by N. C. Reed
“I can't stand someone on my ass,” she almost snarled and I very diplomatically didn't make the smart ass remark that came to me in a flash of male genius. She unbuckled her seat belt and turned in her seat.
“Are you goi-” My voice was drowned out and my night vision ruined for a few seconds by the flash of Connie ripping off three shots out the back window.
According to what she told me, since I couldn't see it myself, the low rider's windshield starred nicely and most likely scared the absolute shit out of the driver. The truck swerved sharply as the driver apparently slammed on his brakes. He had apparently not opted for the anti-locking upgrade because the truck wobbled twice, left to right, before sliding around sideways in the road and coming to a stop even as we roared away. Thankfully we had managed to outrun most of the other traffic so there was no one else close enough to hit the idiot. Connie turned around cool as a cucumber to roll the window back up and then refasten her seat belt.
“Nice.” That was all I had. Just could not think of anything else. Inappropriate or otherwise.
“Thanks,” she nodded, still just as cool as you please. If I hadn't already been in love with her, that would have done it right there.
Fifteen minutes later we pulled into the house with no further signs of trouble. Twenty minutes and Baby was hidden around back and we were inside behind locked gates and barred doors.
Thirty minutes and we were conserving water. Think about it, it'll come to you.
*****
Connie dropped onto the sofa beside me still toweling her hair dry. She'd put on a pair of those wonderful boy shorts and a tank-top. I was wearing gym shorts and a tee while I surfed the news channels. My computer was open on the coffee table in front of me and a hand held scanner sitting next to it.
“So what's the word?” she asked.
“Nothing on the scanner about the 'incident',” I told her. “Probably didn't want to risk the report.”
“I wonder if they got our tag number?” she mused. “They might be able to use it to track us.”
“Would if it was the right tag,” I nodded absently. “It's registered to an undercover cop car. They run that tag and they got more trouble than a shot out windshield.”
“How did you get something like that?” Connie was astonished.
“Stole it,” I admitted easily. “It was out-of-date anyway,” I shrugged. “I keep tags on an old junker car to keep the stickers up to date. Never know when it might come in handy. I put it on before we left for the hospital this morning, just in case.”
“You are just full of surprises Mister Drake,” she shook her head as she curled up next to me. “So what else is going on?”
“Guard is out across the country,” I told her. “They're considering using the active military now for manpower but there's a political battle going on over all that.”
“What are they arguing about?” Connie was astonished.
“Posse Comitatus, believe it or not,” I told her. “It's amazing how little sense our elected officials actually have even in times like these.”
“You expected better?” she asked.
“No, not really. I did expect they'd all be in a bunker somewhere by now, citing the 'continuation of government' or whatever that phrase is.”
“Continuity,” she chuckled dryly. “The word you're looking for is continuity.”
“Yeah, that,” I agreed. “Anyway, the city is burning,” I got to the local stuff. “Turns out some of the glow we were seeing was coming from there, no just on the far side of town. Whole blocks are going up and there's not enough firemen to contain it. And that was before so many decided to abandon ship.”
“You blame them?” she asked me, leaning her head against my arm.
“Hell no,” I shook my head, raising my arm to wrap around her shoulders. “I would have been long gone myself already. This whole thing has been handled wrong from the start,” I added. “You can't tell me this couldn't have been contained. It would have taken some hard choices I don't deny, but it could have been done.”
“Take more courage than that outfit has,” Connie replied.
“They were probably too busy jockeying for position to worry about it,” I agreed. “Now it's probably too late.”
“Not certainly?” she asked, head raising to look at me.
“There's probably still time to get this under control,” I replied. “It will take someone with enough balls to make that decision though. And there is not a Napoleon among them,” I quoted from an old civil war story I'd read once about Shiloh.
“What's that mean?” she asked.
“It means that there's a clear path to follow, but no one to lead them down it,” I shrugged again. “There's only one way to stop this and that's to head shot every infected. Do it now, tonight, while you can. While you've still got the structure and the logistics to get the job done. Another day, two at most, and you won't have it. You're losing people every minute and some of them will be the people you're depending on. Just that simple.”
“Once you reach a point where everyone sees that we can't win, they cut their losses and hunker down to take care of themselves and their families. In some places it's already too late.”
“Like us?” she asked wryly, eyebrows raised.
“We're not soldiers, police, any of the emergency services personnel they need for this,” I shook my head. “We're actually doing the smart, best thing for them by staying the hell outta their way,” I pointed out. “Well meaning amateurs getting in the way just makes things worse. And it's definitely bad enough as it is.”
“Point,” she nodded. “Hungry?” she asked.
“I could eat,” I admitted, cursing mentally at the abandoned Double Big Jack sitting in the doctor's office of the ER. That right there was grounds enough to shoot that bitch Madeline if I ever saw her again. Probably the last one I would ever get, too.
“Keep an eye on things while I fix us a sandwich,” she said, getting to her feet. Before she could move her cell phone rang. We both looked at it with no small trepidation as she reached for it. The number was from the hospital.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“Is it her number?” I asked.
“No, but that doesn't mean anything,” she admitted.
“Anyone else there you'd want to talk to?” I checked.
“Well, no.”
“Turn it off,” I told her. “Forget it.” She nodded and powered the phone down, setting it back on the coffee table.
“One healthy sandwich coming up,” she taunted me, but I just nodded.
“Makes sense after all that junk food,” I admitted. Didn't get the lion-killer smile for that, but it was a smile none-the-less.
I'd take it.
I watched as the news kept playing over the places where things had gone from bad to horrible over the course of the day. There were a lot of them, too. It just didn't seem like all this could have happened in two days or so, which led me to think that it hadn't. This shit had already been here in the states when Dumbo had gone on television saying that it wasn't and that precautions were being taken and all that other bureaucratic horseshit they shovel the public when they don't want to admit to something.
I realized right then that the worst thing that could happen would be if the zombies didn't eat all politicians, everywhere. As long as they got them, then maybe those of us who survived would be okay. Maybe.
Connie returned with a pair of sandwiches, some baked chips and a soda apiece, probably an apology for the healthy food she was forcing on me. I didn't mind really. I needed to be be healthy now.
“I have to keep you healthy,” she jibed, smiling at me. Again it was like she could read my mind. “Despite your obvious failings I want to keep you around,” she added.
“Love me too much to lose me, huh?” I shot back, taking a huge bite of a corned beef on rye.
“Yes.” It was a simple word, yes, yet it carried so much with it. I paused in my che
wing, regretting the enormous bite I had taken since my mouth was full. I carefully looked her way to see her studying me carefully.
“Yes,” she said again, nodding this time.
I finally managed to swallow though it took some work. She hadn't really said it back to me at the hospital and I had almost forgotten it, what with the shooting, the assault and battery, the near incarceration at the hospital of doom, you know, all that.
“Ah,” I started, but then stopped, not really knowing what to say. She smirked slightly and took a bite of her own sandwich, removing the need for me to say anything. I just smiled a little and kept eating. Side by side with the woman of my dreams who had just told me she loved me. All while the world was falling apart around us. What was there to add to that, really?
So we sat there eating healthy and watching the world slowly fall apart as each and every bite from an infected became another enemy. Another problem.
We watched long into the night, getting up every now and then to check things, use the bathroom, refill water glasses, the usual stuff you do when watching the end of the world with loved ones.
Because at the moment that was all we could do. Sit and wait and watch.
*****
Early Wednesday morning, two days after the hospital debacle, we got a rather rude reminder that things truly can 'always be worse'. It was something I should have thought of but didn't. I can't say why, exactly. I'm not making excuses, I should have thought of it. It just didn't occur to me for this particular situation.
And no one wants to think about nuclear weapons.
The Chinese had apparently had it pretty bad. No way of knowing how bad since they closed themselves off when things got bad. But it must have been really bad ( wow, that's a lot of bads) there since they lit off three tactical nukes on their own soil. Beijing, Shanghai, Hong-Kong. No warning, no notice to other nations, nothing. Just three explosions that registered on the Richter scale and were visible from space.
Seeing the images from the ISS made me think of something else. What would the astros on the station do now? Safe to say no one was really concerned with resupplying five guys and a woman who were a long way from home while hundreds of thousands were dead, dying, or undead. Honestly, by that time the casualties were probably in the millions. There's just no way to know since all the governments were lying their asses off about the whole thing until it was too late to do anything about it. That had always seemed like just an inconvenience before.
This time it might have caused the end of mankind.
I know, I know, drama and all that. Doesn't make it any less true. Their poor decision making (stupidity) coupled with their inability to make hard choices (cowardice) and some extremely poor leadership skills by people in extremely important leadership positions had left us, by which I mean the world, in a pretty tough situation. By the time those that were left admitted there was a 'problem', it was a whole hell of a lot worse than 'problem'. Problem is a math word. That's what one of my old professors had said anyway. Well, here's some math for you.
Seven billion (that's with a B) people, all of whom were potential zombies. One bite, which is all it takes to infect someone (seen that for myself). Every infected had the absolute potential, almost guaranteed in the early days, of infecting at least one other person before being 'contained' (an insurance term if ever I heard one). The math said that this was a 'problem' that had the potential to grow exponentially. You know, one makes two, two makes four, four makes eight and so on until we reached that tipping point where the infected outnumber the uninfected.
Consider this; one thousand infected in a city of five million people is something like point zero one percent of the population. Manageable, right? I mean the average redneck (I can say that since I are one) has enough ammunition for his handy deer rifle to take care of twenty or so, no problem. This is a problem that any well trained and equipped metropolitan police force could handle alone, let alone with the assistance of the National Guard.
There's where the trouble starts. No one in a position of authority was willing to give those kind of orders. I know in hindsight it's easy to make that judgment, but bear with me. The initial stages of the infection, when no one realized what was happening or what it might mean, you wouldn't even consider euthanasia of the infected. No civilized society would make such a leap before ensuring that the infected had no hope of recovery and that the problem would continue to spread like wildfire until it was eliminated. I would not have advocated for something like that at the start and would have probably screamed bloody murder if anyone else had.
But once that video from Spain had been released, certainly by the time the video from Germany had hit the net, added to the discovery that there was no cure, that the infected were in fact now medically dead, or undead maybe, at that point some tough decisions are in order.
If they're medically dead, or undead, then there's no hope of recovery. No cure or antidote is going to fix this problem. You can't cure dead.
Now, I'm not saying it would have been an easy decision. I am saying that the decision should have been made. For my way of thinking, once I know there's no help for the infected, no way to restore them or 'cure' them, then the focus has to be on stopping the spread of the infection. You do that by stopping the infected.
Had that line been adopted after those facts had been established, then the average community, at least here in America, was more than capable of defending itself from the dead. Or undead. Whatever.
See what I mean? We could have stopped this before it got so out of hand that China felt the need to nuke three of it's major cities. To tell the truth, now that I put all of this in writing, I'm surprised that China of all places couldn't get a handle on the situation. Everything I've ever read about the Chinese government and their philosophies leaves me with the impression that individual rights simply don't compute with them. With communism in general in fact. It's all about the 'collective'. If that's really accurate, then you would think that the Chinese would be the first government to embrace the idea of eliminating the infected so as to protect the rest of us. All I can figure is that the problem was out of control before they realized it.
And thus we awaken to find that at midnight our time, which was noon their time give or take (I think), China had nuked the three worse infestations in their nation. 'Demands' from other nations to pledge they would not do so again apparently fell on deaf, or maybe undead, ears.
We know all this because the news people were still on the job. Several of them, like Kelly Amberly, (or was it Amberyly Kelly? I can't remember and it's not worth looking back to check) had been eaten in the field, but despite that they were still on the job. I have to admit that made me rethink some harsh things I'd said in the past about reporters in general. Not the talking heads that sat behind a desk and 'reported' on someone else's hard work. They were still jerks. But the people in the field, they were sticking. Reporting any and everything they could find out for as long as they could.
Because of them and the work they did, there are a lot of people alive today who were able to stay that way because they knew what was going on, where it was happening and how bad things were. They knew where to avoid, who to avoid and what to do to prepare for trouble in their area. And thanks to them they knew when trouble had arrived in their area too.
I have to pause here for a minute and remember the people who were not professional reporters, but were still using social media and other means to get local news out to anyone who still had access to that media. Local reports in many cases came from these amateur news seekers who were trying to fill the void and provide information to their local area. Again, there are a lot of people alive today that wouldn't be if not for them. And a lot of them didn't make it.
It was in fact because of these folks who were still out there trying to report on the event that we heard the first good news we had received since all this had started. Something that made me think there just might still be a chance
at least some of us to survive, maybe even see a day when we might see things return to whatever 'normal' we could salvage in a post zombie apocalypse society.
*****
At some point an Army Colonel realized that sending his men into action without permission to fire was just adding to the ranks of the undead. You send soldiers to fight but don't allow them to fight and you lose them to the infection. This man was not willing to sacrifice his men like that and ordered them to open fire on anyone that was infected.
Believe it or not there was a modest uproar about that. Modest because most of the idiots that were 'advocating for the infected', (that's really what they called it. You can't make this shit up), had been eaten by the infected or else had joined them. Still, those few talking heads that remained went on the airwaves that were still operating and demanded that the soldiers be ordered to use non-lethal force only and that the Colonel and any of his men who had shot 'innocent victims of the plague' (seriously. Cannot. Make. This. Up.) be tried for murder.
There was of course no talk of them going to assist with all that. 'Not my place', etc and so on. Nor was there any talk of the 'innocent victims' being held responsible for their crimes since clearly they were beyond reason.
How's that for idiot logic. Idiology? No, that would be the study of idiots, wouldn't it. Anyway. We can't use deadly force to deal with homicidal 'innocent victims' who are killing random people left and right everywhere you look because they had rights.
News Flash Number One: They're dead. No rights.
News Flash Number Two: We're still alive. We have rights. Or, if you insist, we have rights, too. Either way, we had the absolute right of self-defense. And apparently this Army guy decided that extended to him and his men. Which it absolutely should have from the very beginning.
So he and his men began to eradicate the zombies wherever they found them. Anyone bitten but not 'turned' was locked up to see what happened. Honestly I'm pretty sure they were hoping someone wouldn't turn, thinking that might be the key to unlock the door to a vaccine or antidote. I mean, you know, one you could take before you turned. Or whatever.
