ZOMBIE WORLD ORDER

by P. J. Kelley

  “What happened is just what I’m talking about here. The original Pill G Psychos in Afghanistan started infecting people. Suddenly, all these hill people are staggering around trying to tear us apart. We have no way to monitor them, and little control over them. These second generation Pill G Psychos, or first generation Zombies, whichever you like, still responded to UV lights and dog whistles, but that was our only method of controlling them at all. We could only contain them. I’m sure there are still Zombies in Afghanistan, they are just all up in the hills. Now both the Taliban and us are fighting them, if you can deal with that irony. We shoot them on sight as soon as they get to the lowlands. I’m not saying that we don’t kill civilians over there-we do, but a lot of those flying drones you always hear about are hunting Zombies only. A blown up Zombie looks essentially the same as a blown up Normal, so some of the blame we are catching is undeserved, in a way. The worst fear has always been for this to hit a population center which contains American voters, which is what we have happening here. This has to be a huge mistake, since it’s so devastating to our current political system.

  Gregor looked at Dante, then back at Al, and spoke, smiling coldly. “You have hardly said a word in the two days we’ve known you, and now this torrent. Why do you keep saying “we” anyway?”

  “I was a part of this. I was a monitor, which is what people who kept track of Pill G Psychos were called. I got the background after, when I was reassigned to be a prison guard there. I was only in charge of one prisoner-Professor Gaultier. He had degenerated greatly, due to guilt and the abundant supply of primo Afghan Brown he was using to deal with it. Somebody had shown him footage of some Psychos tearing up an entire Afghan village, and he couldn’t hack it after that. Pathetic really. All that brainpower and he didn’t see this coming. He never once anticipated that The Brass wouldn’t let him pull the plug at any time. What was he thinking? At first, probably how slick he was to become a multi-millionaire and help the war effort. He was one brain washed puppy, in the beginning. After he woke up, he was crazy enough to threaten to squeal. Squeal to who? Jimmy Olsen? Reporters take dictation in this country, so imagine what goes on in places like Afghanistan. So they locked him up, or put him in “protective custody.” It shows how highly they thought of him really. Anybody else would have been dead and buried in the Afghan Mountains before they could have finished that threat.” Al was obviously starting to get worked up. “So you can see why I am worried now. We might be better off if we keep moving.”

  “Well, what happened to Professor Gaultier? I can’t believe you actually met him, though I’m not calling you a liar, understand,” Gregor didn’t sound very convincing. “His disappearance is famous, he was like Elvis. He cured Death for God’s sake, and then he tainted the formula to cause Pill G Psychosis out of spite. Everybody knows that.” The others nodded in assent. Gaultier was the most easily recognized scientist name in the world now, and the most hated man in the world as well.

  “For all I know, he is still in military prison somewhere. They kept him pretty drugged up and lethargic, and he doesn’t care anymore. Anyway, he told me a lot of stuff I wasn’t supposed to know because I brought him extra dope. I’ m just sharing what he told me. Also, for the record, the government story about him destroying Pill Alpha and causing Pill G Psychosis is total bullshit. I knew the guy. He made a mistake in selling his invention to the military, but he was a good man. He was just an idiot with a 180 I.Q. He was not capable of causing all this out of malice. I don’t know why they are pinning it all on him. It’s like he’s Emmanuel Goldstein from that book, 1984.

  I’m just saying I’ve got a bad feeling about being here. I got a bad feeling about all this. I’m not saying the Zombies are smart, they probably are not, but somehow they always seem to arrive en masse for important objectives, the way ants always do.”

  “How come you haven’t said anything so far?” Gregor wanted to know.

  “Because, dude, we are being watched. I’m trying to impress on you the gravity of our situation. The Zombies have a tendency to surround a target and come from all sides relentlessly. Soldiers panic when they do it, especially the first time they see it. How do you think untrained civilians are going to react?”

  “Okay, granted, you sound like you know what you are talking about,” Dante spoke up, “So what’s our next move?”

  “Well, this is a tough spot. There’s ways to make this place more defensible, but it would require coordination and cooperation. I don’t think we’ll get it. Not that these aren’t good people, they seem like great people. They just don’t know what they are up against. I don’t want to abandon them to their fate, but let’s face facts. If a couple hundred thousand Zombies hit us at once, we’ll go through all the ammunition here inside of an hour. We have very light artillery, and the air support looks like a couple of old helicopters with light guns. The harsh reality is that once they break through, and they will break through, it’s going to be every man, woman, and child for themselves, barring individual acts of heroism and self-sacrifice which will probably be pointless anyway.

  So I say we load up and haul ass. It stands to reason that the main body of them would be coming from New York and the big Jersey cities down the major highways. If we could stick to back roads, we might be able to sort of outflank them, and keep going to New York. They are very herd-like once they start moving. There won’t be too many stragglers left behind once the vanguard passes through.”

  “Passes through to where?” Dante asked.

  “Picture a mob of hungry cave men cannibals. They get to a food source, they grab up all the easy kills, they eat, and then they keep going to the next easy supply. It’s easier to just keep despoiling than it is to figure out how to catch every last straggling human. Look, I’m telling you this for a reason, what do you want to do? We need to make a decision.”

  “What are you going to do?” Dante asked.

  “I go where the bus goes. We need to get a consensus. This might not be a good place to be tonight.”

  “We should at least tell Sammy and the others what’s going on,” Gregor opined. Some part of Al’s lecture had sunk in with him. “We could just tell them we heard a whole lot of Zombies were heading this way and it was time to bail.”

  “I’ll go talk to Sammy and see what he says,” Jerry said. It was arranged that the group would meet around the bus in one hour’s time, so there would be ample time for discussion and a breakfast of some sort.

  The discussion never took place. An advance contingent of Zombies, maybe fifty thousand strong, struck about 45 minutes later. They’d gone unnoticed by satellite because they had advanced under the canopy of trees which extended around the truck stop for miles. Al’s speech was not without some benefit, since the gist of his talk had spread like wildfire through the truck stop proper, resulting in a highly alert populace. When the first wave hit, Sammy knew enough to immediately sound the alarm sending everyone scurrying into their vehicles. Although the rest of the people at the truck stop got a greatly abbreviated version of Al’s story, it was good enough to hammer home the gravity of their situation.

  The National Guard fought bravely, and the wolf packs of jeeps with 50 caliber machine guns mounted on the back were highly effectual, a good idea. The problem however, was the sheer number of Zombies that kept appearing in fresh assaults. It was like watching those South American Army Ants that will fill a ditch with their bodies, so the rest of the horde can pass across over them. The parking lot soon became impossible to maneuver freely through, as the crumpled bodies of Zombies began to obstruct the Jeeps. As the Guard lost the ability to provide massive firepower quickly at the site of any breach in their defenses, breakthroughs became more common. Rifle fire could drive back ingressions, but it was shocking how much ammunition was being used so quickly, how many weapons were becoming jammed and overheated. The horde just kept coming.

  Al had said he was anxious to leave, but he leaped into the fight. He got one o
f the truckers to let him use a bulldozer he was hauling, and he started to move the scattered bodies into large piles. He was fairly secure in the locked cab of the bulldozer, so even though he was immediately swarmed, the cage he was in protected him. Soon the parking lot was clear enough for the jeeps to become effectual again. For some reason, there was no shortage of 50 caliber ammunition, so Al had reasoned that keeping them going was a top priority. After three brutal hours, the attack ceased. The Zombies hadn’t retreated, or quit to look for easier targets, there just weren’t anymore, in any real numbers. Snipers on the truck stop roof were picking off any still lurking around.

  “I told you we were safe here Al, what do you say now?” Sammy was jubilant. A small group of National Guard and truckers stood with him, celebrating the victory.

  “We were lucky. The first attack came by day, so it was like an advance warning. Somebody in the National Guard has a brain, because whether anybody has told him so or not, those jeeps are genius. Plus, we just happen to have bulldozers and diesel fuel right on the site. This could have ended very badly, even though there weren’t that many of them.”

  “Weren’t that many? We just killed 50,000 of them at least.”

  “Yeah, and half our ammo is gone. Look, we need to rest, they don’t. We need to eat and sleep, they don’t. They will never stop coming. We would be better off running.”

  “How about all the people here?” Sammy wanted to know, “We just leave them?”

  “Bring ‘em along. Look, eventually, the military is going to get it together. The pattern is that once enough people have died, the bosses get scared and let somebody who actually knows how to fight do the planning. We could pack everybody into the backs of these trailers, load them with drinking water, food, and guns, and just start driving, maybe go to the ocean and see if we can get on board an oil tanker or cruise ship, anything. These things don’t climb so well. If we can wait this out someplace safe where we don’t have to fight, we could live long enough for the people who get paid to fix this stuff to fix it. I don’t think we can take another attack like this last one, and we definitely don’t want to be here for a night attack, like I said. What are we defending here? It’s a truck stop. Yes, it was being used as a rallying point, but it seems like we’ve rallied as much as we are going to. There haven’t been any new people for a while, maybe they’ve stopped coming, or there are too few coming to worry about since that would endanger the many that are already here.”

  Unbeknownst to the others, Jerry and a National Guard officer had been standing and listening to the whole exchange.

  “I’m in command here, soldier. You have something to say you should talk to me. I know you’re not scared and that you’re smart after what you did with that bulldozer. Talk to me, and advise me what you think is best,” the officer said to Al quietly. Al joined Jerry and the Guardsman, who apparently knew each other somehow, and they went into a brief huddle apart from the group.

  In the end, all of Al’s plans were used. One long convoy of trucks would carry all supplies. 50 caliber guns were to be placed on the roof of every fifth truck. The lead truck would be hauling bulldozers in case the road needed to be cleared. Diesel trucks would be flanked by any armored military vehicles available. The convoy would proceed along minor highways towards the Camden yards where several decommissioned ships would be available as fortresses. The hope was that the convoy could drive right up, unload their gear, and just sit in the harbor for a while.

  “The best thing is just to get moving towards the ocean, even The Hudson River would have big enough ships. They need to keep moving, I agree. We can monitor the Zombies via satellite to help the convoy avoid them on the road. Confidentially, between us, our helicopters have seen a gigantic mass of these things about twenty miles away coming westbound down Highway 80. There looks like another horde coming right after them. Both are several times as big as what we just faced. We think we have two or three hours so we should be able to get rolling. Our scouts are saying if they can stay off 80 and to a lesser extent 46 by sticking to side roads, they should be able to get back on the interstates once the main hordes have passed,” the National Guard officer said. “Let’s get this going. The more I think about it the more I think it’s the only way, at least for the civilians.”

  “What are you going to do?” asked Al, dreading the answer.

  “I’m going to barricade myself and a few volunteers on the roof of the truck stop with all the field artillery and all the ammunition we can’t spare you, and I am going to try to take a chunk out of the advancing hordes. We’re the only thing standing between them and Pennsylvania.”

  This response reminded Al of a simpler time, as if he were hearing something he had believed in a long time ago, and had thought he had forgotten. Al dreaded knowing what he would say next.

  “Captain,” Al said, addressing the officer by his rank for the first time, “I’m clean now, but I got bounced out of the military for shooting dope. I mainly think all of the wars we are in are for the wrong reasons, and I could be convinced we’re in Afghanistan for the heroin dealers more than anything else, not that I’d know for sure. I am no longer what is popularly considered a patriot, but if you’ll have me, I’d like to volunteer to join you.”

  The Captain smiled grimly. “I could use you. I don’t really know how you got here, but what matters is you’ll be saving a lot of lives now. Help get your friends set up and moving, and then report to the truck stop to help haul stuff up onto the roof. “

  They didn’t bother saluting. Al found The Celtics and told them the plan. Surprisingly, Jerry, Jen, Jorge and Dan wanted to join as well. Sammy did too, but he was taking that small family from Indiana in his truck to the shipyards, and everybody agreed that was the best move for him.

  “This is a suicide mission. I appreciate the gesture, but you are all young kids, and Jerry should go with you to watch you,” Al wheedled with them, knowing he would regret it if they stayed.

  Jen was firm. “I can reload, carry water, help the injured, and fire a gun if I have to.” Jorge would stay if Jen was going to, and Dan and Jerry were also immovable on the subject.

  The rest of The Celtics were uncertain. David was the only one who seemed undistracted. “Hey, do you want me to stay and be a hero too? It’ll be like The Magnificent Seven, though there would only be us six.”

  Dante and Gregor also spoke of being willing to stay, but Al knew they didn’t really want to. Keisha was clear on the topic-she would make her stand in The Bronx or nowhere, and Bridget was simply not going to be much use in this particular situation.

  “You guys just get going, okay? Whatever possibly valid reason Gerard and Amiko had for pushing this game, I think I understand it now. It’s worth it. Jen, if you go, Jorge will go as well. Think of that.”

  Al and the rest of The Celtics exchanged only the briefest of farewells. There was little time for sentiment. The morning’s events had reaffirmed the reality of the impending danger. He felt a twinge as he watched the convoy lining up to drive out. He hoped his plan would work for them. At least they would have access to some military technology, and that should be really helpful for avoiding advancing swarms on the road, for the most part. His farewells completed, Al shouldered his gear and started walking towards the truck stop.

  He didn’t look to see who came with him, but when he got there, he looked around and there was Jen, Jorge, Jerry, and Dan, as promised.

  “This is the right thing to do,” Jen explained, walking alongside him. “This is going to save a lot of lives. It will slow down and thin out the horde somewhat, and give everybody in Pennsylvania time to get ready at The Water Gap. That’s the place to stop them for real.” Although Jen was merely parroting the plan, and was really just a high school girl on the surface, some switch inside of her had been flipped, and Al could easily believe she was committed to the death.

  The work was hard and intense, as pallets of supplies were hauled up ladders and stairs. The Cap
tain seemed to be getting ready for an extended siege. The twenty foot high walls could be held for a long time if the truck stop was properly barricaded. The most open parts were being blockaded with empty tractor trailers, their tires being quickly flattened to make crawling under them more difficult.

  Al and the rest had worked for maybe twenty minutes when they saw the minibus wheeling slowly out of the convoy. It stopped, and David, Dante, Gregor, Bridget, and Keisha got out, satchels and shotguns in their hands.

  “Screw it, we want to die too,” Keisha said cheerfully. Without further explanation, they got out and started hauling freight up the stairs with the Guard.

  Chapter Eleven: Visiting Isaiah

  Ten minutes after Marie got off at the airport, Joe, Charlie, Gwen and George were finally starting to see Psychos. A lot of Psychos, to be exact.

  They weren’t fast or anything like that, but they were supremely willing to sacrifice their bodies to stop a hurtling minibus. Anyone who has ever hit a deer with their car can appreciate that sickening thud flesh makes when hit by a large chunk of metal. The conundrum became this-if they drove too fast, Psychos would jump in front of the bus, causing a lot of damage. If they drove too slowly, Psychos would have time to start massing around their vehicle and tip it over the way anti-capitalism protesters in Argentina tipped over vans a few years back.

  To make matters worse, they were starting to run low on fuel. Gwen stared at Maria’s gift of rubber hose with an almost talismanic awe. Although it had seemed as if Maria had been joking, or being a smart aleck, Gwen was disturbed at what a thoughtful present it had turned out to be. All the gas stations were ravaged and desolate, and many still looked occupied by Psychos.

  Finally, Joe started talking. “I hoped we could get through on the big Interstates, but they look jammed and really dangerous. I have an idea, but I don’t know if you will like it.”