by Guy James
There was another shout, and she could make out the words this time. Sven was calling for her and Lorie, but where was he?
Lorie caught up to Jane and turned back to the long hallway. She pointed to the left, to a door. “It’s coming from there.”
“What, is he working out? Has he lost his mind?”
The shouts came again, and Ivan ran to the nearest door on the left side of the hallway and began to scratch at it.
Lorie ran to the door, turned the knob, and gave it a hard shove. “He’s in here! He’s okay!”
Jane sighed and her shoulders slumped with relief. She put her semi-automatic away and was so happy that she had to stop herself from skipping to the doorway. When she got close, she could make out voices that were neither Sven’s nor Lorie’s.
Confused, Jane walked into the room to find Sven and Lorie transfixed.
They were in a small cardio room that was packed with as many treadmills, recumbent bicycles, elliptical machines, and rowing machines as it could hold. The room was musty, and in desperate need of some ventilation. Dust motes sailed lazily through the thick air, as if riding waves of the stale body odor of exercisers…exercisers now undead…or dead undead…their once toned muscles dry, crumpled, and unusable.
A TV hung above one of the exercise bikes. It was on, and it had Sven’s and Lorie’s rapt attention. Jane walked all the way in and turned to the screen.
Then she too, found that she couldn’t look away, could barely breathe.
Chapter 126
Lorie couldn’t believe it. She couldn’t believe that was the cause of the zombie outbreak. It was crazy.
After the news program had begun to repeat for the fourth time, Lorie snapped out of it and began to pace back and forth in the cramped exercise room.
What a ridiculous explanation, she thought, totally insane. How could that be?
Sven made a sudden menacing gesture at the TV, as if about to hit it. “What?! What the hell does that mean?”
“I…at least…” Jane began, then trailed off and sat down on one of the treadmills.
Sven turned to Lorie. “Did you get any of that?”
“I think so.”
“The glyco thing and everything? What?”
Lorie shrugged. “Yeah, I think so. It’s like a kind of food poisoning.”
“A food-borne illness,” Jane interjected.
“Right,” Lorie said. “It was that new strain of genetically modified soy. They tried it, and I guess it didn’t work out so well.”
“But then why isn’t the rest of the country affected? Were they experimenting on us or something?”
Lorie hadn’t thought of that. “They didn’t really explain why it only went here. They did say it was a small batch though.”
“And what’s with the glycosa…glypho…whatever it is?”
“Glycophysate,” Lorie said. “It’s a pesticide.” The look that Sven gave her made her wonder if Sven knew what a pesticide was, so she decided it was a good idea to explain. “You know, pest-i-cide: kills bugs. We spray pesticides on plants so the bugs don’t get them.”
“Okay, I’ve heard of them, yeah.”
“So, the problem is that when we use pesticides, some of the pesticides can harm the plant that we’re trying to grow…because they’re a lot like poisons. So, scientists have made genetically modified plants that are resistant to the pesticides they want to use. That way, we can spray the plants all we want and kill only the bugs, because the plants are made to withstand the pesticide. So here, they came up with a new strain of glycophysate-resistant soy—glycophysate is a type of pesticide. And…well…we all know what happened.”
“So the tofu that came from these soy plants…was infected with something?”
“I don’t think so. It seemed from what they were saying that it’s not a virus so much as a poison, like the human body reacting to something in the genetically engineered plant. It explains what happened to Randy...or at least what Milt claimed happened to him. He ate that vegetarian, no, vegan frozen dinner.” Lorie looked up, trying to remember exactly what he’d eaten. “Yeah! I remember now, it was Kung Pao Tofu. He even described it to me, telling me how great it was—peppers, peanuts, rice, celery, carrots, but then, instead of meat…tofu.”
Sven nodded. “And it dries us up.”
“Severe dehydration,” Lorie said. “The water gets all expelled, and severe mineral loss along with it. They just go crazy and try to replace the water and minerals any way they can, by biting us I guess. I don’t really get that part.”
“It doesn’t add up,” Jane said. “It does seem more like a virus, like an intelligent virus that’s trying to spread itself. At least that’s how it seemed to me, based on the way they chased after us. If they were just dehydrated, why did they try to bite us? To suck our blood? Wouldn’t it be easier to just drink water?”
“Yeah,” Sven said, “there’s something here that just doesn’t make sense. The zombies were trying to get us for some reason, as if they were trying to spread, to make more of themselves. The dehydration was there, they did dry up and crumple, but I don’t think that’s all there was to it.”
“You think they’re lying to us?” Lorie asked.
“Who knows,” Sven said. “I’m not about to start talking conspiracy theories. Right now, I just care about next steps—the plan.”
Lorie gestured at the TV. “They said the worst of it is over, that as long as we stay inside and away from any of the remaining ones, that we’ll be okay. They said that by day five we’ll be all clear. It’s day three, and I didn’t see any outside. Maybe it’s over already.”
“Let’s go up on the roof,” Jane said. “We can have a look around just in case we need to move again.”
Sven got up in a swift movement. “You’re right. We need to go check.”
He rushed out of the room. Jane followed.
Lorie patted Ivan’s head. “You knew all along, didn’t you?”
Ivan meowed.
Lorie was sure that he did.
She left the smelly exercise room to catch up with Sven and Jane, not caring to see any more replays of the President speaking from the safety of the Oval Office. Apparently, he had made two inspiring addresses during the progression of the zombie outbreak.
“Speeches didn’t help us much, now did they?” she asked Ivan as he padded eagerly beside her. Lorie decided that Ivan agreed.
Lorie exited onto the roof, leaving the multiple sets of stairs behind her. The humid air jolted her out of her thoughts of the mangled zombie corpses.
Although it was still early in the morning, the air was heating up quickly, and was beginning to feel stifling. One of the first things she noticed when she walked onto the roof, despite the humid, somewhat stifling air, was the absence of that strange, terrible smell that the zombies had brought with them—their secret weapon of sorts.
Lorie watched Sven and Jane walk to the edge of the roof together, and Ivan started after them but then stopped a short distance away. Lorie could see that Sven and Jane cared about each other, and she was certain that after all of this was over, if they lived through it, Sven and Jane would end up together.
She was surprised to realize that she wanted to stay with them. Her family was now completely gone…Lorie hoped Sven and Jane would let her…otherwise where would she go, what would she—
She sighed and walked to another of the roof’s edges, away from Sven and Jane. She looked out over the University of Virginia grounds and took a deep breath.
The air was getting clearer, that was for sure. The rancidity of the zombies was fading. Lorie poked at the surgical mask that hung around her neck and hoped she would never have to use it again, even while a part of her savored the violence of the past days’ events. She wondered what that meant about her, if that meant that she was crazy. Lorie shrugged and walked over to Jane and Sven.
“Can you see anything?” she asked.
Sven and Jane both shook
their heads. Lorie looked out from their vantage point and couldn’t see any roaming zombies anywhere.
Then she walked all around the perimeter of the roof, checking as far as she could see in all directions. Sven and Jane did the same, while giving Lorie her space. Only Ivan stayed close to her, rubbing up against her legs and meowing gently each time she stopped at the edge of the roof to peer down and out over the landscape. She felt so much affection for Ivan that she couldn’t imagine leaving him…he was such a good cat.
After walking around the roof for a good ten minutes, Lorie was satisfied that the outbreak had ended—at least in their immediate surroundings.
She realized then that they hadn’t encountered any more people since Randy.
Were there no more human survivors?
Surely looters would have been out if there were people left.
Could it be that they were it? She, Sven, Jane, and Ivan? Were they the only survivors of the zombie outbreak?
The news report had made it sound like there were others, like the government was relaying a message to all of those people still hiding in their homes. Lorie wondered if those people existed...the news report had been so vague, so neatly packaged…too neatly packaged.
She turned back toward the center of the roof to find that Jane and Sven were standing close to each other, watching her.
“Anything?” Jane asked.
Lorie shook her head. “Maybe it really is over…maybe we can go…” Lorie didn’t know what she was going to say next. Go home? Where was there to go home to now? She didn’t want to go home and find her mother and Evan’s father and their crumpled bodies or whatever was left of them. She couldn’t go back there.
“What’s wrong?” Jane asked, looking concerned and starting toward Lorie.
Lorie stepped backward instinctively. “Nothing, I…nothing.” Lorie looked up at Jane. “I don’t want to go back …back to my house.”
Jane put an arm around Lorie, which Lorie found comforting. “You don’t have to. You stay with us as long as you like.”
Then Sven walked over, looking as perplexed as he’d looked in the small exercise room after watching the news program. “I don’t believe it,” he said, looking into the distance and shaking his head. He had a sad, resigned look in his eyes. “I told him not to eat that crap, but he just wouldn’t listen, I told him…” He shook his head again. Lorie watched Jane put her other arm on Sven’s shoulder, and then the three of them were linked…no, it was the four of them, because there was Ivan, pawing at a mallard on Sven’s calf.
“Why don’t we go home?” Jane said. “It’s over.”
As they walked back down into Memorial Gymnasium, Lorie began to wonder what the zombie outbreak meant.
Who had won? Was it the people who were against genetically modified food, or was it the meat eaters who denounced tofu?
It seemed exceptionally ironic to Lorie that the tofu eaters were the ones who protested the proliferation of genetically modified food, and yet they were the ones that had taken the brunt of the zombie onslaught, as if they were targeted.
Then again, Lorie realized, that wasn’t quite right either, because almost everyone in and around Charlottesville seemed to have been affected. Soy was in just about everything, she recalled, and maybe she and Sven and Jane had something peculiar in their bodies that kept them from turning into zombies even though they actually had been exposed to the tainted soy.
She shrugged and tried to put all of it out of her mind for the moment. It was over, and there would be plenty of time to put the pieces of the puzzle together later. If the public was ever allowed to have all the pieces, that was.
Chapter 127
Sven had a hand on each machete when he stepped out of Mem Gym and into the late morning light. Ivan was in his backpack, perched atop Sven’s shoulder. The cat’s head swept from side to side as he sniffed at the air.
“How’s it smell?” Sven asked.
Ivan didn’t hiss, and Sven took that as a good sign. The cloying, paralyzing odor seemed to be settling out of the air, becoming fainter with each passing hour. It was almost noon on the third day of the outbreak, and if the newscasters were correct—if they knew and were telling the truth—then the last of the zombies were crumpling, the outbreak was ending.
“Self-contained deterioration,” that was one of the terms they had used on the news program. Sven didn’t know how anyone could refer to something like this as self-contained. It was ludicrous. The zombies were trying to kill the remaining humans. How could that ever be characterized as self-contained?
Even if the newscasters had just been referring to the course of the virus, the term was at the very least inept, and having dealt with the zombies firsthand, Sven found it offensive.
He looked up at the sky and found a reassuring, almost unmarred blue staring back down at him.
He walked carefully down the steps of Mem Gym, keeping his eyes averted from the area where the burned zombies were. He didn’t want to look at any of that, and there was no time for rubbernecking anyway.
The plan now was to check his house, clear it out if necessary, and relocate there with Jane, Lorie, and of course Ivan. They all agreed it was best to move to a smaller space, one that they could watch more closely, one that at least one of them—Sven—was intimately familiar with.
Mem Gym had worked well for the previous day and that morning, but the building had so many unknown hiding places that they were all uneasy about staying there any longer. They suspected that more zombies might be lurking in Mem Gym’s hidden recesses.
They could barricade themselves in Sven’s house more easily, and keep a better watch over its points of entry, which numbered far fewer than the points of entry into Mem Gym, the number of which they still didn’t know for certain.
They would settle in and lock up—it wasn’t as if the zombies knew how to open doors anyway. It was just a matter of reconnaissance and cleanup now. Sven hoped to God there was no cleanup to be done.
He strode across Emmet Street and stepped foot on Lewis Mountain Road for the first time since he’d driven away on day one of the outbreak. He kept his eyes averted from the piles of crumpled zombies that he passed, but he couldn’t help wonder how he could bring himself to clean up a crumpled pile that had once been Lars. That thought had kept him insisting to Jane and Lorie that they were better off in Mem Gym, even though he knew that they weren’t. Sven had backed off, feeling a bit of shame for his insistence.
Then he was standing in front of his home.
There were bits of flesh strewn across the lawn that Sven assumed were the remains of the mailman, but they were too unrecognizable for definite identification.
They’ll have to check dental records, Sven thought, and wondered if the zombies’ teeth became brittle and fell apart too. If that were true, identifying all of the victims might not be possible.
Sven’s body shuddered as he inhaled and put his right hand on a machete. He waited, but nothing happened. None of the strangeness that he attributed to the machetes took hold of him.
Unsure of whether to be glad or fretful at the lack of jungle imagery, Sven walked straight to his door, avoiding the scattered remains on the lawn. The way the remains were arranged, it was hard to imagine they had ever been assembled in the form of a human body.
Sven pulled the screen door open and leaned it on his right shoulder to keep it propped open. He unlocked the door, put his left hand on the doorknob, tightened the fingers of his other hand on the machete, and pushed the door open.
Less than ten minutes later, Sven emerged, shocked, confused, and not at all relieved.
Lars was gone, along with any sign of his body.
The back door had been forced open and left ajar.
Apparently Lars had made his way out of the basement and out of the house, no doubt in pursuit of moisture and blood.
There was bound to be some of his friend’s flesh remaining on the splinters jutt
ing from the ruined back door. Sven cringed at the thought.
He sat down on the stoop, closed his eyes, and took deep breath after deep breath until he felt lightheaded. Then he went back inside for another check, pushed the stove up against the broken back door, exited the house, and locked the front door behind him.
No more screams, Sven thought, recalling the sounds that had traveled into his front lawn on the first day of the outbreak.
He started back toward Mem Gym in a slow, painful jog. Sven, Jane, Lorie, and Ivan would move, and in Sven’s house they would stay…at least until the government cleanup crews had finished their safety sweeps, clearing out the zombie remains and dispatching any undead stragglers that remained vertical.
He would retake his house, block the doors with furniture, and wait.
As he jogged, Sven wondered how long Virginia would be quarantined from the rest of the country, and how long he, Jane, Lorie, and Ivan could live on stale peanuts and turkey jerky.
At least until the peanuts and jerky run out, Sven thought, at least until then.
Chapter 128
Sven rummaged through the DVDs littered around the TV stand in his basement until he found the one he was searching for. He picked it up and looked at it, hoping that it might take his mind off everything. He didn’t want to believe any of what had happened the previous two days, and at the very least, he didn’t want to think about it.
He also didn’t want to risk turning the cable on, because he was sure news of the zombie outbreak would be on every channel, and he couldn’t handle any more of that at the moment. He needed to escape, to get away from what had happened.
Sven put the DVD in and went to the basement refrigerator. He made himself a chocolate and peanut butter protein drink and sat down in front of the TV with it.
This protein shake was the second he had made for himself since he reclaimed his house. He told himself that he wasn’t going to dump it out like he had the first one. Sven knew that he needed to get his protein in order to heal. He needed nutrients, but his appetite still wasn’t there.
