a few weeks at that point, but I was already well aware of her ability to say things that defied the logic used by sane people.
“They got Virginia and Wade,” Jim said. “We couldn’t save them.”
“What do you mean?”
“They were deadweight slowing us down.” He was winded, but he managed to turn to Sandra and smile. “We’re okay.”
I just stared at him, dumbfounded. Amid the deafening roar of hundreds of thousands of panicking people, after watching two of our group get trampled and possibly eaten, he had the audacity to call them deadweight.
But I didn’t get the chance to call him on his words, for at that moment our escorts managed to zipper open a path through the crowd and get us onto a train. It was a fairly new, fairly clean commuter car. No frills, no special compartments. Just three rows of seats on either side of a center aisle, like a small jet airliner.
And we had the car to ourselves.
I dropped down into a window seat and looked out across the crowded platform. I found it hard to believe we’d ended up the only ones in our car. As we pulled away from the platform, I saw people screaming for a chance to get on. Mothers held up their babies, begging us to take them. Hundreds jumped onto the outside of the train and held on as long as they could. It was a sorry, sad sight, and as Jim and Sandra and Brad began to scream at each other about whose fault all this was, I slipped farther down into my seat and pressed my hands over my ears and tried to block out the screams of all those poor people falling away behind us.
We did not make it very far.
As soon as we cleared the gates I saw people surging against the sides of the train. I heard their bodies thudding against metal and felt the train lurch as they collapsed onto tracks and were run over.
I looked to one side and saw our entire group with their faces pressed against the windows, none of them speaking, but all of them wearing stunned, horrified expressions on their faces.
“My God
,” I heard someone say. “Look at all of them. There’s so many.”
And there were, too.
Hundreds of thousands of them.
I looked out the window and all I could see were faces closing in around us. They were pressing against the train, swarming over the top of it.
Suddenly, the train lurched and came to a violent, shuddering halt. All of us were thrown from our seats. For a moment, I felt like I was getting pushed forward, like I was on the crest of a wave. And then, just as suddenly, I hit the deck and banged my head against the bottom of a seat.
I blacked out for a second.
When I came to, I was groggy, disoriented. I stood up and looked around. My hair felt wet. I touched it and came away with blood on my fingers. Sandra Palmer had her hand over her forehead, a runner of blood oozing out from between her fingers. Her mouth was twisted, like she was about to scream, or cry, but couldn’t decide which. Brad Owens had landed in a heap against the forward door. Jim Bowman was right next to him. His arm looked broken.
“They’ve knocked us off the rails,” somebody said.
“Impossible,” someone else said.
“Take a look if you don’t believe me.”
Several of us went to the window, and I could tell at a glance he was right. From where I stood I could see the half-dozen cars ahead of us, and the lead car was jackknifed across the tracks.
“How is that possible?” the girl next to me asked.
I shook my head. But I knew. I think we all knew. We’d run over so many bodies the wheels had just skipped the tracks.
And now, an army hundreds of thousands strong was surging against our train car, banging on the side panels. The combined roar of their moans and screams and their fists pounding on the sides of the train was deafening. The girl next to me, a culinary arts major from SMU, was in tears.
For a moment I wanted to take her in my arms and hold her. But before I got the chance, Jake Arguello, our Texas cop, started hollering from the rear of the car.
“They’re breaking in the door back here!”
Billy Gantz, our West Point cadet, rushed that way. “I’ll help you.”
I watched the two of them punch and kick a Chinese woman who had managed to squeeze through the busted door. She fell back into the writhing mass of hands and faces and they slammed what was left of the door against the surging crowd.
Jake put his back against the door to brace it.
“I’ve got it!” he yelled. “Get something to help me hold it.”
A metal handrail had snapped and fallen to the ground. Billy scooped it up and jammed it into the well of the doorway on the opposite side. Once it was in place, it looked like a curtain rod between the two doors. It was an elegantly simple solution. The harder the crowd pressed from one side, the more pressure it put against the doors on the opposite side, where the crowd was also pushing inward.
Billy rushed into the door well and pulled Jake back into the car. We gathered around to look at him, then recoiled. His back had been shredded by the fingernails of the crowd. He was bleeding badly, and screaming from the pain.
“Those fuckin’ yellow bastards,” Sandra said. “We gotta stop ’em.”
“No!” Brad said. “They’re cold. They’re hungry. They’re tired and poor. We should let them in.”
“What?” said Jim. “Are you fucking insane?”
Brad raised his chin. “No, I’m not. We will be judged on how we handle ourselves here. Those people are scared. I think we have a moral obligation to share our resources.”
“I’m not sharing anything with them.”
Brad was standing at the opposite end of the car, still nursing his bruised shoulder. He scanned the rest of us to see who had spoken and saw Tynice Jackson staring back at him. She’d been Brad’s biggest cheerleader throughout the first part of our trip, defending him every time Jim and Sandra railed against his leadership, but now she stood defiant, arms akimbo.
Brad steepled his fingers together in front of his belt. “Tynice,” he said patiently, “we’re going through a rough patch right now. We need to approach this logically.”
“Logically?” said Jim. “Dude, they tried to kill our cop. How much more logical do you need to be than that?”
“This isn’t a job for law enforcement,” Brad said.
“Well, it’s pretty much become a job for law enforcement,” Tynice shot back, “because you won’t do anything about it. Get over here and help. As long as you’re standing way over there out of harm’s way you got no business to talk.”
I was frantically writing it all down, thankful I had stayed awake during my shorthand class, when Jake started to convulse.
“Something’s happening!” said Billy. “He’s foaming at the mouth.”
And he was right, too. I watched Jake shaking on the floor. He was bleeding from the corners of his eyes and from his nose. He was trembling like we’d just pulled him from a frozen pond.
“What’s happening to him?” Sandra said. “Those bastards did something to him, didn’t they?”
Nobody answered her.
Wayne Scott, a second-year med student at Johns Hopkins, rushed over to Jake’s side and looked into his eyes. The foam at Jake’s mouth was turning pink from blood.
“His pupils are dilating,” Wayne said. “He’s going into cardiac arrest.”
“Help him,” somebody said.
“I can’t. I’d need a . . .”
Wayne trailed off mid-sentence. Jake’s convulsions had suddenly stopped, and now he looked like a tire rapidly going flat. A faint, rattling gasp rose up from Jake’s throat and then he went still, his bloodshot eyes staring off toward the ceiling, the only movement a runner of blood leaking down his cheek from one nostril.
“Is he . . . ?” Jim said.
Wayne looked up at him and nodded. “It happened so fast,” he muttered. “I couldn’t do anything.”
None of us spoke for a long moment. We all stood there, looking at our dead friend. I saw the same dawning terror on all their faces. What were we going to do? Who was going to bail us out?
I honestly had no idea, and I’m pretty sure none of the others did either.
Outside, the roar of the crowd continued. Their moaning was awful. I tried not to listen to it, to block it out somehow, but that was impossible to do. The sound was making my skin crawl, and all I wanted to do was go to the corner and throw up.
“Something’s happening,” Wayne said.
I stood on my tiptoes to get a look at what he was doing. He was still kneeling at Jake’s side, but his expression had changed to one of disgust, and he was rocking back on his haunches away from Jake.
Jake’s dead gaze had been turned up towards the ceiling, looking at nothing, but now it was locked on Wayne.
“I thought you said he was dead,” Jim said.
But before Wayne could answer, Jake sat up. He looked at the circle of horrified faces staring down at him, and then lunged for Wayne. Wayne tried to push him away, but Jake was already on top of him, clawing at his face and biting at Wayne’s fingers as Wayne tried to turn Jake’s chin away.
None of us moved. I think we were all too shocked. I watched one of Wayne’s fingers stray too close to Jake’s mouth and then Jake bit it off. Blood gushed from the wound. Wayne opened his mouth to scream, but at that instant Jake locked his teeth onto Wayne’s throat and silenced him.
Only then did the rest of us react.
Billy, our West Point cadet, rushed in and pulled Jake off of Wayne. He threw Jake to one side, and was about to check on Wayne, when Jake got back to his feet. He reached for Billy and started moaning.
“Get the fuck back, man,” Billy said.
Jake kept coming.
“I’m serious, dude, take a step back.”
Jake swiped at him with his bloody fingernails. Billy sidestepped the blow easily and swept Jake’s legs out from under him, dropping him to the ground.
Before Jake could get up again, Billy gr
abbed another piece of handrail that had fallen from the ceiling. Gripping it like a police baton, he took up a position between Jake and the rest of us.
“Come on, man, don’t come any closer.”
Jake’s eyes were dead and vacant. If he heard a word Billy said, there was no recognition of it in his expression.
His hands came up again, clutching at Billy.
“Shit,” Billy said, and swung the piece of handrail at Jake, hitting him across the flat of his jaw.
Metal hit bone with a sickening crunch and Jake collapsed onto the back of a chair. Anybody else would have stayed that way, or maybe even slid to the floor, unconscious. But Jake showed no sign of pain. He straightened himself back up immediately, his face a smashed and bleeding mess, and staggered toward Billy a second time.
Billy took a step back, shaking his head in disbelief.
“Do something,” Brad said. His cool, calm veneer was gone. The look on his face was positively frantic.
I saw movement from the floor, behind Brad. It was Wayne. He had been convulsing, the same as Jake had done, but now he was rising to his feet. When he turned to face the rest of us, I saw a large flap of skin hanging from his throat like a bloody napkin.
One of the others pulled Brad out of the way, and the next instant, Billy was standing between Wayne and Jake, the two of them closing in on him from either side.
But Billy kept his cool. Holding the handrail like a spear, he jammed it into Jake’s chest, impaling him with it.
A raspy gargle escaped his lips, but the enormous shaft of metal sticking through his chest didn’t slow him down at all.
“What the hell?” Billy said.
“They’re zombies,” said the girl from SMU. “Oh, my God.”
The word was like a peal of thunder in our midst. Jake’s imperviousness to pain; Wayne’s injuries; the moaning crowd outside; the burned people we’d seen the police shooting back at the hotel; it all made sense now. All through school, most of us had listened to those idiots who talked so gleefully about the coming zombie apocalypse and laughed at them.