by Frank Tayell
Tom screamed, not in pain, but in tormented frustration. He reached down, grabbed the sidearm from the officer’s belt, aimed, and fired. The bullet smashed through the monster’s thigh. He fell. He didn’t scream. On one working arm and leg, he pushed and clawed his way closer.
“Stop!” Tom yelled. “Stop! You have to stop!”
Somehow, Tom knew the man couldn’t hear him, not anymore. He fired again, two shots, straight at the man’s chest. The force of the impact flattened the man against the road, but still he didn’t stop. A bubbling snarl hissed from blood-flecked lips.
Tom fired again, this time into his head. Finally, the man was still. Except, he wasn’t a man, not any more. It was a—
“No.” He wouldn’t even think the word. It was adrenaline, that was it, that was what had kept his assailant moving. He had a vague memory of a late night conversation with the VP, soon after Max had asked the retired general to join him on the ticket. Stopping power was a myth, the general had said. People could be shot in the chest and still keep going. They could be shot in the head, only for bullets to ricochet off the skull. Unless you were using a grenade launcher, stopping power was a myth. It had been an odd conversation, but then the vice president was an odd man. Tom stared down at the corpse, trying to convince himself that his two shots to the chest had missed the vital organs. He didn’t believe it.
There was a groan from behind him, and a weak, solitary, “help.”
The cop. He couldn’t leave her out in the road, not now. He put one arm under her shoulders, lifting her up. Now what? The coffee shop. He staggered over.
“Let her in!” he yelled at the three occupants. They stared back, unblinking, their faces pale with shock.
“Let her in!” he repeated, before lowering the woman so that she was leaning against the door. He held up the gun. “You see this? You see it?” He waited until their eyes focused on the sidearm. “You’ll need it,” he said, and slid it back into the officer’s holster. “Let her in. Please.”
The barista nodded and reached for the bolts. Tom took that as his cue to leave. He jogged along the sidewalk, barely registering the shop windows, often crowded with people who’d taken shelter from this… what? A hallucinogen that turned people into rabid, cannibalistic monsters that could only be stopped by a bullet in the brain? There was a word for that. A word from fiction, yet here they were, in the streets of New York. He needed to find what had caused this, and how far it had spread. He could do that in the apartment in Harlem. Whatever answers he found, however, wouldn’t change the reality of what he was facing; zombies.
Chapter 2 - Zombies
Harlem, New York
Tom closed the door to his apartment, threw the deadbolt, added the chain, and felt no safer. Zombies. It was impossible, but during the journey back he’d been unable to think of anything more plausible. Speculation was useless. He needed facts!
As he pulled out the tablet, he caught sight of his boots. They were covered in blood. So was everything he wore. Infected, contaminated blood. Hurriedly, he stripped, leaving his clothes in a heap by the door. He peered at his flesh, looking for cuts and scratches. There were a few bruises, but no abrasions. What could he have done if he’d found any? Nothing. He collapsed onto the bed, giving in to despair.
It wasn’t quite an efficiency apartment; there was a folding plastic divider that could be drawn across to separate the sleeping area from the living space. To be more accurate, it separated the bed from the desk. The entire room was barely sixteen feet across, with an alcove-kitchen and a bathroom that wasn’t much bigger. It was anonymous, and he’d claimed a bad divorce was the reason for his sudden need for new accommodation. The landlord hadn’t cared about anything other than the three months rent, paid in advance. Tom had haggled a little, for form’s sake, but knew the place wasn’t worth half what he’d paid.
What he’d done began to register. Not the flight, nor the fight in which he’d killed a man, but his actions on entering the apartment. He sat up and stared at his hands again. What would it matter if there were cuts? Infected blood was, like the name he’d given to the creatures, a concept from the movies.
Wanting to fill the room with noise to drown out the fearful voices in his head, he stood, walked over to the ancient television, picked up the remote, and pressed the button. Nothing happened. As he’d not planned on coming back to the apartment, he’d unplugged the set. Powered on, the screen showed the news. He collapsed on the bed once more. Slowly the words of the anchor cut through the veil of shock.
“We don’t know what it is,” the anchor said. “People are attacking each other—”
“Biting. They’re biting people. Eating them,” a male voice, off-screen, interrupted.
“No, we don’t know that, and it’s criminal to speculate,” the anchor said, displaying more restraint than was usual from the news media. Tom sat up, watching more closely.
“The facts are… the facts are…” The anchor faltered. She glanced to one side of the screen. “Okay, yes, people are attacking one another. Violently, and with hands and teeth. The people doing this are ordinary people. There are… they’re just rumors. We don’t have any confirmation for any of this. It’s phone footage recorded in the street. Other stations are saying that this was a terrorist attack. We don’t know, we just don’t! And we shouldn’t say that until we do.”
Tom switched to a different channel. The woman’s rationality would be comforting if the argument with someone off-screen wasn’t preventing her reporting what was actually going on.
“Terrorists have attacked downtown Manhattan,” the anchor of the next station said. Sweat had dissolved the gel keeping his comb-over in place. Lank strands hung limply across the man’s left eye, but he spoke with the same absolute certainty with which he’d reported every story for the last decade. “They’ve deployed a biological agent of unknown origin. People who have been exposed collapse, seemingly dead, then rise again to attack others. Obviously this is a neurological agent of some kind, but…”
But the man was guessing. He knew no more than what Tom could deduce from all he’d witnessed. In the corner of the screen, behind the man, was footage taken from… a helicopter? Yes. It was an aerial shot of a mall. From the field visible in the distance, it wasn’t in Manhattan. Whatever this was, either it hadn’t started on the island, or it had already spread to the mainland.
Next to the TV was the cheap laptop he’d brought from a pawnshop two blocks away. Like the computer in the construction site, he’d left this one here in case Powell somehow found where he’d been staying.
“Powell.” It seemed an age since that man was his most pressing concern. He’d thought it highly improbable that the cabal would discover the apartment. On the other hand, zombies were more than just improbable. He glanced out the narrow window. Smoke rose above the towering buildings. He couldn’t concern himself with Powell, not now.
He powered the laptop on and opened a browser. An error message came up. There was no network connection. Of course there wasn’t. He walked over to the pile of clothes and gingerly retrieved the tablet and sat-phone. He opened the window, propping the sat-phone outside where it could find a signal. The blast of cold air reminded him he was naked. Clothes could wait. He had to know.
He began with the traffic cameras, watching people stumbling through intersections, slamming fists on car windows as they fled in every direction. No matter which direction they chose, there were always these… these…
“Zombies,” he said aloud. “Zombies.” He felt a little better until he realized that it wasn’t true. That wasn’t what they were. With the name came a definition based on fiction. He needed facts. He found the depressing first of those in a video from Grand Central Station, recorded nearly an hour before.
A group of twenty police officers had formed two lines around the front entrance. They stood ten to either side of the doors, the front rank kneeling, the other standing, both ranks firing into the darkened t
icket hall. The firing stopped. A cop waved her arms. A man and two children ran through the gap between the officers. The firing resumed. It was careful, measured, methodical. There was no sound, but Tom could imagine them calling out targets to one another. It was reassuring. He began to relax. For all the horror he’d witnessed, this crisis could be controlled.
“There are plans,” he murmured, thinking back to the records he’d accessed, years before. “What was it called? Operation Green Garden.” Yes, that was it. A national strategy to deal with a pandemic. They’d even run a simulation that assumed the outbreak started in New York. They only needed to dust those off, and this could all be managed.
That momentary confidence vanished as he glanced at the television and saw that footage of a mall still playing to the left of the anchor’s head. Again seeking reassurance, he returned his attention to the laptop. The officers had stopped shooting. Their arms were waving another unseen civilian toward safety. No one appeared. An officer raised her gun. She fired. Another did the same, and then the barrage recommenced. Something was wrong. Very wrong. Not all the officers were firing. Two had drawn their nightsticks. One in a rear rank was slowly backing away. Another lowered his weapon. They were running out of ammunition.
A zombie, its legs missing below the knees, crawled into frame. Bullets thudded into its arms and shoulders. It twitched, but continued crawling, leaving a gory trail, until a shot blew its head apart. Tom’s attention had been on that creature. So, it seemed, had that of the officers. Three more zombies lurched into view. All were still on their feet. The volley that met them was ragged, aimed at the center mass. The zombies staggered back, and then kept on, another four appearing in the edge of the frame. There was a final, desultory fusillade, and the thin line broke. Three officers ran forward, nightsticks raised, and Tom turned the screen off. He didn’t want to know how that had ended.
“It’s not a hoax. It’s not a dream. There are zombies in New York.” And slowly, he was adjusting to this new reality. New York? The footage on the TV suggested they were already far beyond Manhattan.
He hunched over the laptop, his fingers working furiously. They needed information. Not just him, but everyone. Proper, reliable information on which solid deductions could be based. He went online and began altering the parameters of an application he’d commissioned during the campaign. The programmer had thought he was writing software that would sift the internet to find, file, and copy to the cloud any mention of buzzwords Max used during specific speeches. The real purpose was so that Tom could search out disinformation created by the conspirators. He changed the parameters once more, this time setting it to search out ‘zombies’, ‘virus’, ‘outbreak’ and, after a brief hesitation, ‘undead’. But were they? Was he sure that woman who’d collapsed in the junction had been dead? All he could say was that he’d found no pulse. There was the legless zombie in that video from Grand Central, but again, that wasn’t proof.
“A head shot kills them. That’s all I know,” he murmured.
But he needed to know more. Where had they come from? How had they been created? Was it a virus? The ticker on the television still claimed this was a terrorist attack, but there was no clue as to who was responsible.
An icy gust came through the open window. He shivered and realized that he was still naked. A tepid shower did nothing for his concentration. Having not planned to come back to the apartment, he’d thrown out the soap, toothpaste, and the towel. He dripped his way back into the main room.
Laundry was more time-consuming than buying new clothes, and he’d had no time to spare for either in the last few weeks. All that was in the wardrobe were a pair of suits and some new shirts. He’d left them there so Powell would assume those were the type of clothes he’d been wearing during his escape. He used a shirt to dry himself. Donning a suit, he couldn’t imagine himself more ill-prepared for what lay ahead.
“As to what that is, start with how and where this all began.”
People talked about zombies a lot. It took twenty minutes before he found the point where the references weren’t to the episode of that television show broadcast the previous night. He began refining the parameters for the algorithm, dumping the useless information. Slowly, a picture emerged. It had begun in Manhattan that morning. Precisely when, he was uncertain, but it had reached the streets, and social media, between ten and eleven a.m. Twenty-eight people had been…
“Infected? Contaminated? Twenty-eight people were contaminated in four separate incidents in downtown Manhattan. Okay. So what can I tell about the people who infected them? Is that…?” He peered at the photograph on the screen. “Yeah, those are hospital scrubs.” He glanced at the TV. If this had begun in a hospital, surely that would be easy to confirm. The television station was still broadcasting vague hints about terrorism to a background of the same shaky camera footage.
“Okay. It began in a hospital. So patient zero is someone who was sick. Maybe someone who came in on a plane? No. Don’t guess. Check that.” How? He’d have to access the air traffic control logs. That would take time. He paused with his hands above the keyboard. Everything would take time, and he wasn’t sure how much of that he had.
“Find out where they are, how far they’ve gotten.” Yes, that was more important. Then he could plan his escape. The twenty-eight took the infection in almost every direction, but the story was the same. The infected person staggered through the streets, onto public transport, or sometimes into a car. Inevitably, they collapsed. Others would come to their aid. The person turned. A zombie came back and attacked those dutiful Samaritans, and so the virus spread.
“There’s no consistency,” he realized. Some turned almost immediately. For others, it took far longer. One woman made it to Grand Central. Another all the way off Manhattan, to a mall north of the city. That was the footage he’d seen on the TV, a recording from a news chopper that was being shared, unedited, on thousands of accounts.
He glanced at the clock. It was already half past four. What was he doing? Wasting time. He’d learned nothing that he couldn’t have guessed. He forced his hands off the keyboard, stood, and went into the kitchen. He opened the empty cupboards, knowing he’d find nothing there. Like the damp towels and dirty clothes, he’d thrown out anything that might start to smell, and so have the landlord come and investigate. And he’d done all of that because of Powell. The conspiracy.
“Is it connected?” That was the real question, the one he’d been avoiding thinking about because the answer terrified him.
This morning, he’d sent a warning about the plans for Archangel and Prometheus to people across the world. Minutes later, the zombies started attacking people.
“Minutes. It happened too soon. Even if one of the recipients was a conspirator, they couldn’t have organized a viral outbreak that quickly.”
Unless they’d been planning it all along. Powell was in New York, after all. Perhaps he was here to do more than search for Tom. Even so, releasing this type of virus didn’t fit with what he knew of the conspirators. In fact, it went against everything he’d discovered about Project Archangel.
Archangel was a super-vaccine designed to combat some of the most deadly viruses on the planet, and which, it was hoped, could be adapted to respond to any new virus in a matter of months. The project had its roots in the Cold War, created at a time when there was a very real threat of biological attack from the Soviet Union. The early trials were a disaster, a financial sinkhole that could only be justified by that era’s fanatical paranoia. When the Iron Curtain was pulled back, Archangel was mothballed. It wasn’t forgotten.
The original research had taken place in Britain. It was there that an ambitious politician secretly resurrected the plans. He’d turned to his ideological brethren in the United States for support, and thus the conspiracy was born.
When Tom first discovered it, he’d found the concept of politicians plotting to end disease intriguing. He’d only continued monitoring it because one
of those involved was the man he held responsible for the deaths of his family. Tom had dedicated his life to murderous revenge. Exposing this scheme would allow him to destroy the politician’s reputation before he took the man’s life.
Then he discovered the other part of the plan, the reason these self-centered, power-obsessed politicians were acting in an uncommonly altruistic fashion. The vaccine was nearing completion. There had been some limited trials that showed it worked, at least in theory. A demonstration had been planned. Representatives of the world’s major governments had been summoned to New York. This was why Tom had scheduled the release of that email, and why he’d broken into the U.N.
He knew the conspirators had agents in foreign governments, but he didn’t know how high up they were. What he did know was that after the demonstration, after proof had been given that the vaccine worked, the ultimatum would be issued. The vaccine would be made available to those countries that adopted policies ‘friendly’ to the West. Those that didn’t would be destroyed.
That part of the plan was called Prometheus. It was a distributed, tactical nuclear strike against technological infrastructure. Population centers would be left standing so that hungry millions would be left without power, water, communications, and food. That was the insanity of the cabal. The ultimate in join us or die. And the worst part was that this plan bypassed the usual command-and-control protocols. It was instituted by presidential order under a previous incumbent. Having it rescinded was one of the reasons Tom had wanted to get Max elected.
It was an insane plan, an utter nightmare that he wouldn’t have believed if he’d not seen the bodies. Yet, however the conspirators might describe their motives, they were the megalomaniacal fantasies of old men who needed history to remember them as saviors. Unleashing zombies on the streets of New York went against everything he’d learned of them.