ZOMBIE WORLD ORDER

by P. J. Kelley

  “I have some personal matters to take care of, and I have to catch a flight about ten more miles up the road, so there is where we’ll be saying goodbye.”

  “What is it you have to do?” Charlie asked.

  “Well, if you must know, I have to visit my father. I just think it would be fun to drop in and surprise him.” Marie ran her finger around the freshly abbreviated and filed steel shotgun barrel. All of the patients exchanged glances, except Joe, who appeared not have heard a thing, and just kept staring fixedly at the road as he drove. Only once did Marie feel him looking at her, briefly in the rear view mirror. When she met his gaze he instantly looked away. This gave Marie a twinge, but it was just a shadow, a memory of an older pain. Marie had been forced to bid farewell to friendship and camaraderie so many times she had now abandoned the capacity out of a desire for emotional survival.

  Theirs was a silent journey, with but a minimal recourse to words. Charlie and Joe no longer spoke to each other, George seemed a bit on the slow side, and Gwen apparently had arrived at the conclusion that Marie was some kind of gangster. Her native timidity had been exacerbated by the rigors of the last few hours, and she had lapsed into a kind of catatonia, staring out into the moonscape that was New Jersey in disbelief as Joe gunned past and through the mayhem. Psychos reacted to the passing bus, but a moving target is hard to hit, and the main contingent of them seemed to have already swept through here on their way towards areas of greater population density. Whether by luck or some kind of psychic sense of Joe’s, his choice of routes had made their journey at least passable, but their progress was starting to get slower due to all the road obstructions.

  At last, they arrived at the small airport, which at first glance looked deserted. The sturdy chain link fence encompassing the perimeter appeared to be unbreached.

  Dawn broke as the minibus pulled up to the gate. With scant words of farewell, Marie climbed on to the roof of the bus, tossed her satchel and equipment over, took off her coat and spread it over the razor wire on the top of the fence. She quickly crawled over the coat, using it as a shield to reduce the amount of laceration her lithe body received as she fell over to the other side, clawing at the metal links to slow her descent. Her high level of physical conditioning contributed greatly to the success of this procedure. The bus had peeled out before she landed on the airstrip side.

  “I guess I didn’t really deserve an emotional sendoff,” Marie quipped. It was easier this way. Friendship was a nice idea, but Marie had cured herself of ideas, and was finally dealing with just realities. The world had shrunk in the last six months, and she could no longer delude herself that there was room in it for both her and her father. She headed for the helicopter ports, making sure her police revolver was fully chambered, and her sawed off shotgun had all five shells in and the safety off.

  She tucked the revolver into the back of her jeans. Coatless now, the early morning wind bit into her thin frame, but she didn’t mind. After hours in the bus her joints were stiff, and she welcomed the fresh air and exercise. Although she had been locked up, she had spent most of her time inside doing the corniest thing imaginable-pushups, thousands every day. She had never felt stronger or more toned.

  The heliport looked deserted, but as she walked up two figures emerged from the gloomy interior. Thinking they were Psychos, she instantly went for her revolver, but as she raised it, long gun barrels emerged from the gloom as well, as the two figures raised their weapons.

  “Okay, just stop. Lower your gun, raise your other hand, and walk towards us,” a voice shouted. Marie obeyed, her satchel dangling from her arm she was carrying her sawed off with.

  As she got closer to the two men, she watched their eyes, and in them saw the reaction she had been hoping for. Marie had been blessed, or cursed, with an unusually pretty face. All her life she had taken it for granted. It was only the recent threat of losing her looks that had made her conscious of how much easier her life sometimes was made by virtue of them. After what may have been days spent in isolation and panic, the two men still lit up involuntarily at the sight of Marie, even Marie unwashed, in jeans and a T-Shirt, a bit bloody from the fence, and with a bandaged nose. If Marie could have believed it, it was also the boldness of her step, and the courage with which she faced them that anyone would have found attractive, but she had been objectified too much over the course of her young life to accept this possibility.

  The men looked at her closely. “Were you bitten?” the shorter one asked, looking at her bleeding arms.

  “No, I just got scraped pretty bad coming over the fence. Why do you ask?”

  “The Psychos are contagious,” the shorter one said, his eyes roaming over Marie’s body with a kind of fearful admiration. They both kept watching her as if she were about to transform into something unholy.

  “I thought only the people on Pill G were affected,” Marie countered.

  “You thought wrong. They caught the disease first, but now they are transmitting it. What are you doing here anyway?” the short one demanded.

  “I came to catch a ride, if possible. What are you doing here?” Marie asked. Taking the offensive is sometimes a good strategy. Maybe if she preempted their questions she would be able to make them defensive enough to question her less.

  “We work here, young lady,” said the shorter one, who may have been five years older than Marie. “We are responsible for keeping an eye on things.”

  Marie liked people by nature. Why she had not lost this trait given her travails was a mystery, even to her. So, it was not without an element of good natured fun that Marie responded, while looking around at the barren tarmacs and the empty stretches of open hangars.

  “What are you keeping an eye on?” she asked, smiling just a little.

  “Never you mind, you are trespassing. You are lucky we don’t kick you out right now. The radio says a horde of Zombies is coming right at us,” the taller one said officiously. “We’ll be very lucky if they don’t crash right through here anyway.” Marie realized that these two were almost quaking in fear, despite their attempts at bravado.

  “Why do you call them Zombies?” she asked, curiously.

  “Because that is the name that best describes them and what they do. They rage, they bite, they infect. After the disease incubates, the bitten person essentially joins them in their raging beserkness. According to the finest literary traditions of George Romero, Psychos are actually Zombies, or Zombies are Psychos, ipso facto. Whatever the government’s cover story is, even though it appears to contain a few kernels of truth, if it looks like a Zombie, waves his arms and staggers like a Zombie, and turns others into Zombies by biting chunks out of them, it is a Zombie. Words have exact meanings.” The tall one appeared to have been waiting for a fresh audience for this speech, as the shorter one had obviously heard it before.

  “Essentially, he calls them Zombies because he fell off his rocker,” the shorter one inserted.

  The taller one grew angry. “How can we expect to defeat them if we cannot even name them accurately? They are best defined as Zombies.”

  “Well, whatever you call them, what’s your plan?” Marie was processing this new information, but since it had no real bearing on her immediate mission, she would ignore it for now.

  “We were supposed to stay here and keep the last helicopter ready to go. It belongs to some rich guy in Manhattan, and when his pilot got here we were supposed to catch a ride out with him. We’ve been waiting for eight hours. With this horde coming, I don’t know if the pilot could ever get through even if he decided to try to show.” The tall one spoke as if to himself. He was terrified. Marie knew all the signs, knew them extremely well in fact.

  “Why don’t you just take the chopper and get out of Dodge then?” Marie asked the leading question.

  “We, uh, don’t fly. We mainly keep plane and helicopters flight ready, fueled up, that sort of thing,” the short one said. “We do a lot of pre-flight checks, anything really. We so
rt of can fly little Cessnas, but helicopters are a lot different.”

  “Where would you go once the pilot gets here?” asked Marie.

  “My uncle has a really nice boat. He says the best thing would be for us to join him. He’s already out at sea, but the helicopter has a long rope ladder. We figured the pilot could just sort of dangle us down to the deck. Sounds safer than dry land, at any rate,” said the shorter one.

  The taller one chimed in, “My family is in Texas, and so I was just going to go with Arty here to the boat. My name’s Phil, by the way.”

  “Glad to meet you. I’m Marie. By any chance do you know the name of this rich guy in Manhattan?” Marie knew what they were going to say before they even answered. Sometimes you can just feel the luck rolling. When they did answer, she smiled. “That would be my father,” she said, telling them the address. “You are in luck. I can fly that helicopter well enough to get you to where you are going, and then I will deliver the chopper myself. The pilot isn’t coming, and you know you have to get out of here soon.” She addressed herself particularly to Phil, who seemed very open to the idea of leaving. “Why be heroes? I might be your last chance out of here. By the way, what was that pilot’s name?”

  Arty and Phil stared at each other for an interminable moment.

  Chapter Ten: Afghanistan Al

  At about 7 a.m., Dante woke up and came out of the bus. He went to one of the numerous Port-o-Johns that had been set up, and came out wiping his hands with a Chem-Wipe. Many of the men had simply been relieving themselves in the bushes, but Dante was naturally fastidious. He walked up to Al explaining. “I never smoke. I won’t keep bumming them. Luckys. You must have death wish. I know you just got out of jail now.” Dante took the proffered cigarette and the lighter Al handed him. He lit up and started coughing. “Damn, boy, you don’t need the Psychos if you keep smoking these.”

  Gregor also emerged from the bus. He did not seem to be a morning person, and signaled for a cigarette by hand gestures. When the rest of The Celtics, along with Jerry, Jorge, Jen and Dan emerged, Al began to speak.

  “This was the only kind I could find. Lucky to have them.” Al spoke patiently. “What’s our next move, do you think?”

  “Well, Sammy sounds like he’s talking sense. We could just ride it out here. Like he said, there’s plenty of supplies, and we are bringing some guns to the table and Sammy owes us, he says, so I don’t see a problem with just hanging out. Think of this-how many of these Pill G Psychos can there even be? They have to be thinning out,” said Dante.

  Slowly, significantly, Al raised his hand to the top button of his coat and covered it. Dante looked confused for a microsecond, and then covered his own coat button. Gregor looked obtuse as well, but then covered his button. The rest of The Celtics followed suit. Al nodded, and then spoke: “You are right, by that line of reasoning, but let me ask you this-how do we know how many there are? True, it started with The Pill G Psychos, but what if it is spreads to the general population? What we’ve seen so far could still be just like the early tremors before a major earthquake.” Al spoke softly, facing away from the bus. “If this is true, being in an open space like this with a lot of panicky civilians with kids could be a major mistake. There’s no high ground that’s really defensible. If these Zombies really start coming, they won’t come in thousands, or ten thousands, but more like hundred thousands, swarming towards the Water Gap. All we’ve seen so far are just a few strays from the main contingent.”

  Dante looked at Al for a long time impassively. Then he spoke, very softly, “Al, until you used the word “Zombies”, I was totally on the hook. You just left me. Was that just an expression or did you actually mean to use that word?”

  “I know something about this. I intentionally used the word Zombies because the best way to describe what we are facing is to call them Zombies. The term Pill G Psychos only applies to the initial generation of the diseased. After the initial infection resulting from the use of the generic form of the Life Pill G, the reasons for which the government has detailed, and are, in fact, essentially accurate, the disease morphs into full blown Zombieism in the second generation. This highly useful fact is something the governments of the world are not talking about.” Al spoke rapidly and perfunctorily. He seemed to be racing to make himself understood, while at the same time knowing that what he was saying would take some time to internalize.

  “Al, you have obviously given this some thought, but why would the government lie to us? Also, how did you become such an expert?” Dante looked unbelieving, as did the rest, except for David who was staring out across the truck stop parking lot to the mountains beyond.

  Al lit up another cigarette. The morning sun betrayed his exhaustion. Exhaling, he spoke thusly, “Dante, I don’t know why the government would lie. I do have some theories, though. I think that it is probably a combination of reasons more than one particular item. One of the reasons is the true origin of the Life Pill. I am going to explain this to you as it was explained to me, as best I can. First, consider this question-of all the periods of scientific research, particularly biochemical research, when do you suppose was the most productive, or one of the most productive?”

  Dante shook his head. “Maybe right now, there are a lot of research labs and stuff, at least there were.”

  “Yes, you are right, but some of the most important foundational research occurred in Nazi Germany. It’s one of the dirty little secrets of Biochemistry, if you want to call it a secret. People just don’t take the trouble to find out. Hitler understood the value of science, and he provided an unlimited number of human beings for primary testing. Can you imagine how much faster that was? After the war, when the origins of so much of this primary research was so easily swept under the rug, a lot of scientists from the Allied powers saw this and got inspired. Some Nazi scientists were rehabilitated and brought to The States, the USSR, or anywhere there was a cooperative government that was willing to allow them to work unmolested. This yielded more than cutting edge technology, some of which has inarguably saved lives. It incorporated an ethos, a new ideal, into Western Science. The ends began to justify the means when it came to formulating, developing, and implementing new compounds and data.

  This brings us to Afghanistan. Now, we could talk about that war all day, but the important thing is that long about early 2007, after years of fighting, we were about to throw in the towel. American kids were dying for reasons nobody seemed to remember, and there was no foreseeable way out that could preserve our national dignity, as well as the careers of the Pro-War president, senators and members of Congress who would be up for reelection in 2008. The Afghan Army we were raising up to fight the Taliban after we left was essentially not useful, to put it charitably. We needed better home grown fighters, and we needed them fast.” Al paused, his face visibly tense. He had forgotten his cigarette burning to the nub, and grimaced, throwing it away and rubbing his hand briefly where it had singed him.

  “So along comes this egghead named Professor Gaultier with a project he’s been working on for his entire career, which up to the then had been mainly teaching at some no name school in the South. It had started out as part of his Doctoral Thesis on life prolongation, which nobody had paid any attention to. He noticed his latest attempt at it prolonged animal life extensively while maintaining the emotional stability of the subject, but another variation promoted longevity but also an almost superhuman aggression. He was still perfecting the first one, Pill Alpha, but he wanted to know if The Defense Department might have a use for the second one, which he called Pill G. Apparently, he had gotten tired of living in University Housing.

  The Pentagon took a look at it and liked what they saw. They asked him what he needed to test it, and he said, although he would never do it, the fastest path towards optimizing this pill and the dosage, etc., would be to test it on humans who were living under stressful conditions. Well, it didn’t take long for somebody in the military to get the idea of killing t
wo birds with one stone by testing the new drug on humans while also accelerating the training of Afghan freedom fighters. They had not much to lose, and a whole lot of funding to gain. Like I said, even though the Nazi Scientists are dead, their ideas remained. It’s like nibbling at The Forbidden Fruit, you may as well just eat the damn thing.”

  “At first, the operation was an incredible success. The new amped up Freedom Fighters were impervious to almost anything but a direct head shot. As far as being aggressive enough, these guys would literally tear the Taliban to pieces, or anybody else for that matter. They were like these destructo-bots, except that their brains would get fried and they would lose all power of cognition and forget how to use weapons or talk or anything else requiring higher cognitive ability. They also started attacking anything that moved. Still, they didn’t attack each other, and as long as we just dropped them into the heart of Taliban country, they didn’t have the opportunity to kill too many friendlies once they turned Psycho. They were like these walking land mines even after they turned stupid. They created a lot of chaos, a lot of confusion. They were scaring the crap out of the Taliban, who as a group, I feel qualified to tell you, are not known for scaring easily.”

  “Doesn’t sound like a problem so far, at least from a military perspective,” Gregor interjected.

  “It wasn’t at first. We even installed cameras and GPS monitors on them so we could track them. We could get them to attack a Taliban hotspot by hitting the area with ultraviolet light and dropping in noisemakers that were like these pulsed dog whistles. They’d see the lights and hear these dog whistles, which can’t be sensed by ordinary people, and they would come shambling in to attack. They tripped land mines and IEDs and would just keep crawling with half their bodies blown off. The Taliban used up an awful lot of ammunition before they figured out that only head shots would work against them.”

  “So what happened?” asked Keisha, who was starting to wake up at last.