by Evans, John
It was in just such a circumstance that a team of EMTs rushed to Eval Center 14 a man in his 40s, one of the local yokels deputized because they knew their way around a weapon.
The country people who survived the initial onslaught of the virus had come to live among their urban brethren in startling numbers. City-dwellers were amazed at how many strong but strange people lived on their fringes, largely unnoticed by national media all these years.
This was obviously just such a fellow. Inside his Sheriff’s Department uniform were the practical muscles and sun-blasted skin of a manual laborer. He would look more at home thumbing work from a Home Depot parking lot than writing speeding tickets.
That uniform was presently covered in blood and its wearer screaming in pain. The cause was a stomach torn apart by a hollowpoint bullet.
The paramedics rushed him into a curtained area. But they did not move with the crispness displayed on “ER.” There was a certainty in their halfhearted efforts, however technically adequate, that this could only end one way.
“Anesthesia!” the presiding doctor ordered. It was Lena Gladden.
An emergency nurse and a physician assistant fastened restraints to the patient’s arms and legs while he thrashed wildly and bellowed at the top of his lungs. This man certainly wasn’t going out with a whimper. He’d survived too much already to quit now.
Two burly orderlies took over for the EMTs in holding the deputy still, so the nurse could take his blood for a virus sample. He had already been tested on the scene and the chances of contagion on the way to the hospital were infinitesimal. However, were it necessary to euthanize post-haste, a claim that the patient was in fact v-positive made the paperwork much simpler.
The physician assistant struggled with his patient, who flailed in an attempt to push aside the P.A.’s hypodermic. It was filled with sedatives intended not so much to dull his pain as to restrain him. The deputy recognized this and didn’t care to entrust his life to these people.
He was right not to.
This hardened rural survivor indeed lost his battle for life when the needle found its mark in his thigh. Lena’s voice was calm and soothing in his ear. “We’re going to take the pain away. You’re all right now.”
The deputy, face aged beyond his years, glared feverishly at the nurse who injected him.
“Don’t you kill me while I’m out,” he commanded, already fading. His face contorted in desperate authority.
The nurse didn’t have much say in the matter. Once their patient lost consciousness, the E.R. staff cut his shirt off and went to work on the wound. They made a credible attempt at halting internal bleeding. But he already had blood in his airway. Lena began suctioning it out.
The deputy started to shudder, eyes fluttering.
“He’s going into shock!” Lena’s announcement was to a room that didn’t really care.
The flat line on the cardiac monitor set off an alarm. A crash cart was wheeled in.
“Asystole. Defibrilator!” Lena yelled.
The emergency nurse grabbed the paddles off the machine, dabbed gel on them. The others stepped aside instantly so her next exhortation was unneeded.
“Clear!”
The body convulsed as electricity surged through it.
Voskuil stepped into the room, glanced at the physician assistant and pointed at the IV he’d just changed the bags on.
“Epi? Atropine?”
The man nodded grimly.
“Clear!” The nurse discharged another shock with the paddles, but the deputy was unresponsive.
Voskuil joined Lena. “Call it. We don’t know how much time we have.”
Lena looked down at the inert chest before her. His slack features, the glaze of death in his eyes. She nodded.
The nurse attended to the official record. “Patient declared dead at 11:41 a.m.”
Lena took charge again. “Administer viral activation countermeasure, please.”
The physician assistant injected the dead man in the back of the head with a reinforced hypodermic.
“At 11:42 a.m., 20 ccs of hydrochloric acid administered.”
“Noted,” Lena said.
While Lena was cleaning up, Voskuil sidled close, his voice a conspirator’s whisper.
“Sorry to show you up,” he said. “But can we agree that it had to be done?”
“James,” she said, voice little more than a hiss, “I’ve done dozens of these. Do you mind if I try to make the last person they see on Earth seem even slightly kind to them?”
Voskuil let his voice carry a bit, feeling justifiably aggrieved. “Do you think, in that final moment, this guy would be more pissed at you for letting him die, or for seeming like a bitch?”
Disgusted, Lena left the room.
#
The rest of Lena’s day went similarly. She attended to a series of mini-crises, tough calls and catastrophes averted. When it was over, life and death moments were consigned to routine memory, and any associated feelings were suppressed in a deep well of emotions classified “undesirable.”
By the end of Lena’s shift, 10 gray trucks, their sides lettered “U.S. HEALTH AND SECURITY AGENCY,” had left her workplace.
Five of the trucks were loaded with the bodies of the dead. The bodies were processed at a county facility and rumors suggested many never got funerals or obituaries. Their grave marker, if one existed, was only numerical.
What they did get was a trip to a furnace for quick cremation. After all, corpses were slightly less dangerous than bombs.
The other five trucks, those freighted with living occupants, were bound for “the camps.”
#
By the conclusion of her own workday, Nic had fired her weapon 14 times, in three different encounters, and eliminated six feeders. She could be credited with saving several lives.
She did not euthanize a living person, as she had the day before, and for this she was profoundly grateful.
It was somewhat more action than a typical day, perhaps, but nowhere near the record books. Those marks, set in the war phase of the virus’ conquest of America, were untouchable. One hoped.
When Nic arrived home, she found Lena in a similar mood. “When was the last time we went out?” Lena asked.
Nic nodded at once. “Took the words right out of my mouth,” she said.
#
Hunkered down in the forward lookout, Shepherd felt the night breeze on his skin and with it wafted an odor he knew well. The sickly sweet, putrid stench of rotting flesh. The sons of bitches were out in numbers tonight and wouldn’t be sneaking up on anyone. Their stench preceded them.
He panned his binoculars over the forest, which painted it in luminous red shadings. The trees were densely packed but he noticed human silhouettes passing between trunks in deliberate but clumsy fashion. A LOT of human silhouettes.
He grabbed his walkie and hoped Kevan wasn’t piss-drunk yet. “Yo man! We got a fucking army on our hands here!”
It took a long time for anyone to respond, and it wasn’t Kevan. It was the distinctive twang of Ace, who was supposed to be asleep already.
“I’m comin’. Open the fuckin’ gun locker for me.”
Shepherd humped it along the trench, regretting the almost nightly bag of Cheetos he’d been putting away during his shifts. His belly bounced perceptibly as he ran.
Reaching the bunker out of breath, he went to the arsenal and keyed it open. Ace appeared, eternally angry eyes glaring at Shepherd through the greasy lenses of his specs. Ace pulled out the CAR-15 he favored, checked the breech and grabbed a belt of clips.
On impulse, Shepherd slipped on the propane backpack and ignited the pilot flame. If the camp was being overrun, he wanted to light up a few dozen shambling meat-puppets before they tore him apart. He was forbidden to use it, because of the fire risk, but he’d gladly face the music later if it meant they were still alive.
Moving back to the trench, he heard the lowing of the dead, like restless cattle in a
field. There were many voices in that chorus.
He clicked on the walkie again. “I’m serious here. They’re out in force tonight!”
Strangely enough, no one answered. Am I being jammed?!
The rumble of an engine drew his attention to the road. A low-slung vehicle, not really recognizable as one model or another, cruised up and stopped short of the defensive perimeter. As if the driver knew the road was mined. It had Humvee tires but more resembled a tank. In fact, due to the silvery steel plates covering its panels, it looked like a larger version of the Delorean used in that old ’80s movie. Back from the Future? At the moment, Shepherd couldn’t remember. He knew the star had later gotten sick with one of those nasty diseases that turned you into a spastic in a chair.
Something snapped in motion on the back of the vehicle – a catapult, he soon realized — and an object soared over the trenches to land on the roof of the farmhouse. Music began to scream out of it, plenty loud.
“All I do is win, win win, no matter what,” rapped D.J. Khaled at high volume. An ironic choice for an attack on an all-white militia.
A veritable horde washed over the armored vehicle and kept going, lurching, shambling and stumbling in the direction of the music. Explosions detonated one after another as the walking corpses stepped on mines and blew up. But this was a wave beyond the compound’s defensive capabilities.
Shepherd saw Riley, Malachi and Snacks Douglas run from the barracks and start blazing away at the invaders on the west. They didn’t know some were coming from the north, too. That was Shepherd’s responsibility but he was giving some thought to abandoning it.
His gaze flicked to the stone walls surrounding the farmhouse. The last line of defense. He might make it if he dropped the flamethrower and ran. But the feeders were converging on it from all sides. Could he get someone to open the gate for him before the mob hit? There were already figures there, clawing at the bricks.
Shepherd saw Ace go down, cursing, beneath a wave of slavering teeth and nails. Looked like that gun he loved so much had jammed.
Shepherd’s gaze flicked back to the north. His perimeter. The zombies from the forest were approaching the trench, a veritable wall in their own right. But this barrier was built from rotting flesh.
Some of it dry as kindling.
He thought about Gena and his dad, sleeping and vulnerable in the farmhouse. If he went out guns blazing it would be a good death. That was kind of a relief. He’d always feared that in the end he’d try to weasel out of the heroic last stand he and the other guys liked to imagine, but now the moment was here and he had a flamethrower.
“Fuck it,” Shepherd said, lifting the barrel and pulling the trigger. Pressurized gasoline sprayed from the nozzle more than a hundred feet, igniting as it left the barrel and saturating the advancing horde with incendiary liquid.
Shepherd’ weapon was devastating enough that he could actually submerge his fear for a moment and enjoy the row of human-shaped torches lighting up the night, and even entertain the hope that his sacrifice might reduce the invaders’ numbers enough to make a difference. Maybe he’d buy just enough time for his family to make an improbable getaway.
Shepherd strafed the mob, left and right. Clothes blazed, sagging flesh cooked, and drier, dessicated bodies turned to ash. Most of the feeders only made it a few steps after being immolated. Flaming skeletons collapsed twenty to thirty feet before reaching the trench.
“Who wants some barbeque!” he roared, giddy and alive. Then he saw a figure standing motionless amongst the zombies. Facing him. Too still, too poised to be one of them. And was that a rifle in his hands?
Shepherd didn’t have time to wonder why the zombies weren’t attacking the figure. In fact, he decided to take cover a moment too late. He heard the shot before he felt it but suddenly he was collapsing, flamethrower still blazing. High-caliber bullets had torn through his body in multiple places. Before he died, he realized that he was setting his own legs ablaze, but the agony only flared there for an instant before darkness came.
His last thought was that this guy was going to end them all.
CHAPTER SIX
THE LAST PICTURE SHOW
JAMES VOSKUIL CRAMMED his hands into the pockets of his cashmere overcoat and tried to ignore the night’s chill.
The urban movie-house had attracted a sparse crowd to its ticket window. The customers were on edge, many eyes roving warily up and down the street and over each other.
Voskuil found himself thinking about Lena Gladden. She was intensely attractive, but on this occasion his thoughts were not idle fantasies of storage closet assignations. (Those idylls frequently involved Lena tied up so that Voskuil could perform various unnecessary diagnostics on her.).
Rather, his mind turned to her behavior of late. Questionable health certificates. Her unseemly effort with the obvious euthanasia case. The woman had always seemed a little on the soft side, but had he failed to notice this kind of slip-up before? She was definitely putting his side business at risk. An audit of the facility was sure to find traces of his entrepreneurial efforts.
Voskuil felt owed a million dollars a year to do this job, so a little extra was the least he deserved.
A burst of laughter and coarse voices startled him and heralded the addition of three disheveled youths to the end of the line. He noted with suspicion their grimy faces and truculent air before turning back to the line.
Voskuil preferred not to think about things over which he had no control, which is why he’d come to the movies tonight. Two hours of distraction would unwind him to the point of being able to sleep. And he was willing to endure the hassles of a public theater if it broke his monotonous pattern of hospital to apartment and back.
Next in line was a bulky African American fellow with a balding head and glasses. He was accompanied by a pretty teenager whom Voskuil presumed was his daughter.
At the ticket window, a uniformed staffer stepped in front of the cashier to say, “May I see a recent health certification, sir?”
The fat guy instantly took offense. “What’s that supposed to mean? I’m perfectly healthy.”
“Federal regulations, sir.”
“You didn’t ask that lady for hers!”
Voskuil rolled his eyes as the debate continued.
“I’m sorry sir, but it’s theater policy to require a physical for patrons who may pose a health risk. If you would just step over to that line over there—”
“No, I will not step over there. You can’t treat me like some invalid because of a few extra pounds—”
Voskuil stepped forward, “Look, buddy, I’m a doctor — it takes five minutes to check your blood pressure and vitals—”
“Oh yeah? Our movie starts in five minutes!”
“So you miss some goddamned previews. Deal with it.”
“Ridiculous,” the man muttered, glowering at Voskuil before stepping into the second line. The girl, clearly mortified, hurried after him. Voskuil assumed their place and addressed the cashier.
“One for ‘The Predicament,’ please.”
“Five dollars.”
Voskuil paid up with a smirk. One nice thing about living in America A.V. — “after virus” — was that to get people into a theater, exhibition chains were forced to slash ticket prices. Fewer movies were being made and on smaller budgets, but cinema was once again an egalitarian experience.
As Voskuil approached the concessions counter, he passed the terminus of the second line. Behind a portable curtain, nurses examined overweight, elderly or possibly ill patrons. Stationed nearby were a pair of rent-a-cops. Impassive observers.
Voskuil bought some Junior Mints and a caffeine-free root beer. He didn’t want to be up all night — quite the opposite. This would be his pleasant coast from madness to unconsciousness, for all too few blissful hours.
When the lights dimmed, there were only 20 or 30 people spread throughout a cavernous theater. The place was built in the headiest days of the multiplex
, so it sported stadium-style seating and there was no such thing as a bad view.
Voskuil sat alone near the front and ate his Junior Mints.
Unbeknownst to him, the three teens whose boisterous eruption startled the ticket line were the closest patrons. They sat six rows back, at the front of an elevated second section.
Once the trailers started, the kid in the middle, his stringy blond hair cut short by an amateur hand, leaned over to his friend and whispered, “Pass that shit, man….”
Manuel shook his head. He hadn’t had his snort yet. Silverfish was eager, of course — they all were — but Manuel always went first. ‘Fish should know that.
Manuel made sure all eyes were on the screen and carefully unfolded a piece of blue construction paper. The white powder stood out nicely even in the projector’s pale light.
Manuel prepared a nice fat line and used a straw to snort it. He felt instant bliss.
Good cocaine was so easy to get these days. The market was flooded, so prices were way down. The U.S. government had basically waved the white flag in the war on drugs. Demand was too high (people needed to escape this hell on Earth however they could) and law enforcement resources were spread too thin to halt any remotely devious traffickers.
That was where Manuel came in. Sure, he got high on his own supply, but he had a nice business going selling for an L.A. based gang. Customers were still mostly yuppies but, as prices dipped, new markets emerged. Manuel believed that, at these prices, only the homeless had an excuse to smoke crack.
Though his eyes remained closed, Manuel felt Rico taking the coke. He let him, making a mental note to set his lieutenant straight. You didn’t just pull a man’s drugs from his hands. That shit wasn’t right.
As that first, 10-second blaze of purity faded, Manuel scowled at Rico. “Y’all are like my dog, beggin’ and shit….”
A few rows away, Voskuil watched the movie with contented disinterest. Onscreen, an attractive actor overplayed a petulant expression and said, “If I go with you on this road trip of yours, at every comfort stop I’m going to require sexual favors. And a shot of tequila. Deal?”