Cities of the Dead: Stories From The Zombie Apocalypse

by Young, William

  “That was half the dose of the last subject, and it was still as quick. Whatever this bug is, it moves fast. Keep an eye on him throughout the day and let me know if he revives.”

  “What about the others?”

  Carlos shrugged. “They’re not going anywhere. Just keep them locked in their rooms.”

  He walked through the laboratory and pushed through the office doors and sat at his desk. For some reason, the contagion took over a person much more quickly when a person was asleep and exposed to it by the air: almost twice as fast as by a bite infection or exposed blood contamination. It made no sense to him. Carlos looked at his watch and figured that if subject Ken reacted as previous subjects had, he’d arise as undead within six to eight hours. And his tests had all been conducted using his various guess-work concoctions as to what the pathogen might be composed of.

  He was sure that for it to have spread so rapidly across the globe, and infected so many so quickly, there had to be a better explanation because it hadn’t infected everyone simultaneously. People in one house would arise in the morning like normal, looking for breakfast while the family next door would awaken to a life as the undead. It made no sense.

  And then it hit him.

  It was a learning virus. A retro-virus of some sort, perhaps, that couldn’t infect everyone at first, but as it mutated through those it successfully infected, it began incorporating the differences in DNA of the human species into its attack sequence. He sat back in his chair and wondered if that made sense, if a virus could be so adaptable. And, especially, if it could alter itself that quickly.

  “But it doesn’t always change the host, it sometimes kills the host,” he said aloud, softly, to no one. Killing the host was a mistake. The virus must have adapted early on to revive the host as something different. But if it didn’t infect everyone through its primary delivery system then that meant there were humans who were resistant to the plague, at least until it evolved further. Which meant there was a cure. Or a vaccine. But there was hope.

  He flipped through some of the paperwork on his desk and wished, again, he had a computer that could crunch data, analyze trends, spot outliers. This work could take decades done this way, and he wasn’t sure he even had years. He was going to need to run more experiments. He was going to need equipment. He was going to need time.

  And he was going to need more test subjects.

  The Road

  Tulsa, Oklahoma - Day 204

  The two were on horseback, now, having made the beginning of their trek across Oklahoma on foot under the searing summer sun. Carter hadn’t wanted to use a motor vehicle of any kind as he didn’t want to be tied down to the need for gasoline and maintenance. In the days they’d been making their way across the state, they’d come across countless little caravans of vehicles abandoned in the middle of the road, so he figured he was in the minority on this issue. The world had gone to hell more quickly than anyone could have imagined, abruptly ending thousands of years of steady progress toward air-conditioning and convenience store burritos, and most of the survivors were still clinging to the ways of civilization.

  There was no civilization. Not anymore. Already, Mother Nature was taking back that which the humans had brought under their control, planting weeds and grass anywhere a seed could take root in a crack. It was only a matter of time until the tornados tore apart the buildings in Oklahoma City and Norman. In time, everything man had built would fall to the ground. Carter had no reason to believe the walking dead would maintain anything, seeing as they seemed bent on devouring the living. Whatever the future for man was, if there was a future, it would look a lot more like the distant past than the recent past. Carter figured that the people who adapted quickly to the fundamental change of how life would become and learned the skills sets of the outdoors would find themselves in a better situation than those who roamed the countryside in four-by-fours in search of a way to salvage what had been.

  Like anything easy or fun, letting go of it would be difficult. People - Americans, he corrected himself (and, then, parenthetically, in his thought process, he guessed the West in general, and any advanced civilization on the planet specifically) would find it difficult to give up on the idea of electricity, automobiles, grocery stores and leisure time. For most of the lifespan of the human race, easy living had been the rarest of rarities, and those who had achieved it guarded it jealously. Most people had to eke out a subsistence and lived grubby, short lives of desperation and want.

  Now the human race was back to that paradigm. The walking dead had seen to that. Why was a question no one might ever know the answer to. Not that it mattered. What was done, was done. Only now, humans weren’t the only Alpha Predators on the block, so the road back would be much, much more difficult.

  The whine of dirt bikes rose above the sound of the wind and traced its way along the landscape off to their right, a niggling whirr of noise that spent a minute moving east before fading into silence. Carter made no effort to look, although he knew the boy certainly was.

  “Don’t worry about it. There’s no shortage of people roaming around. Long as we can hear them, we know where they are.”

  He lifted up his cowboy hat and wiped the sweat from his brow, pushed his hair back up and set the hat back down. The boy was probably right, though. It probably was the same pack of bikers, stalking them, now choosing to be brazen rather than stealthy. Whatever the boy had in his pack, they wanted it. They had killed his parents in an attempt to get it, and he had shown up however-many seconds too late to help them, arriving just in time to kill the two leather-coat-and-football-pad-encrusted thugs and save the boy.

  He had asked the boy his name, but the kid - he guessed him to be about twelve - hadn’t answered. Carter had shrugged and not told the kid his name, and the two had formed a unit that had made its way across Oklahoma in silence. Carter prodded his horse and it began walking, the kid saying “let’s go” quietly to his horse a second later.

  They kept the horses off to the side of route 51. The road was empty with the exception of an empty car or truck every couple of miles. They rode for hours without coming across another person - living or undead. Carter found that odd, and it rolled around in his mind, searching for a reason to stick to. This close to Tulsa, there should’ve been some activity. And then he smiled to himself and shook his head: just a couple of months into the zombie apocalypse, and he assumed he was already an expert at sensing the patterns of the new world. What the hell did he know? The kid probably knew more about zombies than Carter did.

  They had seen the smoke pouring into the sky long before they got to the outskirts of the city, and Carter had figured Tulsa had fallen just as fully as every other city they’d been through. He had never really followed the news: pre-zombies he had been a Major League Baseball and college football junkie, so he had listened to sports talk radio and watched ESPN. By the time he realized he should find out what was going on with the world, it was too late.

  “Over there,” the boy said.

  Carter looked over at the kid and saw he was pointing. Carter followed the trajectory outward and saw a knot of walking dead. They were milling around on the other end of the dam which made Keystone Lake, almost as if they were guarding it, but still too disorganized to be a coherent unit. He watched the undead stumble around and thought about the options. It would be easy to go a different way, and the time lost wouldn’t matter, as he wasn’t in any hurry.

  But, still, the undead had managed a choke point? How would they have known to form as a group here, where there were no other living? The zombies were constantly moving, in search of new food or new converts. He had no idea what the undead really wanted, what they were up to, only that they seemed always hungry for human flesh. Not that he’d had the chance to study any of them up close, but he had yet to come across one of the undead that was not hungry or intent on killing the him. Carter was pretty sure a sated lion wouldn’t attack something else and kill it just to kill it,
although he nodded to himself that he didn’t know that for sure, either.

  “Let’s not risk it,” he said to the boy, motioning with his head to the east. “We’ll head that way and find another spot to cross.”

  At the intersection of routes 51 and 97, there was a massive traffic jam. Hundreds of cars were wedged against each other, many crashed into each other. Four-wheel drive vehicles were bogged down in the nearly dry river bed, the water dammed up miles behind them to create the lake they had just left. The cars had done the same thing to those in the city, forcing people onto their feet for the flight from the city. Most hadn’t made it: bodies were strewn everywhere, torn apart and stripped to the bones of flesh.

  “Keep your eyes moving, you know how the undead like to hide among the dead,” he said.

  “We gonna look for any supplies?”

  Carter shook his head. “No. Going in there would be foolish. If there’s any undead, you’d never be able to get out. We’ll make our way across the river bed here, then skirt alongside the west side and make our way around the north end of the city.

  “It’ll be getting toward dusk by the time we get up there, so keep your eyes open for any place looks like we can put up for the night.”

  They came across a small farm that had been an equestrian training school an hour before sunset. Carter had knocked on the door of the farmhouse, rang the bell, and peered through the windows before deciding it was safe to break in, which only took pushing the door open: the owners had left without locking the place, figuring they’d never come back. Or, maybe they figured they might lose the keys in the time they’d be gone and wouldn’t want to have to break in. He didn’t know. He’d locked the door to his house before leaving. And he’d moved everything he thought would be worth stealing to the attic, figuring staples-focused looters wouldn’t waste time on opportunity theft if there was nothing he valued laying around.

  He and the boy cleared all the rooms in the house one-by-one, he wanting to make sure there were no living or undead inside. Then they checked the stables, an auxiliary storage building and a car garage. They grabbed some hay and littered two stables with it, filled the feeding troughs and put the horses in for the night.

  “Now, we can eat,” Carter said.

  He rooted around the pantry at the bottom of a staircase connected to the kitchen, using a small flashlight to play across the shelves, which were stocked with canned and dry goods. Whoever had lived here left quickly to have abandoned so much food. But, then, everyone everywhere had either left quickly or been killed quickly. The news of the spread of the plague had gone from centering on the quarantine of Los Angeles the first month to the sudden appearance of it nearly everywhere a month or so later. After that, there was a national panic as everyone realized everywhere was unsafe and began to flee.

  He had told his wife that no place was safe, so it was just as well they stayed put and waited it out. Neither of his sons thought that was a good idea, but he reckoned that was because they both had small children to look after. He had had a heated argument with his older son, Carl, when he had shown up on their doorstep to tell him they were there to take him and Jolene with them to his hunting camp outside the Mark Twain National Forest.

  “Carl, it’s not anymore safe there than it is here,” he had said. “This plague is everywhere at the same time. Missouri’s no more safe than Oklahoma. You know that.”

  “But Dad, it’s out in the sticks, far from populated areas, so there will at least be less of them,” Carl had said. “And food is going to get scarce. People are going to end up killing each other, too. It won’t be just the zombies.”

  He had laughed at that. Zombies. “These aren’t the dead risen from the grave, son, they’re infected with something. Somebody will figure something out.”

  “Maybe, but nobody’s gonna figure anything out soon. You and mom have to come with us, now,” Carl had said. “Peter’s already on the way. We have to leave now, though. When it hits Oke City and Tulsa, you won’t be able to go anywhere on the roads. It’ll be pandemonium just like LA and Chicago and New York. We can all wait it out together.”

  He had shaken his head at that, the thought that he would abandon the family farm, now his after three generations. Not that he had ever farmed it. He and Jolene had a large garden behind the house, but the rest of the 500 acres he rented out. He owned a small auto repair shop in Hammon and his wife worked as a dental hygienist.

  “Listen, son, I know you mean well, but your mother and I are gonna stay right here and wait this thing out. We’ve got everything we need in the house to survive for close enough to a year,” Carter had said. “Don’t try to change my mind about this; your mother and I have already talked it through, and we’re staying put.”

  Carl’s shoulders had sagged and he stared at the ground. “Dad...”

  “I understand you’ve got to do what you think is right by your family, so you do that. Meet Peter at the hunting camp, tell him we’re fine, and we’ll be here when the trouble has passed.”

  His son had just nodded a few tiny head movements. “Okay, but will you at least do me one favor? Will you both at least keep your cell phones turned on and on your persons? Especially if you decide later to come? So we can keep in contact and know where you are?”

  Carter had reached out and placed his hand on his son’s shoulder and smiled. “Carl, you’ll know where we are, because we’ll be here,” he had said, “but we’ll make sure we keep the phones on.”

  But he had left the phone on the desk in his office at the shop when a horde of hundreds of undead had swarmed through Hammon late one morning a month earlier. He’d grabbed the Remington 870 he kept in the corner of the room and shot his way to his truck, and then had driven to the dental office where his wife worked, only to find it had been abandoned, the receptionist and a patient both eaten to death in the lobby.

  He’d driven home to find an empty house. He tried calling Jolene on her cell, but all the calls rang through to voicemail. He’d spent several weeks holed up in the house, waiting for Jolene to come home. He had called Jolene’s phone every day and left voicemail. And then he saw the beginning of a zombie horde making its way down the road toward his house from the window of the master bedroom and realized everything was much worse than he had thought it had been, and he would probably never see Jolene ever again. He spent five minutes throwing supplies into a backpack, grabbed his Winchester rifle and 9 millimeter Smith & Wesson pistol, and raced out to his truck, driving off furiously in front of the zombie phalanx.

  Away from Hammon.

  Away from his wife’s dental office.

  Away from the farm.

  He was almost to Texas when he had realized he was driving in the wrong direction. He had made his way over to Interstate 44 and began the long drive north until traffic jams around Fort Sill had forced him out of his truck and on foot. He had made his way on side roads until coming across the boy in Chickasha.

  Carter awoke to the sounds of several dirt bikes racing around in the early light of dawn. In the distance, the figures were shades of gray whirring up and down the main road adjoining the driveway. He was sure it was the same gang that had been inexplicably shadowing them for the past few days. Why?

  He slipped his feet into his cowboy boots and went downstairs, surprised to find the boy already awake, eating a bowl of corn flakes with condensed milk from a can.

  “They’re back.”

  Carter nodded. “Any idea why they’re following you?”

  The boy shook his head and ate a spoonful of cereal.

  “When you’re done with breakfast, come out to the barn and help me finish saddling up the horses,” Carter said.

  Outside the whine of the engines rose and fell over and over again. Carter wondered what the hell they were doing on the bikes just as much as he wondered why. He knew it was the boy they were after, but what could the boy mean to them? Why would several men be interested in a boy who was maybe eleven or thirteen
years old? And then he shuddered at the realization.

  “There’s no fucking way that can be the reason,” he muttered as he cinched the saddle straps under his horse.

  The whining of the bikes was getting closer, and it was only then that Carter noticed something peculiar about the rise and fall of the noise. It was as if the they were riding up and down the road in short bursts, getting incrementally closer instead of just riding up on the farm. They knew he was armed and that he would shoot, so it made sense they were keeping their distance. But they had to know he knew they were coming. He grabbed a pair of binoculars from the saddle bags and climbed the ladder to the loft, pushing through the loft doors and scanning for the riders on the road. They were, indeed, riding somewhat slowly back and forth. What for?

  He glanced down at the boy. Normal kid. He put the glasses back up to his face and scanned the road some more. His jaw dropped: the bikers were luring a horde of hundreds of zombies up the road, racing to and from the horde and acting as bait. He looked back down at the boy.

  “Hey, I need you to run back into the house real quick and get a backpack I left on the kitchen table. It’s got food in it we’ll need for the next couple of days of travel,” Carter said, making his way down from the loft. “Hurry. We’ve got maybe five minutes left here before we have to start riding hard.”

  The kid nodded and sprinted out of the barn. Carter took the kids messenger bag off the saddle horn and marveled at its weight. The kid had been carrying this for days across the state. He dropped it to the ground and zipped it open.

  It was filled with gold jewelry of every type imaginable: rings, bracelets, necklaces. He lifted a handful of it and stared at it in disbelief. Diamond engagement rings and gold earrings slipped from his hand. He dropped the jewelry into the bag and shook his head. The desires of the old world hadn’t ended, not yet, not completely.

  Outside, the whining of the dirt bikes grew closer.