Nolan saw no reason to let the tension build. He took several steps forward, pulled his gun level with the zombie’s head, and pulled the trigger. The thing’s forehead opened up like a fleshy firework—spitting brains wildly out the back. It fell over quite unceremoniously, sideways, hitting the clearing floor with an audible thud.
Nolan walked over to the corpse that had been its dinner. This one wore designer jeans with expensive-looking stitching on the pockets. It had, or had once had, long hair . . . which was now strewn all about the body. The face was virtually impossible to discern.
“Allison Duprix,” Kesha pronounced. “I can tell from her clothes.”
Nolan looked at her in surprise, then turned back to the corpse he’d just shot. He bent down and peered intently into what was left of its rotting face. He looked for any clue. Any sign at all. What was this guy’s story? What on earth was happening?
A single writhing maggot stood upright on the corpse’s nose for a moment. It wiggled back and forth, as if taunting him. Whatever it knew, it would keep secret. There was nothing more for Nolan to learn.
“Do you think it followed them out of the caves?” Kesha said.
“I hope so,” Nolan said, “but I’m worried it didn’t.”
“Huh?” Kesha said.
“I’m worried that this is not confined to the caves,” Nolan said, pacing around the clearing as he looked for other clues. “Did you see how slowly that thing moved? How could it catch up to them here, twenty paces outside of the cave?”
“Maybe Allison was hurt,” Kesha offered.
“Yeah, maybe,” Nolan said. “I see some defensive wounds on her hands . . . There’s nothing that should make her that slow.”
“Maybe it snuck up on her?” Kesha tried.
“Yeah, I think it did,” Nolan said. “But not from behind. Look. Imagine this . . . You come out of the caves like we just did. You’re scared. You want to get away. What do you see? Where do you go?”
Kesha stood at the mouth of the cave and looked around the clearing in the waning sunlight.
“I think over there,” Kesha said, pointing past her prone (or possibly supine) classmate. “It looks the most like a trail.”
“I agree,” said Nolan. “So you start to walk that way, and then—boo!—captain cataract steps out from these bushes and takes a bite of your forehead.”
Kesha tried to imagine it. Pretty soon she was nodding.
“So what do the others do, assuming there are others?” Nolan asked. “Your friend is getting eaten alive, so where do you run?”
Kesha slowly turned in a circle, tracing every fold of the surrounding foliage.
“There,” she eventually declared, pointing to a dark opening in the tree line where heavy branches kept out nearly all of the sunlight.
Nolan probed the opening with his flashlight. Then he said, “I think you’re right.”
Nolan walked over to the dark, shadowy fold. He carefully avoided touching the nearby branches, as if disturbing them might erase some important evidence. Kesha watched curiously. After a few moments, Nolan cried, “Aha! Come and look at this.”
Kesha carefully approached his position. She followed the flashlight beam as he trained it on the leafy ground. A fold of yellow leaves was smeared with ocher.
“That’s blood,” Nolan declared. “At least one is still alive. Probably more. And this is damn-straight where they headed.”
“Are we going to follow them?” Kesha asked.
“I am,” Nolan told her. “But first we’re going to get you to a safe place.”
Nolan produced his smart phone and began pressing buttons. It had no service. Frustrated, he tried the phone’s mapping application—at least he would know where he was—but that didn’t respond either. Neither did his search engine, which loaded and loaded but never launched. With growing frustration, Nolan put his cell away and instead tried the park ranger radio. The line crackled, but nobody came back. Nolan surveyed the darkening sky. He saw no manmade lights in any direction.
“Do you have a phone?” he asked Kesha desperately.
She patted her pockets and shook her head.
“It fell out when I was in the water,” she said. “My dad’s gonna kill me.”
“I think your dad will be happy that you’re alive, and not care about your phone,” Nolan told her. “But damn. We need to figure out where we are.”
“Do you have a compass?” Kesha tried.
Nolan smiled at the quaintness of this idea and said, “No. But the sun sets in the west.”
“The way they went,” Kesha pointed out. “The people from my class. The survivors.”
“Yes,” Nolan agreed absently. If only there were some way for him to tell in which direction the caverns had taken them. The way had snaked and twisted so many times, Nolan didn’t even dare to guess. The parking lot and ranger station could be just a few paces through the trees . . . or several miles away.
“Do you hear that?” Kesha asked.
“What?” Nolan said, his hand flying to his weapon. He hadn’t heard a thing.
“In the distance . . .” Kesha said. “It sounds like a tornado siren.”
Nolan went motionless and listened. She was right. There it was.
“And do you smell that?” Kesha said.
This time Nolan nodded right away. He did. Something burning. Something industrial. Something with a biting, chemical stench. The kind of air pollution that, even in Indiana, you couldn’t get away with for very long.
“What is it?” Kesha asked.
“I don’t know, but something’s not right,” Nolan said. “Something’s definitely not right.”
“What are we going to do?” Kesha pressed.
For the first time, Nolan detected something close to hysteria in the girl’s voice. With each question that he could not answer, it seemed to grow a little more.
“I don’t know exactly where we are, but we can’t have gone that far,” Nolan said, trying to sound like a calm policeman. “At this point, one direction is as good as another. We’re bound to run into people soon. I’m not worried about that. But somebody from your school group is alive and bleeding. I think it makes sense for us to follow them. If they run into civilization first, that’s great. If they don’t, maybe we can catch up to them and help.”
Kesha started nodding slowly. A plan was a plan. A plan made you feel like you were taking steps to solve things. Even if, really, you were just picking a direction in the middle of a forest and praying.
“Okay,” Kesha said. “Let’s just get somewhere before the sun goes down. I don’t want to be out here in the dark.”
“You’re a city girl, huh?” Nolan said, the smile returning to his face.
“Um . . . definitely yes,” Kesha returned.
“Gotcha,” said Nolan. “We’ll see what we can do.”
They set off together into the steadily darkening wood.
6
Although an Italian leather chair had been positioned at the head of the table, Governor Hank Burleson was too nervous to do anything but stand.
How had this happened? How had things gone from zero to absolute monkeyshit in just a few short hours? Why could no one tell him that? Why could no one tell him anything?
Cell phones were down. Landlines were starting to fail—you’d occasionally get through to someone, and then static would cut you off. Power outages were rolling across the state. And, most alarmingly, there was chaos in the streets.
What kind of chaos? Of that, people were less sure. . . .
Was it rioting? It sure looked like rioting. People were running about and screaming. But what was there to riot about? There had been no controversial courtroom verdict. No political rally. No sports victory. No, there had been nothing of the kind. So why were people acting so crazy?
Was it a terrorist attack? Burleson had been in Manhattan on 9/11 attending a political conference. He remembered the running to and fro. The stunned office workers
parading up Broadway as they walked home to the Bronx. The general alarm and confusion. But 9/11 had had a clear inciting event. There had been no grand explosion in Indianapolis. All tall buildings were present and accounted for. And yet the chaos was upon them.
That morning, the citizens had risen as on any other day. They had commuted to their jobs, taken lunch breaks and smoke breaks, and settled in for the long commute home on I-465. But now in the early evening, these same citizens were running around as though the city were under siege. Some were openly carrying guns. Why? Why???
The governor could not bring himself to sit still until he had answers.
Burleson’s chief of staff was a man named Doug Huggins. Even-tempered and unsmiling, Huggins could usually explain current events and their implications for the governor in a clear, concise way. Huggins was a wiry man in early middle age with curly brown hair and tiny Benjamin Franklin glasses that always seemed in danger of falling off the end of his nose. For the governor, these glasses symbolized the precarious unpleasantness of dealing with Huggins in general. Just as the glasses were always in danger of falling, even on the sunniest of days, there was always the danger of Huggins walking into his office with word of some new problem or dilemma looming on the horizon. And while the governor may not have always liked the information Huggins brought, he could at least count on Huggins to have it. On this day, however, the chief of staff was uncharacteristically tight-lipped.
In addition to Huggins and Governor Burleson, there were five other staffers in the conference room in the basement of the capitol building. At least another five came and went in a constant stream. The large television affixed to the wall had been turned to the local Fox affiliate, which had broken in over regular programming. Two other TVs had been wheeled into the conference room. They also played, albeit with the volume muted, different local news broadcasts.
The uncharacteristically silent Huggins circled around the chaos that had enveloped the de facto war room. The governor decided he looked like a man with money on a horse. A horse that might be struggling just to stay out of last place.
When he could bear it no longer, the governor waved his hand to get Huggins’s attention as though signaling for a waiter.
“Can we go over the facts again?” the governor asked. “I want to keep them straight. This stuff on the TV . . . it all looks like chaos. And these reporters are just guessing. What do we know for sure?”
Huggins acknowledged the request by smiling to himself. Burleson hated when Huggins smiled. The glasses dangled indefinitely.
“What we know for sure?” Huggins answered rhetorically. “We know for sure that there are reports of rioting and violence across the city. We know that in the last three hours, the IMPD have received the number of calls that they would otherwise receive in a month.”
“What about the rest of the country?” Burleson pressed. “Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit? Anything?”
Huggins shook his head and shrugged.
“Damn it all,” Burleson cried.
He had always hoped that Hoosier exceptionalism would keep his state safe from any disaster that befell the entire Midwest. Back in the 1960s, when Martin Luther King had been assassinated, Indiana was the only state where there had not been rioting in the major cities. Thus, Burleson believed, there was precedent for his conviction that Hoosiers would behave differently in times of crisis.
Huggins continued.
“We know that every IMPD officer, firefighter, and emergency services worker has been called up, and that people are asking us where the Army troops are. . . .”
Huggins let this hang, almost like a question.
Burleson had called up the Indiana National Guard about an hour prior, but asking the regular army to send tanks rolling down Keystone and Meridian felt like too much. Especially when the nature of this rioting was still so intangible; he still could not, in good conscience, have told anyone what the fuck was going on in his state. What if it turned out to be nothing? What if this was some small misunderstanding that just seemed like rioting? What happened to the political prospects of a governor who cried wolf like that?
“No,” Burleson said, waving his hand to dismiss the idea. “I’ll tell you what I told Washington, D.C. an hour ago. I haven’t seen anything yet—anything—to make me think we can’t handle this on our own.”
“Mmm,” Huggins said neutrally.
Burleson turned and regarded the local television newscast for a moment. They’d cut to a live-remote news reporter not a hundred yards from the capitol building. The camera showed mostly abandoned city streets. The few pedestrians present rushed to wherever they were going with their heads down. A police car drove by with its lights flashing.
“We also know—for sure—that people are scared,” Huggins said as he watched the same screen. “We know that people want answers. They are looking to their elected officials to provide a sense of stability. To let them know the problem is being addressed. They want to know that—pardon my French, Mister Governor—shit is getting handled.”
The governor also waved this away, as if it did not answer his question.
“How about what we don’t know?” Burleson asked.
“What we don’t know?” Huggins repeated. “That’s just about everything. What do you mean, Governor?”
“I mean, what do we need to know in order to solve this? What are we trying to find out that puts us one iota closer to fixing this? What are we waiting on?”
The governor was breathing hard.
“Well . . .” Huggins began, running his fingers through his increasingly sweaty forelocks. “We don’t know why people are rioting. Or being violent. Or doing . . . whatever it is they’re doing. Is this an insurrection? Terrorists? Communists? Some kind of group from the Internet?”
Burleson was not impressed.
“What do you think, Huggins?” the governor asked.
Huggins ran his hand through his hair once more and looked over at the three yapping television screens. One carried a crawl reading “Violence Crisis.” Another showed fires burning across a whole section of the city. A south-side working class neighborhood. Half the homes on one block were aflame.
“I think that TV news is not always where you learn what’s going on,” said Huggins.
“What the hell does that mean?” the governor responded.
Huggins picked up one of the laptops on the conference table.
“For the last couple of hours, reports have been circulating on the Internet of dead bodies coming back to life all across the state,” Huggins said. “Bodies coming back to life and eating people.”
Burleson suddenly wanted to rip those tiny glasses off of Huggins’s nose and crush them in his fist. He found the strength to resist this impulse. For the moment.
“There are videos,” Huggins continued. “They’re a little grainy and shot on cell phones, but they seem to show dead bodies getting up and walking around.”
Huggins turned around the laptop so the governor could see the screen.
The video that played had been uploaded in the last ninety minutes, but already had over 50,000 views. It was shaky, obviously shot by an amateur. The description merely said “Indianapolis, Castleton, 4:30 p.m.” and bore that day’s date. The video showed the interior of a modest home, and focused particularly on the doorway to the home’s exterior. Walking through that doorway—but momentarily blocked by a screen door—was a man who was obviously dead.
The man was white, maybe six-foot-two, and in his mid-thirties. He had short hair and his face held a cheerful smile. He wore slacks and a T-shirt that said BORN TO CODE. It was a little hard to read the shirt, however, because what looked like a railroad tie was sticking out of the bottom of his stomach.
Each time the thing moved forward to enter the house, he was stopped by the tie pushing against the screen door. Though seemingly stymied, the man’s face showed only a genial bemusement. Then the camera zoomed closer. The thing’s mouth was constantly
moving, though it was not forming words. A red drool could be seen on its teeth. It growled like a dog.
“It looks like Andy,” a voice said from just out of the frame. A child’s voice.
“Shhhh,” someone else said.
There were evidently a number of people behind the camera operator, watching this spectacle.
“Get away from there,” another voice called.
The camera operator did the opposite.
The camera moved forward until it nearly touched the screen door. The thing outside looked up. It was clearly aware of the people on the other side. Its gesticulations became more animated. It mustered itself into a new assault against the door with a long, hard slam. It did not make progress, but the railroad tie was pushed farther into its stomach . . . and farther out of its back.
“Oh my God!” someone called from inside the house.
“That is Andy, isn’t it?” the child’s voice cried again.
The thing backed up a few steps and made another lumbering run toward the door. The result was the same. The railroad tie continued to make progress.
Suddenly, a girl of no more than six or seven ran forward into the frame. She cried, “It’s Andy!” and gripped the knob of the screen door.
A voice offstage cried, “Charlotte, no!”
But it was too late.
The small girl turned the handle and threw the door wide. The impaled man took a step inside the house, looking around dumbly. The young girl remained where she was, staring up expectantly into the thing’s face. An instant later, it lunged forward and descended on her. The audio erupted into shrieks. The person holding the camera dropped it to the floor. The video stopped.
“That’s just one,” Huggins said as the screen went black. “Seems like more are being uploaded every few minutes. I haven’t had time to keep up.”
Burleson remained absolutely motionless for a moment.
Then he reached over—delicately, slowly—and slapped Huggins once across the face.
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