by Mark Tufo
"Mike." The behind voice cried once more. "We need you here."
I pulled my right leg up. It released with an audible pop from the ground. How long it hovered I don't know, not sure that time is relevant in purgatory. I looked upon the faces of my mother, of Brendon, Jen, Jo, Jed and dozens if not hundreds of relatives, this I knew not from sight but by the feelings of warmth and love that emanated from them. They all stared at me expectantly, waiting to embrace me within their collective grasps. I screwed up, I turned to look and see my pursuer. Tommy stood no more than ten feet away, tears streamed down his face. His body shook violently.
"Mr. T, it's not your time yet."
"Are you sure Tommy, because it really seems like it is."
"Have I ever lied to you Mr. T?"
"Tommy I don't know if you've ever lied to anybody." And still my right foot hovered a foot from the ground. I was twelve olde English inches from literally meeting my maker. Maybe not the closest call ever, but then again not everyone truly knows HOW close they are to death.
"Think about your family, Mr. T."
"I have Tommy, but what's the point? Won’t they all end up here eventually and then we'll all be together again."
"Don’t you want your grandson to grow up, Mr. T? To have a life and a love of his own?"
That hurt more than I care to admit.
"If he dies before he's born Mr. T, he doesn't come here."
"That's a lie!" I screamed.
Tommy's features didn't change.
"Eliza knows about this place, she can keep your family away from here, forever." He added.
I wanted to scream at him, to throw him to the ground, to tell him that God would make him burn for telling those untruths. The problem was it was all true, instinctively I knew he was speaking the truth.
"I hate that bitch." I swore under my breath. What circle of hell do they reserve for people that swear on Heaven's doorstep? I nearly and literally almost fell over into the great abyss, only Tommy's steadying hand on my shoulder kept me from going over the edge. "Nice grab." I told him.
"You ready to go home?" He asked.
"I thought I was." I answered truthfully. I turned back. "Bye mom, I miss you."
"I'll see you soon." She said softly, with a ghost of a sad smile on her lips.
Now that I had made up my mind to stay on this side of the death divide, I hoped she didn't mean too soon or else this was going to be a short novella punctuated by my untimely demise.
"Thank you Tommy, you've saved me again."
"Want a Pop-Tart?" He asked as he pulled me close.
CHAPTER SEVEN - JOURNAL ENTRY 3 -
As the emergency room lights grew brighter, the field I was in grew dimmer. Like the Cheshire cat, Tommy's grin was the last thing to fade.
My eyes fluttered open, bright light pierced into my soul.
"We have brain function." I think a nurse might have said.
"Blood pressure is 70 over 20 and climbing Doctor. Another 20 cc's of epy?"
"No we've already pumped him with more than I feel comfortable putting in a rhino. Mike can you hear me?"
"Get…damn…light…out…of…my…eyes." I rasped.
"Good to have you back."
I wasn't quite as sure.
"You've lost a lot of blood again Mike. You're making me doubt my expertise. Nearly everything I did on your shoulder came unglued all at once. You were clinically dead for twelve minutes. If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes I wouldn't have believed it."
Tracy was squeezing the shit out of my right hand.
"Hurts.." I muttered.
"I bet it does Mike." The Doc continued. "We had to go in…"
"No…" I took a breath. "Hand."
"No we didn't have to do anything with your hand we…"
"Oh I think he means me Doctor." Tracy said releasing her death grip on my hand. She began to rub blood back into my purpling appendage.
My head ached as I scanned the room. Travis' red-rimmed eyes were what I caught first. He turned away when he noticed me staring at him. "Not...quite...dead...yet." I said in my best Monty Python English accent. "I…think…I'm…getting…better." He turned quickly to leave the room, his shoulders bobbed up and down in heavy sobs. I knew what it was like to be a teen, all those hormones surging to the fore and there was always the constant cool that had to be maintained under any and all circumstances. It was nice to see that I had broken through to his humanity, something which I think had been slipping from him, minute degrees at a time.
Justin was next, his eyes were red-rimmed also but they were more the result from whatever poison surged through his body. His words froze me. "She knows we're here."
"Justin!" Tracy screamed.
Justin's face fell. "Mom." He began.
"You tell that bitch!" Tracy yelled. "That she can go to hell, and if she comes here I'll send her there personally. Why don't you and your girlfriend go for a walk!" Tracy sobbed.
"Hon…" I said almost grabbing her with my damaged arm. The Doc must have known I wasn't the brightest bulb on the string. This time he made sure that I would not be able to make any sudden movements. My arm, no scratch that, my entire upper half of my body, was immobilized. Tracy stopped her tirade to look at me, the pain and the hurt was etched in her eyes.
"I don't think he was taunting, I think he was just telling us."
"I don't care Talbot, I just don't." Tracy stormed out, her shoulders doing a fair impression of Travis' from a few moments earlier.
"Do…do you want me to leave Dad?" Justin asked, his eyes never picking up off of the floor.
I didn't want him to leave. I did however want Eliza to piss off. Was pretty sure she wasn't going to listen though. "No it's fine." I said through gritted teeth. The lingering effects of being dead were beginning to wear off and the pain of life was rearing its ugly head.
Next in line was Nicole. She looked worse than Justin. She wore the affliction of loss heavily.
"Hey Peanut. How you doing?"
Porkchop pushed past Nicole. "I'm doing good Mr. Talbot. Thanks for asking. Wanna see my transformers?"
"Porkchop!" Doc Baker called over from the corner, doing his best to be discreet while also actually monitoring my progress. "I'm pretty sure he's not talking to you."
"Dad yeah he is. You heard him right?" Porkchop asked Nicole.
"Well actually…" I began.
"So see this one is Bumble Bee. He goes from this guy into a yellow Camaro." Porkchop said as he hastily began to do the magical folding and bending of plastic to make the action figure turn into a sports car. Sweat began to bead on his brow as the arm assembly was not being very cooperative. "Almost got it." Porkchop said in deep concentration. I would have laughed a little when Porkchop's tongue came out while he was in deep concentration but I knew the pain that would have ensued was not worth the expenditure.
Doc Baker had to physically remove Porkchop from the vicinity. Porkchop was entirely too wrapped up in the transmorphing of his toy to realize that he had actually been moved.
"Dad I've got something to tell you." Nicole said, her eyes as downcast as her brother's.
"It's alright honey Br…" Holy crap I was half a sentence away from telling my grieving daughter that her dead boyfriend had already told me that she was pregnant. That wouldn't have gone over too well. Nicole picked her eyes up to meet mine. A questioning look fleeted across her features.
"Brendon's dead." Nicole sobbed flatly. The shock of those words spoken aloud stunned her. Up to this point I don’t think it had been vocalized. Obviously she knew but the spoken word carried its own weight, a finality, a punctuation to an ending.
A new fear wormed into my heart. Would my daughter begin to look at me as the person for whom her fiancée had died. Being Catholic meant I already carried an immeasurable amount of guilt around with me. I didn't want to add to the load. I wanted to reach out and comfort my daughter; the cloth strap bound tightly across my chest thought otherwise.
Nicole wept as she gripped me tight, the deep sobs reverberated throughout both our bodies. The movement was causing me quite a bit of pain, which I was doing my best to squash down. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the Doc unobtrusively working his way closer and closer to my bedside. Nicole kept her final secret to herself. That was fine with me. We all carry certain things we don't want the rest of the world to know, problem was hers was going to reveal itself no matter what she did or did not say.
She pulled herself up so we could see eye to eye, which was still difficult due to the copious amounts of tears being spilled. The big bad ass Marine side of me would like to say they were all hers or even mostly hers but this water works display was a joint effort.
"Nicole I know this won't help now and most likely won't make any sense, but in The End we WILL be all together." I told her. I wanted to finish with. 'Once I take Eliza's head and slowly feed it through a wood chipper.' Sounded good in my head, got the feeling Nicole wouldn't appreciate it nearly as much.
"I love you Dad." She said squeezing me tighter.
The Doc couldn't take it anymore. He gently placed his hands on her shoulders. "Miss, we really need to let your dad rest. If anything else happens to him, I don't know that there will be enough left to sew back together."
Justin led his sister out and I would imagine to their quarters. Nicole had always been a very petite girl. Somehow she looked even more diminished, like her soul was wrung out. I know mine was.
"Mike you should get some sleep." The Doc told me.
"Doc I'm sick of sleeping."
"I can see your point, but the more rest you have the quicker your body will heal."
"First things first Doc."
He stopped what he was doing to look at me.
"Where am I and what is going on?" I asked him.
"Well I guess a few more minutes won't make a difference," as he pulled up a chair. "Where would you like me to start?"
"I was thinking maybe the Mesozoic era." I said smart-assedly.
"The beginning it is." The Doc said immediately picking up on my sarcasm. "First off you are on an impromptu military base called Camp Custer in Indiana that abuts up against the great lakes, Lake Michigan to be specific."
It was nice to have someone recognize my acrimony.
"The newscasters had one thing right, it did start with a flu shot. When the vice president died from complications arising from the H1N1 Influenza strain, the administration, in an effort to squash public panic, pushed researchers and vaccine developers past their breaking point. Safety measures were cut or completely ignored. Tests on the vaccine's effectiveness were never validated. Most likely the tests weren't even conducted. I'm not going to go into what specifically went wrong, microbiology is not my area, suffice it to say that something went completely awry."
"You think." I grunted. "Did you say Custer?"
He nodded with a weak smile. "The vaccine they were inoculating everyone with was a live strain, something they haven't done in over thirty years because of the inherent danger this type of dose can cause. Obviously nothing on this level, but the live strains of vaccines used to cause upwards of a 7% infection rate. Meaning..."
"Meaning that out of every 100 people given the shot to prevent the flu, seven actually got the flu."
"Exactly." The Doc nodded. "Those were great odds back in the day, but as we learned more about how to combat the influenza virus, it was discovered that the success rate with 'dead' vaccines was much larger. Odds of actually getting the flu from a flu shot were infinitesimally small. So much so it was widely believed that the people who actually got sick already had the virus within them."
"Why the live vaccine then Doc?"
"Time, Mike. It would have taken another 3 to 4 weeks to adapt the 'dead' viral agent. The country was already on the verge of a pandemic. Thousands were getting sick daily. Hundreds, if not thousands of deaths were imminent. Schools, businesses, hell even government buildings were shutting down to prevent the spread of the virus. All of the president's admonishments that the flu was not as bad as the media was making it seem went down the drain the very minute the VP died. Vaccination producing facilities began to work around the clock to get enough doses out there, and even with those extraordinary measures it wasn't going to be nearly enough."
I could not get the image of small vials of zombieism heading down an assembly line. An innocuous clear liquid in a small bottle with a cap especially designed for the insertion of a needle. If I had not been laid off my family and I would have been first in line to accept the deadly shot. "There were no tests?" I asked angrily.
"Well maybe I spoke too soon. In a gesture of 'Goodwill," the Doctor said with air quotes. "The good old US government sent crates and crates of the newly fashioned immunization to third world countries around the globe."
"Bastards. They might as well have been giving smallpox laced blankets to the Yup'ik."
The Doc looked at me a little funny. "I knew you were a smart man Mike, I didn't know that you were educated also."
"There are a lot of things about me Doc that might confound you but my knowledge of that has more to do with my fear of conspiracies than book learning."
"I see." The Doc said looking off into the distance as he assimilated this new information.
"So didn't the scientists get a clue that maybe the vaccination wasn't so good when Peruvians began to walk around eating their relatives?"
"They would have, had they waited. Within a day or two of shipping out the crates they began the roll out the first shots to area hospitals."
"Are you kidding me? So being the assholes that we are, we use whole nations as our guinea pigs and then don't even have the follow through to see the results?"
"It gets worse Mike."
"How is that even possible?"
"I could probably get shot just for telling you, but it's not like you're going to be able to go to the media with this information." The Doc looked back to the door as if expecting Big Brother to be standing there, they weren't, so he continued. "There is every indication that the higher ups within the government knew the shots were tainted."
The look of shock nearly froze my features into place.
"No, no wait. It's not that they were trying to take down civilization as we knew it. I guess it was more of inaction that may have doomed our species. Just as the first few people in the states were coming down with the infection, the boxes of shots began to make their way ashore all around the globe. In typical government fashion, this new development of death and reanimation was immediately covered up. In its defense the government tried their best to quickly and quietly retrieve the shots. But with vague directions, hospitals and caregivers were reluctant to give their hard won shots back. They immediately began to dose as many people as was possible before government representatives could get there to retrieve the stock. What's infinitely worse is that once the U.S. realized it could not contain the shots within their own borders they didn't act to save any other country."
"They figured if we were going down then we were taking as many people with us as possible."
"Quite." The Doctor said resignedly.
"But you said third world countries, Doc. Is there anywhere that is zombie free?" I asked hopefully.
"We have satellite communication with most countries that are still people populated." He pulled his hand across his face. "It seems we lose contact with a handful every week as they go dark."
Going dark could mean a lot of things. Possibly running out of power, burnt out diodes, laryngitis, bad case of the hiccups might keep someone from broadcasting.
"Australia seems to be the least infected, but it really is only a matter of time."
"An exponential disast
er, one becomes two, two becomes four, and so on."
"And so on." The Doc repeated sadly.
"How much of humanity is left Doc?" Where do you go, what do you do, when hope is gone?
"In the states, maybe 5% aren’t zombies yet. The rest of the world, well they're lagging behind like usual but are coming on fast, they may have upwards of 15% of their populations still alive."
"Is there any way to stop them?" 'Them,' being our neighbors, our friends, our families.
"We've been working on a vaccination."
I must have looked at him funny.
"I know, it seems a little late in the game for that. Haven't had much success anyway, volunteers have been scarce." He said weakly. "The new agent might counteract the flu immunization if someone were to immediately seek out help. But at this point I can barely give someone a saline solution intravenously. If we have generations left it will take that long for the fear of needles to subside."
"What if someone is bitten?" I asked hopefully.
"Maybe in the beginning a stronger vaccination could have helped, but the disease has mutated. The pathogen that floods the body in a bite now is much too virulent. It overwhelms the body's defenses in a matter of hours, what used to take a day or more now happens in half that time. Individuals don’t even have the capacity to die in the traditional manner before they are re-animated."
"The speeders." I said aloud.
"Speeders?" The Doc questioned.
I related our experience with this new breed of death dealing machines.
"With the original 'zombies,' I'll use that term because it seems to be the current vernacular to call them but not completely true. Anyway, the older agent could take up to 24 hours to overwhelm its victims. The patient's body temperature could swell well above the 107 degree threshold before the brain literally began to cook. Once the infected 'died' the microorganisms or parasites really began to go to work."
"How is that possible? Doesn't the parasite die when the host does? How can it keep going without that symbiotic relationship?"
"And that's the difference. Our little carnivorous sycophant values its existence above all others. Sort of like man itself." The Doc said wonderingly.
