by JE Gurley
“Wonderful!” she moaned around a mouthful of banana.
Alex had to admit that Gore had been right. The fruit would be a nice addition to their otherwise monotonous diet, but would rot quickly in the heat. The tinned goods were another matter. Entire boxcars of tinned meats, stews, soups, vegetables and fruit juices, cases of bottled water and assorted sodas had spilled their contents, enough foodstuffs for years all for their choosing.
“You were right,” he reluctantly admitted to Gore. “We should concentrate on the fresh produce,” he suggested. “We can find a couple of pressure cookers and cases of glass jars and preserve it. It will last for years.”
Gore nodded. “But some cases of meats, too.”
Alex relented. “Okay, but save room for fresh produce. We can always return for more.” Alex now wished he had located a larger truck instead of the Jeep. The van could hold three-quarters of a ton of foodstuffs but the Jeep had a limited capacity. Still, he would load as much as it would carry.
Gore began grabbing cases of tinned meats at random and ferrying them to his van. Nicole concentrated on fruits, placing them in the van and the Jeep. Alex picked through cases of carrots, green beans, peas, and tomatoes, choosing the freshest and loading them the back of the jeep. As an afterthought, he tossed in four, fifty-pound bags of potatoes.
“Why are there no bodies?”
Alex stopped working and turned to Nicole, who stopped loading and was now looking around the wrecked locomotives.
“Maybe they survived the crash and left,” Alex suggested.
“If they were driving the train, why did it derail?”
“Maybe they were zombies.”
Both of them turned to Gore. He continued, “They turned into zombies while onboard and couldn’t drive the train. It couldn’t make the bend.”
“How do you know?” Alex asked.
Gore shrugged. “It explains the wreck and lack of bodies. If they simply walked away, someone would have come back to clean this mess up. If they had made it to the nearest town and reported it, someone from there would have already picked through this.” He held out his arms to encompass their newly claimed larder.
“That makes sense,” Nicole said in agreement.
Alex thought the answer too glib, but didn’t challenge Gore’s conclusions. “Come on. Let’s finish loading this lot and head back. It will be dark soon.”
“Yeah, yeah, just a few more boxes,” Gore replied.
Gore disappeared into the rear of his van with a load of boxes. Alex secured the boxes in the back of the overloaded Jeep with bungee cords. After completing his task, he called out to Nicole, still rummaging around the locomotives.
“Time to go, Nicole.”
“Yes, it’s time we left, Nicole,” Gore said from behind Alex.
Alex turned to face Gore, who had his Glock pointed at Alex’s middle. Gore’s smile bore none of its earlier warmth. He reminded Alex of a grinning devil. “What’s this?” he asked, amazed that Gore’s move did not come as a complete surprise to him. He should have been ready for Gore.
“All this food will last two people for years, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I could find a few good men willing to swear their fealty to me in exchange for food.” He looked at Nicole. “Women are scarce, especially good looking ones. When I get tired of her, I’ll trade her like any other commodity.”
“You’ll have to kill me first,” Alex challenged, balling his fists. Maybe Nicole could escape, if he could delay Gore long enough..
“That’s been my plan all along, Alex old friend. You’ve built yourself quite a fortress in that old factory. Secluded, good field of fire, room to expand. From it, a group of determined men could build a new empire hereabouts.” He shrugged. “A small one maybe, but it’ll do for now.” He waved the gun at Nicole. “Come on down Nicole. I don’t want to shoot you too.”
Alex watched Nicole walk slowly toward Gore, and then stop. “Let him go first.”
“No can do. Alex here is too resourceful. I wouldn’t want to keep looking over my shoulder waiting for him to show up. You would, wouldn’t you, Alex?”
Alex grinned. “Assuredly, and I would take great pleasure in gutting you like a fish. You wrecked the train, didn’t you?”
Gore shrugged. “I was out of supplies and saw it coming. I figured there might be food onboard. It was a simple matter of driving onto the tracks. The engineer hit the brakes, but the weight of the cars was too much for the curve. I just wanted to stop it, but wrecking it worked just as well.”
“The engineer?”
“He and his partner are in a ditch down the line a ways.”
Alex saw Gore’s eyes grow cold and his finger tightening on the trigger. He leaped to one side as Gore fired, but not quickly enough. The thunder of the pistol rang in his ears, but it wasn’t loud enough to drown out Nicole’s frantic scream. A searing pain exploded in his right side as the .45 caliber slug tore through flesh and muscle. He landed hard on the edge of a drainage ditch and rolled down the embankment. He looked up at Gore smiling down at him.
“That should do the job,” Gore said. With one hand he held a struggling Nicole by the shoulder. He glanced up at the sky. “I won’t waste another bullet on you. The buzzards will finish the job soon enough, or the dingoes.”
Alex tried to get up, but found his muscles wouldn't cooperate. He touched his side experimentally and his hand came away bright red. He bunched his shirt over the wound in an attempt to staunch the flow of blood, but his vision was already growing dim. “I should have let the zombies eat the bastard,” he muttered to himself as the light faded and he lost consciousness.
14
Sept. 2, 2013 ‘Resurrection City’ Oates Land, Antarctica -
The storm blew all day and night, raging like a horde of angry yeti. Gilford had sealed off the dining hall from the rest of the frozen building, but a small fire inside a metal garbage can produced more smoke than heat. The base heating operated from steam produced by a boiler and diesel generator, now wrecked, but the kitchen used bottled propane for cooking. Anson located a tripped emergency safety feature that had flooded the kitchen with extinguisher foam and automatically shut off the gas flow. After he and Marino performed a little clean up duty in the kitchen, they moved in.
Marino was worried. Basky’s condition had grown dire, leaving him lucid for only short periods. John Gilford improved slowly, but Marino was more concerned with the scientist’s mental health. He spoke endlessly of angels and the hand of God. Eating their first decent meal in several days, he and Anson discussed their predicament.
“When the storm lets up,” Anson said, “If the Herc will run, we can continue to Melbourne. Right now, we’re in pretty good shape.”
Marino looked at their two charges. “Two of us anyway.”
“Basky has gangrene.”
Marino stopped his forkful of steak before his lips touched it. “Gangrene? You’re sure.”
“I’m sure. I caught a whiff when I checked on him. I’ve smelled gangrene before.”
Marino did not doubt Anson’s diagnosis. He knew about gangrene. Everyone in frozen climes did. The blood stopped flowing to frozen tissue, like fingers, nose, or toes, and the tissue died. Sometimes, in the severest case, ‘gas gangrene’, bacteria such as Clostridium perfingens created gas bubbles that spread throughout the body. He assumed Basky had ‘dry gangrene’ where the tissue simply dried up and rotted away. Either case, he knew that, without immediate medical attention, Basky would probably die. They had one other option, one that made Marino shudder thinking about it.
“Can we amputate the dead tissue?” he suggested.
Anson stared at him a moment before shaking his head sadly. “It’s too late for that. Besides, we would probably kill him if we tried. Luckily, he’s rarely lucid enough to suffer.”
Marino, annoyed by Anson’s apparent callousness, allowed a bit of sarcasm to color his words. “Yeah, I guess it’s better to die without knowing what’s
killing you.”
Anson raised an eyebrow at Marino’s reply, but did not accept his challenge. “I think so.”
Marino looked over at Basky’s unconscious form. A slight smile parted Basky’s lips. At least he’ll die dreaming happy dreams, he thought.
Anson changed the subject. “I’ve been looking around this base. It used to be a small Australian resupply depot for polar expeditions. The Yanks made quite a few changes. So far, I’ve counted twenty-four bodies. Some were technicians, but most were soldiers. The place has no designated name. I saw a handwritten sign naming it ‘Resurrection City’. What does that mean?”
“It’s another name for the Garden of Eden.”
They both turned to Gilford, now awake and staring at them.
“We recreated it here in a test tube,” he continued, “but the garden had its serpent just like the original Garden of Eden.”
“What do you mean?” Marino asked.
“We created a nanites virus that could regenerate dead tissue, at least in theory. In practice, there were all kind of technical difficulties, but we thought we had it, AR-21. It need more work, more time, but the general was in a hurry. We tried P-51, that’s what we called it . . . A-10 really. It created zombies. The general became contaminated and was in Washington before we could stop him. From there . . .” He shrugged. “I sealed myself in my office until the cold weather deactivated the nanites. Your plane . . . I thought you were angels.”
“I heard about your submarine a couple of years ago,” Anson said angrily.
“Oh? I thought they kept that under wraps. One of our patients, Seaman Jessup Colder, we regenerated muscle tissue in his leg; a blinding success, we thought, until later. We didn’t anticipate his job as a reactor technician. The low dosages of radiation mutated the virus, and turned it lethal. It quickly spread throughout the crew.”
“And a damned lot of our men,” Anson snapped.
“You’re Australian, aren’t you? Well, yes, a few of your men died, but we lost one hundred and twenty-nine on the Providence. I haven’t slept well the past two years.”
“Too bloody bad!” Anson snapped. “Some of my mates were on the Vendetta, one of our destroyers. They lost a dozen men before they sank your damn sub.”
Gilford was unflappable, “AR-21 worked.”
“Tell your Seaman Colder that.”
Gilford shrugged, “We learned from that mistake, but for some reason AR-21 became less effective. AR-10, the mutated nanite strain from Colder,” Gilford smiled, “We named it P-51 for the old Mustang fighter, seemed to offer a new direction in our research. If not for the general . . .” His voice trailed off. “Is that steak I smell? I sure could use some. I’m starving.”
Anson stalked out of the room. Marino heard the outer door open and felt a draft of frigid air. He went to the kitchen to prepare a plate of steak and baked potato for Gilford. The researcher seemed better, but he was still weak from his ordeal. Marino considered what Gilford had told them. Nanites, zombies, a plague centered in Washington that may have swept the world – How could intelligent men create such a monstrosity, especially after killing the entire crew of a nuclear submarine?
“Our tax dollars at work,” he mumbled.
Gilford indeed ate as if he was starved, gulping down chunks of steak without chewing, slurping coffee and spilling a good portion of it on himself. He ignored his fork and ate his baked potato like corn on the cob. When he finished, he wiped his mouth with his sleeve and smiled at Marino.
“Good grub. I was eating cold canned soup and stew until I ran out a few days ago.” A grimace crossed his face and furrowed his brow. “I didn’t have the courage to come back in here and face the dead.” He nodded his head at Basky. “I overheard you two talking. Your big friend is right. There’s nothing you can do for him. He’s too far gone. There are some narcotics in the dispensary. I can give him a shot that will end his suffering.”
Marino looked at him aghast. “Don’t even think about it. We’ll get him to Australia soon.”
“Australia? You think there is still an Australia? When we realized the virus was loose here, I took a radio into my office. I listened as the stations went off the air one-by-one. They quarantined Washington the first week, but by then it was already too late. The disease had spread to Europe, Australia, Asia, and Northern Africa. Countries closed their borders and killed anyone trying to enter, but there were just too many people crazed with fear. Within ten days, the radio went silent.
“I think I slipped over the edge for a while there – frozen, starving, and afraid to leave my office. Finally, I gave up. I tried signaling a passing plane, but no one responded. I sat there on the ice waiting to die, and then you showed up.”
“We’ll leave here in a day or two, when the weather clears,” Marino said.
“We’ll find a dead world. The cold slows them down, but in warmer climates, these zombies would be like wild animals, raging in packs, killing anything with blood. We’ll face horrors you couldn’t dream of. I pity anyone that didn’t die immediately.”
Marino had had enough of Gilford’s foreboding talk. “I’ve got to help Anson,” he said and walked out.
He found Anson in the research center, standing and staring through the ice-frosted glass of the surgical room. Anson glanced at Marino when he walked up, but returned his gaze to the glass.
“This is where they played God,” he said. “It looks like any other surgery in any hospital, but for all the sterile procedures, the shiny machinery and the centuries of accumulated medical knowledge, it could be Frankenstein’s laboratory.”
“They paid for their mistake,” Marino said, looking at the frozen corpses on the floor. At first glance, they looked as though they had lain down and gone to sleep. He didn’t want to investigate closer to see the torn flash and gaping wounds hidden beneath a layer of frost.
“We all paid for their mistake, that’s the trouble,” Anson challenged. “If the virus had escaped just here, we could have nuked the place, but no, some general with bright shiny medals on his chest for ordering people to die, had to carry it to Washington before he died. His last will and testament is written on the millions of corpses.”
“Maybe it’s not as bad as we think. There must be some organization left – the army or navy ships at sea.”
Anson appeared to mull Marino’s statement over in his mind. “Some ships might survive, but how long can they stay at sea? They’ll run out of food or fuel sometime, or sail too close to land and a breeze will carry the virus to them.” He shook his head, “No, I think mankind is at an end, at least the civilization we knew. It’ll be back to growing your own food for survival and making your own clothes, just like it was three hundred years ago – no cities, no factories, no interstate commerce, no bloody beer.” He kicked at the steel door leading to the sterile surgery. “Maybe I can find some books on brewing.”
Marino let his friend wallow in his self-pity for a while. The implications of what they might expect were just now beginning to dawn on him. Was Phoenix a ghost town? Were the Arizona deserts littered with the corpses of illegal immigrants trying to reach the imagined safety of the US? He wondered about friends and family. He had no close ties in Arizona, a few colleagues, a few acquaintances, but no real friends. His only sister was in Colorado. Maybe the cold weather slowed the spread of the nanite plague.
He passed at a door marked ‘Pharmacy’ on his way out, and remembered Gilford’s suggestion to end Basky’s suffering. Suicide went against his religious background, not that he professed any deep-seated morals, but if Basky grew coherent enough, he would leave the decision to him. He pushed open the door and stepped inside.
The room was in a shambles. Broken vials covered the floor with their contents frozen into multi-colored puddles. Pills, some crushed, some undamaged, mingled with spilled bottles of various powders and crystals. He briefly eyed the shelves, but decided he wouldn’t know what product to use if he wished to give Basky an easy w
ay out. Gilford would know what drug to use if it came to that.
Outside, the wind was howling and blowing so hard that he could barely stand. He looked toward the runway, but blowing snow obscured the big Hercules C-130. He hoped it would ride out the storm undamaged. It was their only means of escape from their frozen hell. Returning to the mess hall, he stumbled over a frozen corpse, but did not bother examining it. He had seen enough death in the last few days to last him a lifetime.
Gilford was up, warming his hands over the flame of a gas burner.
“Feeling better?” Marino asked.
Gilford smiled, stretching the pallid skin of his gaunt face. “I’m still weak, but I’m still alive.”
“Good. You’ll be back in the pink in no time.”
Gilford’s chuckle startled Marino. “We’re going to die here,” he said.
Curious, Marino asked, “Why do you think that?”
“When this storm is over, it’s going to warm up. It always does. These corpses are going to thaw out and start looking for blood, our blood,” he laughed.
“We’ll be out of here before then. As soon as the storm blows over, we’ll leave.”
Gilford chuckled again. “We’ll never leave this place. It wants to keep us here, to eat our frozen corpses with glacial teeth, grind our bones to dust and drop us in the ocean for the fish to feed on.”
Marino looked into Gilford’s eyes and saw madness in them. He figured he had better humor him. “Maybe it has enough bodies to satisfy its appetite,” he replied slowly.
Gilford shook his head. “The ice is never satisfied. You’ll see.”
“Uh huh,” Marino agreed and went back into the dining room. Basky was staring at him. “How do you feel, Basky?”
He smiled at Marino feebly. His voice was raspy and quiet as he spoke. Each word came out slowly, as if he had difficulty forming them with his lips. “Not good. The doc here says I’m a goner. I think he’s right.”
Marino glared at Gilford, who smiled in reply. “Don’t listen to him. We’ll be out of here soon and get you some real medical help.”