Cities of the Dead: Stories From The Zombie Apocalypse

by Young, William

  “I’ll check it out.”

  He stood playing the beam from his flashlight across the wreckage, his shotgun held idly in his left hand. He shook his head in disbelief: the shed was little more than a year old. What the hell had just happened?

  Elena walked up behind him and put her hand on the back of his left shoulder, patting him ever-so-gently. Hristo turned and rolled his eyes. Elena smiled.

  “What happened?” Elena asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said, handing his wife his shotgun and stepping onto one of the fallen walls, moving the beam back-and-forth through the rubble. “Maybe an airliner dropped its toilet blue ice and it hit the shed?”

  “Don’t touch anything then,” Elena said. “You don’t want to get that filth all over you.”

  “I don’t see any filth, so it must have been something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “Maybe a micro-downburst?”

  He walked away from the ruined structure and took the weapon out of his wife’s hands and nodded toward the house. “Did it wake the kids?”

  “Just for a minute and I told them to go back to bed.”

  “Good. Let’s do the same. I’ll check it out in the morning before I go to work.”

  The next morning, Hristo Gruev walked into his back yard with a cup of coffee and looked on the ruination in the light of day. His first thought was that maybe it could be rebuilt from the existing pieces, but as he looked closer, most of the walls had suffered severe cracking and most of the studs were broken. On the plus side, most of the tools and equipment seemed undamaged.

  And then he saw it: a small, fist-sized rock in a divot on the dirt floor. He crouched down and looked at it. It was a deep gray color with hundreds of pockmarks and small pimples, shaped almost like a seed attached to a wing, like a Maple tree seed. He looked up into the sky and laughed: his shed had been destroyed by a meteorite. He wondered if it was worth money and picked it up, amazed at the weight of the thing in the ball portion. He guessed maybe two or three kilos in all, a solid piece of rock or metal. Hristo finished his coffee and went back into the house.

  “Well, I’m off to work, honey,” Hristo said, putting the meteorite down on a bookshelf in the living room. “We were hit by a meteorite, I think. It would be a a lot cooler if it hadn’t destroyed the shed, though.”

  At work, he spent time online researching meteors, meteoroids, and meteorites, the last of which apparently impacted the planet hundreds of times a year, mostly without anyone noticing. During this research, he came across numerous sites detailing the asteroid Apophis, which apparently passed close to the Earth on a regular basis and had the potential to devastate a large area of the planet if it struck. He was surprised to find out that scientists across the globe had feared it would strike in 2004 and would be in position to hit again by 2036.

  He had had no idea the Earth was in such peril from the universe.

  He swiveled his chair and turned to Abel, who was staring at a chart on his computer screen and puffing furiously on an eCig.

  “Have you ever heard of an asteroid named Apophis?” Hristo asked.

  Abel paused and shook his head. “I didn’t know asteroids had names. I thought they had numbers or letters or some combination of the two.”

  Hristo glanced at his monitor. “Well, sure, it’s also known as 99942.”

  Abel swung his chair quickly around and dropped his eCig into his lap, exhaled a cloud of water vapor, and brightened. “Nine-nine-nine-four-two? Of course I’ve heard of it! Everyone is talking about it.”

  “Jackass.”

  Abel smiled. “Why should I know about it?”

  “Apparently the thing comes close enough to the Earth every couple of decades that scientists are worried it could hit the planet.”

  “Can it destroy the planet?”

  “No, but it can kill a significant part of it.”

  “Like what? Tunguska?”

  “Bigger than that.”

  “But not like the one that killed the dinosaurs?”

  “No, a lot smaller than that.”

  Abel shrugged. “Well, unless the Americans are going to do something about it, there’s no real point in worrying about it. It’s a rock in outer space.”

  “I’m not worried, it’s just that a meteorite struck the shed in my house last night,” Hristo said. “Knocked the damn thing down. I only built it just last year.”

  Abel laughed. “A meteorite hit your shed last night?”

  Hristo nodded.

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah, seriously.”

  “And it destroyed your shed?”

  “Yup.”

  Abel drummed his fingers on his lap, put his eCig in his mouth and puffed a few clouds of vapor. He shrugged. “Are you supposed to report it to the authorities?”

  “Probably only if it were made out of gold so they could tax it.”

  Abel laughed.

  “But this one is made out of something else. Iron or rock or something, I don’t know,” Hristo said.

  “I don’t know what to tell you, but I’ve got to get back to this report.”

  After dinner, Hristo took the meteorite from the shelf in the living room and into the home office. He set it down on the desk, examining it with a magnifying glass he’d found in a science kit his older son had gotten for his most recent birthday. He couldn’t figure anything out about it and wasn’t sure if there was anything for him to discover. It looked like a tree seed made out of a weird kind of rock.

  There was a light knock on the door jamb and Hristo looked up to see his son Bogdan.

  “When do we start packing? I feel like I should start now so I don’t forget anything,” Bogdan said.

  Hristo smiled.

  “You’re not going to forget anything. Your Mom has a detailed list of everything everybody needs to take. She’s been working on it for the last two months, so I’m pretty sure it’s more-than-complete,” he said. “We’ve still got a couple of days to go before we worry about that, anyway. But you might want to start thinking about what you’re going to take on the plane to keep you busy. It’s a long flight to Los Angeles.”

  “We’ll be able to get off the plane, won’t we?”

  Hristo nodded. “I think there are short layovers in Italy and New York City, but we won’t be able to see anything but the inside of the airport in either of them, so you’ll need something to read or a video game to play.”

  “I can’t believe you’re taking us to America. I don’t think I’ll believe it until I actually see Uncle Gavril and Aunt Sara.”

  Hristo laughed. “Really, that’s first on your mind, not the whole Disneyland trip?”

  Bogdan screwed up his face for a moment in embarrassment: caught. “Well, sure, Dad, but I think Branimir is more excited about that. I just really want to see if America looks like it does in the movies, if everything is really more modern than everything here.”

  Hristo rolled his eyes. “There’s plenty of old stuff there, too, Bogdan. It’s been lived in for hundreds of years.”

  “Can I look at the meteorite?”

  Hristo nodded and handed the magnifying glass to Bogdan. After a minute, his son put it down and shrugged. “I thought it would be a lot cooler than this, since it came from outer space.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s just a rock like any other rock. Apparently, the galaxy is full of them.”

  Hristo tossed the meteorite up into the air as hard as he could and watched as it fell back to earth, making one quick spin around before landing with a thud in the grass. He had no idea how much force a falling object had on impact. He had searched online and found numerous sites with calculators to determine the kinetic energy released by a falling object, but not being a science or math person, he had been unable to figure out why the meteorite had only destroyed his shed and not the entire town. It didn’t seem heavy enough based on his throwing it up, but he could only throw it up twenty feet, and it had fallen from outer s
pace.

  He threw it up again. It landed with another thud, but for a moment he thought he saw a brief flash of yellow - dust? powder? light? - when it landed on the ground next to him. He picked it up and looked at it, noticing a tiny sand-crystal-sized spot of yellow on its surface. He brought it close to his face and looked at it and then sneezed so forcefully he dropped the meteorite. He sneezed again and stood up. And sneezed again.

  Hristo shook his head and took several deep breaths. He was lightheaded. The inside of his sinuses tickled intensely, and the back of his throat quickly followed suit. He stood in the back yard and rubbed his tongue against the back of his mouth, trying to scratch the itch to no avail. His eyes watered. Hayfever? He’d never experienced it. He sneezed several more times in rapid succession, deep, full-body explosions that weakened him and made his eyesight wonky.

  After a minute he stopped sneezing, but the itching in his nose and throat persisted. He picked up the meteorite and put it on a table on the back patio, thought better of it, and put it back where he had originally found it, in the splintered shed.

  Inside the house, he searched through the medicine chest in the bathroom looking for antihistamine tablets. None of them were allergic to anything, so he knew it was a long-shot to find anything.

  “Honey, do we have any allergy medicines in the house?”

  Elena appeared in the doorframe. “What for?”

  Hristo turned to look at her, “I’ve got some sort of thing going on in my head. Sneezing, itchy throat, watery eyes. I think it’s hayfever.”

  “It’s December, people get hay fever in the spring and summer,” Elena said, closing the distance between them and looking at his blue eyes. “Your eyes are completely bloodshot.”

  “They feel weird. Kind of watery with a little itchy, too.”

  “I’ve got drops,” Elena said. “Did you get dust or something blown in your face.”

  Hristo nodded lamely. “I guess. I was in the backyard near the shed.”

  He spent the next two hours on the couch in the living room with his boys, watching them argue-cooperate their way through a video game, sometimes having to mediate their disagreements, and sometimes having to tell them how to solve the level. He couldn’t remember if he and his brother had been like that as kids, switching from best friends to bitter enemies over and over again during the course of a day. Gavril’s three kids were the same way. Hristo’s father said that’s exactly how Hristo and Gavril had been as kids. Hristo just assumed that was how kids were, and it was the most unsatsifying aspect of being a parent: you couldn’t train your children to always be on the same side.

  How true was that? Gavril had moved to America over the objections of their father after writing some software that had gained notice, and he had done well, married an American girl, and had - as he called them - American kids. The last twelve Christmases had been spent without Gavril; this one would be spent without their dad: their dad didn’t want to go to Los Angeles for Christmas, he wanted Gavril and his family to come back home so Gavril’s kids could see their heritage, their homeland. So while everyone was planning on twelve days in sunny southern California, their father was going to stay home and endure the cold. Not even Disneyland swayed him.

  Hristo woke up just before noon the next day, thirteen hours of sleep under his belt, and still he felt dead tired. But his body couldn’t take laying down any longer, so he had risen from the bed, showered and made his way to the kitchen. His head hurt, but not like a headache, and he felt a vague sense of nausea, but not enough to curb his desire to eat something.

  “You look pale, honey, do you feel okay?” Elena said as he entered the kitchen.

  He shook his head. “I feel weird.”

  “Maybe you should lay down and take it easy.”

  He shrugged. “I’ve been laying down since we went to bed. I’m tired of that. I feel like doing something.”

  “Maybe you could fix the shed,” Elena said and smiled.

  “That can wait. I need some bacon or sausage or something meaty. I’m starving.”

  The week had not gone well for Hristo. He had fluctuated between feeling better than he’d ever felt, to suddenly ill. At night, he dreamed of hunting deer and eating their raw meat. He found himself in the backyard one night, clad only in his pajamas, stumbling around as if he were drunk. He had no idea how he had gotten there or how much longer he would have lived exposed to the frigid night. He hadn’t felt cold, though.

  The day before their departure day had been awkward: he’d spent the entire day eating meat and then barfed it all out before bedtime. Afterward, he sat on the floor of the bathroom and felt dizzy, the world spinning around him as if he were epically drunk. He felt bone tired, as if he could sleep for days.

  “You should see the doctor,” Elena said.

  “I’m fine. It’s a stomach thing.”

  “Hristo, you’ve been having symptoms of something all week.”

  “They come and go, though, so it’s not a something they can do anything about,” Hristo said, wiping sweat from his forehead onto the palm of his hand.

  “I was looking online, maybe you were poisoned?”

  Hristo smiled. “Poisoned? Who would poison me? You make all the food I eat, so if you were poisoning me, I don’t think you’d tell me to go to the doctor to find out if someone was poisoning me.”

  When they boarded the plane for America on Wednesday, Hristo felt fine. He’d awoken from a series of nightmares and eaten nearly a pound of breakfast sausages and several fried eggs, and felt better. But after the plane had been in the air, he’d started to feel wrong. There had been a layover in Rome and he’d barfed the entire breakfast up in a stall in the terminal bathroom, and had been startled to see blood in his vomit. What was wrong with him?

  During the trip over the Atlantic, he’d slept fitfully, sweating profusely and dreaming of hunting creatures he’d never seen before. He could almost taste the brains of the creatures he hunted.

  Brains? He’d never eaten a brain of anything in his entire life.

  “Hristo, wake up, we’re in America,” Elena said, jostling him awake.

  “What?”

  “We’re in America. We’ve got to change planes. Wake up.”

  “I need water.”

  “After we get off the plane. Come on.”

  He took her hand and the look on her face morphed into sudden concern. She put her hand on his forehead. “You’re burning up.”

  She bought a bottle of aspirin in a convenience store in the airport and made him take two with some water, telling him it would help to break the fever. He could feel the water and pills as they entered his stomach, a weird rush of cold that turned his stomach and made him feel every square-centimeter of its interior surface, a sensation he’d never had before. His first thought was that he wasn’t going to be able to keep the water and pills down because nausea quickly settled in, twisting his stomach. He could feel sweat bead up on his face on his upper lip and chin, could feel droplets of it in his hair as they moved down under the force of gravity.

  He looked over at his sons in the waiting area of the gate, each playing on PlayStation Vita handheld gaming consoles, the centerpiece present for each the previous Christmas. This past year had been the most successful of his career as a software engineer, and he’d been glad that he’d taken the chance and jumped to the start-up firm in Sofia rather than remaining with the information technology division of the hospital. The next year would be even better and the future looked bright. This trip to California to visit his brother was sort of an advance on his future earnings and a carrot on a stick to lure him to America where he might find a better software company, yet.

  For the first time in his life, he felt that he was finally in control of his destiny.

  He didn’t realize he had fallen asleep on a chair in the waiting area until Elena woke him. “It’s time to get back on the plane, honey.”

  Hristo nodded. He felt awful. Elena touched
his forehead.

  “Your fever’s come down. You actually feel colder than you should.”

  “I feel worse than I should. We’re on vacation and I’m coming down with a bug. I have a feeling I’m going to find out how good this world renowned American medical system is,” he said and smiled.

  Shortly after the non-stop flight to Los Angeles had taken to the air, things changed dramatically for Hristo. He dozed fitfully, his body a furnace again, the sweat streaming off of him. He kept losing his color vision. He thought he could see sounds. And he was sure his bones were vibrating inside his body. He looked around the plane and everyone looked the same to him for long periods: he could see differences in size and sex, but they all appeared in his mind as generic mannequins. Something made him wonder about how he would identify the weak in the herd.

  “Are you alright?” Elena asked, leaning in close to him and grasping his forearm with both her hands, her face a mixture of concern and panic.

  He shook his head, slowly. “I have to go to the restroom.”

  He stood up and paused, the interior of the plane losing its tubular shape, dizziness set in quickly and he swooned before suddenly vomiting a stream of blood and mucus over the passengers near him. He turned to make his way out of his seat, stumbled, reeled, took a step, grabbed the upright seat back and felt the fabric beneath his fingertips. He heard screams. He saw no colors. He gulped air.

  “Hristo!”

  A female voice.

  The world tilted and spun around him and he felt hands on his body, pulling him back. Inside his body, he could feel every cell twitching, changing from ones to zeros. His teeth hurt. He couldn’t keep his head up, sleep bore down on him and crushed him into an atom and exploded. For a moment, he saw Elena coming after him down a path through a sea of chairs, her face pale with emotion. He smiled at her before shuddering violently and going slack in the arms of those who had grabbed him.