Genesis Virus

by Pinto, Daniel

  Genesis Virus

  Daniel Pinto

  Copyright © 2020 Daniel Pinto

  Cover design by Daniel Pinto

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address the publisher.

  Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Names, characters, and places are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Excerpt from “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost ©1969

  ISBN: 978-1-73446-990-5 (E-Book)

  ISBN: 978-1-7344699-1-2 (Paperback)

  First printing edition 2020.

  For my Sister

  Prologue

  At the crossroads of a dirt street and lonely boulevard, a tattered American flag flaps in the wind, staked through a zombie’s eye. Up and down the two streets, rows of zombies feast on human carcasses hanging from bent telephone poles. Convex craters as large as homes in the barren fields are vast like chicken pox on a cherub’s face. A chilling sunrise reveals the cars and skeletons overflowing the holes.

  Miles of barbwire are wrapped and bound around an army of tree trunks protecting the forest. Scattered about within the barbwire, dozens of the dead are propped up with thick spears of wood; exiting their mouths and they look as if they’re screaming towards the heavens in agony. Inside the spears, is a ring of bags filled with arms pushing against the cloth about to escape. Eyeless heads on strings dangle at eye level. Stakes as tall as trees have arms and legs for branches. On and on, the rings of death go.

  Men and women huddle together for warmth in the epicenter of the never-ending forest. The wind against their nude skin speeds up their shivering. Chins rest on strangers’ shoulders. This is their new home, could be a negative utopia or salvation. They were rescued or captured a few days ago depending on who you ask. Ages and natures range within the group, but all are of the same mind in this moment. Nobody has to say a word.

  Stuffed into a truck like livestock and brought to an unknown fate. At least cattle are well fed and protected before slaughtered. Some people cry at the thought of being cattle for just one day. Only adults are present. Where have all the children gone? A dense fog immerses the area, hiding the forest. Fear of the outside world keeps them stationary for all intended purposes and to the possible bitter end.

  Within the inner sanctum and clearing area, is a man casually slicing an apple. “All this death protects me and helps me sleep at night. Some of you can have this too or become part of this tapestry of our security.” He scratches his razor burns on his freshly shaved face like a man about to start the day anew. Sheep with a hundred pounds of hair bah and bleat and congregate behind the man in their pen fenced with hay baling wire. The leader has a broad back filled with hundreds of tiny black crosses, almost looks like he’s wearing a black shirt. Is it a memorial or a blacklist? Nobody stares too long at it. His hair is brown twisted dreadlocks held together by a rubberband choking a ponytail, his countenance naturally sanguine with no malice. The topless man speaks with a deep baritone voice that beckons respect in any time-period. “Your pilgrimage is at a end,” he throws on a long sleeve shirt, but does not button it. On his waist is a belt lined with bullets, a couple of speed loaders, and two silver revolvers in holsters. Another Goliath of a man carrying a dead body on each shoulder, drops both by the Cowboy’s feet, grunts through his nose like a bull and stares down the group of people, daring them to run.

  The Cowboy leader takes a syringe and jams it into the zombie’s heart. “We are the Second Coming.” All the eyes in the crowd are on the syringe as it fills with dark blood. The cowboy taps his inner elbow like a junkie, takes a long breath, and injects himself with the warm blood. Immediately, all the veins in his arm pulsate and pop through the skin. He makes unintelligible sounds as if speaking in tongues to his Creator. He falls to his knees and scratches through the dirt. Varicose veins appear and creep from his stout neck up to his bulging face. Gazing upwards, his hands are now digging into the hearts of the deceased at his feet, he experiences epileptic shakes, causing the crowd to recoil with each thrust forward. Nobody runs and moves from their spot as if sequestered by an invisible rope. No weapons are pointed at the people.

  The sun shines down through the opening of the forest and spotlights the Cowboy. His face looks like he’s being choked, he looks down and releases a deep breath and the blackish veins in his face recede into oblivion.

  “Who’s next?”

  Chapter One

  1

  In the beginning God created humans to be social creatures; this was the downfall of civilization. Humanity’s time in the sun is over and the rest of us purely exist in the darkness now. There are no longer winners simply survivors. The world is in its last act waiting for it be to put out of its misery as humans are regressing to ghosts in shells. Under dire circumstances and false pretenses, we met our glorious demise. Never lose yourself to the lie that this world is ever going to be the same. Mankind now walks and lives in the greys of sanity and wonders into endless days of suffering.

  The Genesis Virus is a global flood with open arms slaying everyone and everything with patience and persistence, it caught the world with its pants down and has shamed it into submission. The Genesis Virus is the great equalizer, an unwanted child, a nemesis, and all fears wrapped into one inescapable being. With the sick part being, that it needs your help in order to kill your species, it turns everyone into the victim and the perpetrator to the murder of everything they hold dear. When the last person dies, consciousness will become an urban legend in the universe and no one who will be able to warn the next unlucky souls.

  Time masks all wounds. Before this I spoke and thought like a child: now I’m a man because childish things were taken from me in the annus horribilis. It’s been lean years since the total blackout. Down the spiral of madness I’ve become someone better out of necessity. Life has put me in a corner and I’ve been fighting for years for a moment of peace. Yesteryear’s reality is a pipe dream of the past, and I can never awake from this American nightmare.

  Global Alliance Industries (GAI) along with the U.S. army manufactured solar powered bunkers across this God blessed United States, years before I was born, and now these bunkers serve as pockets of humanity. Still I fear my neighbors more than the creatures up top that go bump in the night. The human herd has been culled and thinned out and what’s left isn’t the cream of the crop. I’ve been informed recently that there’s a traveling caravan of skinheads near us and that they’ve slaughtered a group by a water source last month. By Paul, a new member of our group who told us this story. I don’t completely trust him. He may be a friend or foe, that’s yet to be determined. I’m starving, but I’m not a fucking idiot.

  Years before this, Earth was bombarded with harmless asteroids or so we all thought. The media liked to call this event “The Great Bombardment.” Landing somewhere in Russia, the rocks from the sky didn’t rain down precious metals, but instead a new air borne virus with a 99% conversion rate that killed the host and gave it a deadly hunger for humans. Soulless people now cover the continents like locusts and humans have been driven underground like rats. These beings have no plans or ulterior motives. Simply put, they’re straightforward killing machines. They were our family and friends, but now they’re nonhuman parasites eating mankind, one person at a time, for the hell of it. The only cure is survival. We have become an endangered species that’s being hunted by the world’s most dangerous game, ourselves. Philosophers like to say that to walk with humans, is to be humane. Tell that the undead before they eat you. Fat kids, fat pets, and fat adult
s, were all easy pickings for the insatiable undead.

  There was no stopping the virus, people had it and were spreading it for years, before we realized anything was wrong. There were no initial symptoms at first and the virus lay dormant, and then one day, the Genesis Virus took what it wanted like a thief in the night. Because of the different exposure times and preexisting conditions. People were becoming monsters at different rates, in their homes with their families, at work, in malls, or on the road. People began to fear thy neighbor and in turn fast-forwarded Armageddon, by quarantining healthy folks with the sick. Which eventually lead into more attacks. We lost millions of the immune to the infections of their wounds and to the teeth that never stop gnawing on human gristle.

  The ones of us that haven’t turned will never turn into those things. I’ve witness some of my new friends get bitten and nothing happened, but there’s still billions of problems walking the Earth. Some creatures have begun eating other creatures. They are not all the same; mutations have created variations in how they look and how they behave. Torture thrives on creativity.

  The laws that the weak created to control the strong are long gone. Countries were destroyed from the inside out. Languages, races, and customs have become extinct, but who has time to care about that? Mankind was always destined to play a crucial role in its own destruction and half of mankind knew this, but figured not in my generation, and the other half of the populous have been predicting and wishing for this to happen, the end of the world. Here it is ladies and gentlemen. I don’t see any parades being thrown. I only hear cries and screams of terror on demolished streets.

  I heard a story about a man, the last man of a city, actually. That made it to the top of a skyscraper to watch a beautiful sunset. And when the sun finally went down, so did he into a crowd of the undead. His last thoughts are unknown like the creatures that devoured him. He was a coward and he was my father.

  David stops writing at the sound of the alarm.

  2

  David’s muscles and chest tenses up, though he doesn’t hesitate about what has to be done. He grabs his brass-knuckled machete and homemade steel shield, both design to cut the dead in half. In the long concrete corridor, he runs through the flickering lights and scared faces. “Get out of my way.”

  He finally reaches the top and tries to catch his breath as his eyes adjust to the light. Vultures swirl up high in the humidity. The only vegetation is weeds and cacti sprouting from the golden mosaic plains. An unknown entity inside the zombies has blindly guided them like migrating birds to David’s doorstep. His bunker is an island in the middle of an ocean of sand; bubbles of tumble weeds floating around.

  David is tall and lean like a swimmer; Phillip, the other man is even taller and huskier like a linebacker. Phillip takes out a steel bat, and leaves a crowbar and axe in the duffel bag; he grabbed whatever he could, on his way up to the top. He’s in David’s shadow and on his side like a Spartan warrior. “Come back with your shield or on it.”

  David is in his late twenties and Phillip late thirties. They met a few years ago when David and his group rescued Phillip, his wife, and a few other lucky ones that night from the runner breed of monsters. Phillip is a military man and was a weapon specialist who taught actors how to look realistic and impressive on the big screen. So out of his gratitude, he taught David how to fight with melee weapons, as well fieldstrip, clean, and reassemble firearms. The trading of survival skills has become the most valuable commodity in the New World.

  The austere Phillip revivifies the facsimile humans back to life as he says to them. “Fuck ya’ll.” David bangs on his shield.

  Zombies are in a formation like an undead human snake coiling and uncoiling forward ever so slowly in serpentine eagerness. Undying allegiance, the zombie serpent is sun bathing until David and Phillip stirs it with stomping legs. Globetrotting invalids panhandling for a meal. Blood is the beast’s guiding North Star at this range of attack. Let us not disappoint our guests or get caught in this ouroboros of death.

  Tears of blood leaks from zombie eye sockets and lactates from pendulous breasts at waistlines. A chorus of moans and groans seep from within the death march bearing hell-bent intent, despite a pathetic appearance of a family on its last legs. The zombie’s feet are sizzling on the one hundred degree rocks and putting off a burnt rubber smell.

  Fuzzy patchwork of clothing holds on for dear life on the frames of the upcoming dead, they’ve dangly bits under their swaddling rags, and dingle berries matted over their zombie asses. These particular zombies are wrinkled, dehydrated, and compressed like dried out chilies, with only their flaky crocodile skin keeping it all together. A strong wind would turn them into a puddle of ashes. Many zombie lips are glued together by blood and black bile, others are missing in action. The scorching sun has melted eyes to globs of wax. Regeneration and perspiration is a thing of the past for zombies and it clearly shows on the degraded faces and bodies which foretell their old age like rings inside of trees.

  David drops his shield and swings his machete in the air in a stretching fashion as he awaits the fisher of dead men zombie upfront, who’s prancing like a classic mummy, it’s missing its lower jaw and fingers. It gargles its tongue into the air. David’s sweat drops and steams away in a flash on the fractured earth. Closer. The raven perching on the leader zombie’s shoulder flaps away, knowing what the zombie does not. Locked to the ground, David rotates his torso back then forward upper-cutting the zombie’s brains out, chunks shower into its followers, the grey matter slips in their mouths and eyes when they look up for a treat like a dog. The head of the snake is gone and once the chain is broken, it causes the rest of the zombies to disperse on cue at the sight of their leader’s second death. All that remain linger on desperation and hunger, but do not know why. Peer pressure rears its ugly head and drives them full speed ahead.

  The sun is shining through a row of bullet holes down along the flimsy woman zombie’s torso, like a shiny new shirt. Her breasts are craters filled with old leaves and white bird droppings. David straightaway kicks her in the belly, its wrist snaps as its mustard yellow nails clamors for its long awaited dinner; the zombie’s torso then bends to the right, forming a sort of walking V before it collapses, becoming two half zombies squirming on the dirt like earthworms too stubborn to die. A calcified fetus expels from the bouncing torso section; the rays of the sun illuminate the unborn statuesque expression. Sour sweat is pouring down David’s forehead and back.

  A zombie with a syphilis face: no nose, lips or ears, opens its mouth like a snapping turtle; maggots infest its tongue. It stumps forward a few steps making a squealing sound like a choking cat; Phillip elbows it on top of its head, collapsing bone downward like a weak roof. On its skeletal hands and knees, worms and flies spew out of the zombie’s face and into a puddle, the zombie’s arms give out and it lands in its own insect vomit.

  Phillip sidesteps, whistles, and eggs on a bloated zombie with a turgid head and protruding eyes that looks like if it sneezed its head would explode. Phillip swings his slugger and hits the zombie smack in the ear with his bat, blasting out its brains through the other ear. He hits in again just because.

  David beheads a zombie, the swing makes him unbalance, as the dead head spins in the air, Phillip rushes towards its body and launches the zombie from his pelvis up into the small crowd behind it, it bodysurfs on the depraved mob. Sewerage colored blood dumps out from its orifices. The headless body distracts the zombies; Phillip knocks off two heads with each swing. His bat makes a humming sound. Phillip runs up to the last zombie of the small group trying to get up, and swings his bat towards the ground like a golf club; shards of bone and teeth sprinkle like diamonds in the parched air. Underfoot, blood and piss stains the golden canvas in streaks and blots like a Pollack painting.

  David has blood smeared over his face in a war paint design. In the death throes pocket, he delivers a one-two combo to the zombie’s exposed bony chin. Human bottled up energy overp
owers the nightmare fuel in the dead, all that remains is a pile of broken bones as David cuts the zombie down like a thorny shrub.

  Phillip clocks a zombie so hard in the temple that it turns its head completely around like a demon possessed child. Yet, the zombie continues to pounced forward, so Phillip steps into it, guides it by the shoulder, and uses it as a shield. He then slams its head into another zombie’s face. After the third head-butt, the zombies fall into each other’s arms with only one head keeping them connected.

  The continuous rubbing of David’s hand and makeshift sword has ripped open a blister on his palm. The west wind picks up David’s scent and the zombie’s pupils enlarged like a shark chasing blood in the water vapor. David stops fighting and looks towards his friend. Phillip is ripping a zombie’s torso off, waist up; he then tosses it into a line-up of three attackers. From behind, a zombie with sinewy and hollow arms hugs David. “What the fuck?”

  He drops his weapon and pulls each limb inwards; they detach and crumble apart like a hand full of descending sand. David then judo flips the humiliated zombie over his right shoulder with simplicity and slams his boot heel in its upper row of teeth. It sounds like rolling dice against a corner. Its tortured eyes and beaten body looks up at David’s boot.

  David and Phillip take a breather at the place where they started.

  David waves his arm across the horizon. “I’ll take those over there, you get all that past me.”

  Phillip laughs with his mouth shut then says. “Maybe I should just go back inside, don’t do me no favors.”

  Promptly the two men ready themselves to face the second wave of undead with their backs to each other. David says over his shoulder. “If you start crying again, I won’t tell your wife.”