Die Trying: A Zombie Apocalypse

by Ryan, Nicholas

  On the side wall were several shelves of small cardboard boxes, each stacked neatly. I figured they held nails and screws, but I didn’t waste time investigating.

  I went to the back wall. There wasn’t one pair of pliers – there were four. There was a long-nosed pair of pliers, a standard pair, a miniature pair, and an extra large pair that looked like the brutal instrument of some medieval torturer. I took them all, and went back out under the roller door, back out into the rain and the dark night. I slid the roller door down until it was closed, and followed the concrete driveway until I sensed I was near the corner of the house. I had my hands full with tools and the flashlight and so it took me a minute to juggle everything until I could flick the light back on for one final second to orientate myself. The light burst bright across the back of the house and I caught a split-second glimpse of Jed’s dark scowling face in the gloom behind the kitchen curtains. I went to the back door, soaking wet again, and shivering from the cold and the tension.

  I stood in the kitchen for long seconds, catching my breath as water dripped onto the floor.

  “Find anything?” Jed’s voice ghosted out of the night. He was still by the window.

  “Yeah,” I said, and set the array of tools down on the kitchen counter. “I’m sure one of these will do the job.”

  There was a moment of silence, then Jed said softly, “Jesus.” He took another long urgent mouthful of whisky. The bottle was less than a third full. I left the flashlight on the counter beside the pliers. “We’ll be needing the strong light when Walker rips your tooth out,” I said with a hint of malicious pleasure. “We wouldn’t want him to wrench out the wrong one – would we?”

  I left Jed, and used the cigarette lighter to find the bathroom where I changed into more dry clothes, before heading back into the living room.

  I could hear a soft murmuring voice, and when I reached the doorway, I saw Colin Walker leaning close to the candles, his hands splayed wide, and his facial features intense. He was talking quietly to Harrigan, who seemed genuinely appalled. Harrigan heard me approach and his head snapped round. His eyes were wide and fearful.

  “Mitch, come and listen to this,” he urged. “Mr Walker – he has information about the virus.”

  I sat down. The candle light guttered and then came back, glowing brightly.

  Colin Walker looked at me and raised an eyebrow.

  I nodded. “I found four pairs of pliers. I’m sure one of them will do,” I said. “I left them in the kitchen – and Jed found a flashlight.”

  Walker nodded, then started to get to his feet but I grabbed his arm, and he sank slowly back to the floor. “Jed’s still got about a third of a bottle of whisky to go,” I said. “Maybe another thirty minutes. By then he’ll be feeling no pain.”

  Walker relaxed a little. Harrigan cut across the conversation. “Tell Mitch what you told me,” he urged. “Tell him what you know about the undead virus.”

  Walker’s eyes flicked back to me and he stared hard. His gaze was steady – almost disconcerting.

  “I was a janitor in Washington,” he said quietly. “I worked for the Government.”

  I frowned. “I thought you were military.”

  “I was,” he said. “But when I mustered out after the Middle East, there wasn’t a lot of work for guys like me. So I took the only work available,” his eyes shifted to glance at the silhouette of his daughter sitting quietly in the sofa chair, and then back to me. “When the virus first hit, the government didn’t know how it started,” Walker went on. “They still don’t. They don’t know if it was from one of our CDC labs – an experiment that went horribly wrong – or whether it was an act of international terrorism.”

  “Terrorism?”

  Walker nodded. “A dozen militant terrorist groups claimed responsibility for the virus. Every extreme group you have ever heard of, and plenty more you wouldn’t know about. They all claimed the virus as their own, and said it was Allah’s Wrath against the Great Satan… you know the kind of things they say.”

  I sat in complete silence. Jed and I had been holed up in a house for three weeks, with no contact to the outside world. The only snatches of news we had heard had been during the first few days of frantic fractured radio grabs as we drove to escape the plague. Since then, we’d heard nothing, and seen very little. During the first week in the safe house, we had seen undead roaming the street beyond the front window. We’d seen two cars crash, and the victims set upon and dragged from their vehicles. We had seen the victims torn to pieces and their bodies dismembered. But the horror had been isolated and localized to what was going on outside that window. We had no idea that the entire country had gone to hell.

  “How far has it spread?” I asked quietly.

  “Everywhere,” Walker said. “It spread like a wild-fire, starting somewhere here on the east coast. One rumor was that the virus had been brought into America by an infected Egyptian sailor who arrived in Baltimore harbor with unusual symptoms… but no one really knows,” Walker said. “But within days it had raged along the entire east coast, and before the Government could develop some way to quarantine the affected states, it had spread west. The whole country is gone,” Walker’s voice became grave. He shook his head. “It’s all gone.”

  The news was like a punch in the guts. Isolated, Jed and I had dared to hope that somehow our Government was working hard to contain the spread of the infection. I thought maybe the military was flexing its muscle and preparing to sweep back up the coast, reclaiming the areas that had been infected. We thought hope and help were still somewhere nearby, and that all we needed to do was wait for the cavalry to sweep back into Virginia and restore order – that one day soon this would all be over and we could pick up the pieces of our lives. We thought the world would go on. Now I realized suddenly that it wouldn’t.

  The world would never be the same again. Fear and horror were the new everyday reality. We weren’t victims of some terrible natural disaster – we were the survivors of an apocalyptic plague.

  I shook my head in disbelief. “The Government…?”

  “There isn’t one,” Walker said bluntly. “And there’s no army. It’s like every worse-case nuclear scenario you could imagine,” he said darkly. “There are pockets of survivors, but chaos reigns. The undead virus has wiped out everything. Social order collapsed within the first week. Since then it has just gotten worse.”

  Harrigan interrupted. “You said there were survivors. What do you mean?”

  Walker stared down into the light of the candle and his voice became low and heavy.

  “The navy has ships off the coast. They were recalled from their station in the Mediterranean once things got out of hand. The infection hasn’t reached them. They’re offshore, taking any survivors who can reach them.”

  I shook my head. It made no sense. “And how the hell do people reach the ships?”

  Walker made a macabre, bleak face. “There is a staging point about forty miles south of here. It’s a little town on the coast called Pentelle. Somehow, it has remained virus free. There are troops there.”

  I stared off into the darkness.

  Forty miles.

  It might as well be a million. The chances of us ever making the distance through a world filled with undead killers were practically zero.

  “The only other way… is by helicopter,” Walker said, and there was a pointed bitter emphasis to his words.

  Harrigan picked up the ball. “And that’s where you and your daughter were heading?”

  Walker nodded. “The plan was to fly to Pentelle,” he said softly. “There was a pilot flying people out of the Capitol. He was charging twenty grand for a seat on his chopper.”

  I sat and thought for long seconds. “Is that why the helicopter was painted black?”

  Walker shrugged. “I suppose,” he said, as though it had never been something he had considered. “This guy was making a fortune. He was ferrying the wealthy and the desperate. He didn’t c
are.”

  I did some more thinking, and then shook my head slowly. “We never heard another helicopter,” I said. “Ever. If this guy was flying people from the Capitol to this place on the coast, why didn’t we hear him flying overhead? He must have been making several flights a day. It’s probably only a two hundred and fifty mile flight.”

  “We got into trouble,” Walker explained. “We should have been east of here. The route was along the coast. But shortly after liftoff, there were engine problems. At first I thought the pilot was scamming us – trying to get extra money. But he wasn’t. The instrument panel went haywire, and suddenly we were flying miles off course. He was fighting just to keep the thing in the air. That’s how we ended up here – and it’s the reason we crashed.”

  “You were lucky to survive,” Harrigan said gently.

  Walker said nothing for a long moment, then he looked up at Harrigan’s ruddy face. “Were we?” he asked softly, then shook his head. “I prayed that if we crashed, we died instantly – because that death would be better than being torn apart by the undead.”

  Solemn silence. My thoughts went back to the dead bodies littered across the grass just a few hundred yards back down the street, and to the scene Jed had described as the undead ghouls had reached the helicopter and torn the pilot’s body apart.

  “Do you know anything about the virus?” I asked Walker. “How it spreads? How it affects the victims? How to stop them?”

  Walker took a deep breath and frowned in dark concentration. “It’s bad,” he said. “Real bad. If you’re asking me what the scientists call the virus, I honestly couldn’t tell you. It’s got a name about twenty-seven letters long. But in Washington – and on the streets – they’re calling it the Jaws Virus.”

  “Jaws?”

  Walker nodded.

  “What does that stand for?” Harrigan asked.

  “Nothing,” Walker said darkly. “It’s not an acronym. It’s because of the way the virus makes the undead act. They’re like sharks,” he said. “Their hearing seems to be greatly magnified, so that movement attracts them – just like a shark. And the blood. They sense it. It drives them to frenzy,” he explained. “The thirst for blood is the trigger. That is why not everyone bitten is infected and becomes another undead killer,” he said. “Because sometimes they just tear the body to pieces. Sometimes they’re so driven to a frenzy that they turn upon themselves. If they’re still fresh – still in the early stages of infection – a wound to themselves can be enough to drive others around them to madness. They turn on the victim. That’s what we saw tonight, when you shot that tall undead man, and he went over backwards near the helicopter. He must have been fresh. There must still have been blood in his body. The others sensed it immediately and tore him to pieces. That’s why you can’t ever get a wound and leave it unattended. They sense it somehow. And that’s why it has been called Jaws – because of Spielberg’s shark movie.”

  “How do we kill them?”

  “Head shot,” Walker said. “It’s the only way.”

  I grunted, and remembered the ghoul that had attacked Harrigan on the rain swept street. I remembered the instant when Jed’s bullet had torn through the zombie’s eye socket after we had shot it repeatedly in the chest with absolutely no effect. “We figured as much out for ourselves,” I said. ‘We just had to find out the hard way.”

  “The hard way?” Walker asked.

  “Trial and error,” I said vaguely.

  I sat back out of the candle light and arranged my thoughts. There were a lot of questions I wanted to ask Walker. For all he had told us about the virus, the man himself – and his daughter –remained mysteries. We knew nothing about them, and it left me feeling uneasy. But a sudden sound from the kitchen snapped my senses to full alertness. I got to my feet, my hand going instinctively to the Glock, and whirled round, just in time to see my brother stagger into the living room. The bottle of whisky was clutched in his big knuckled hand. It was empty. Jed swayed on unsteady feet, looking like a dark deathly apparition. He stared blankly for long seconds, rocking from side to side like a man on a small boat in a storm.

  “Fucker!” he hissed at me, “let’s get this over and fucking done with.” Then he seemed to recognize the shape of Walker’s teenage daughter huddled down deep in the cushions of the sofa, and he was overcome by some ridiculous attempt at manners. “Fuck. Sorry,” he mangled an apology. “I fucking forgot about you.”

  The girl said nothing. Walker and Harrigan got to their feet. Walker glanced at me. “We’ll do it in the bathroom,” he said. “It will be easier to clean up afterwards.”

  I nodded. “Will there be blood?”

  Walker’s face twisted into some kind of a smile. “Oh, yes,” he said. “There will be blood.”

  Walker turned to his daughter. “Stay here, Millie.”

  She sat up with sudden alarm. “No!” she blurted, and there was a flush of fear beneath the skin of her cheeks. She was terrified of being alone. “I… I want to stay with you,” she said softly, and then added, “Dad.”

  There were a couple of straight-backed chairs nested around a table in the kitchen. I carried one of them through to the bathroom and set it down on the tiled floor near the vanity sink. Walker had two pairs of pliers in his hands, and Harrigan gave me the flashlight and stood back. Jed slumped down onto the chair, and his head lolled to the side. His eyes were bleary and unfocussed. There were little frothy bubbles of spittle at the corners of his mouth.

  There was just one small window in the bathroom and we had drawn the curtains shut when we had first cleared the house. Now Harrigan hung heavy towels over the opening so that we could use the flashlight without fear. I flicked it on. The light was dazzling – a piercing beam that bounced off the white tiles of the walls and floor, and illuminated the whole room.

  Walker chose the long-nosed pliers and tested them, snapping at thin air. They looked vile and menacing, and the serrated grip was crusted with dirt. He cleaned them on the tail of his shirt and looked at Harrigan.

  “You’ll have to hold him down,” Walker said. “Get behind him and pin his arms.”

  Harrigan looked doubtful. He was a big man, but Jed was bigger and more finely muscled. And Jed had a temper. Harrigan hesitated. “Shouldn’t…. shouldn’t we tie him down?”

  I shook my head. “No rope,” I said. “And I’m not going back out into the night to find any.”

  Still Harrigan hesitated. He edged himself behind the chair and took up a position where he could press down on Jed’s shoulders. Walker snatched another towel from a railing and wrapped it across Jed’s chest, like a hairdresser’s cape.

  “For the blood,” he explained to me – not that he needed to.

  I leaned close to Jed and looked him in the eye. We were gathered in a tight knot around the chair and Jed was beginning to look alarmed. He knew what was coming – and the imminent fear of pain was starting to seep through the whiskey-fueled haze.

  “You can’t make any noise,” I said to Jed, speaking slowly and clearly to make sure he understood. “It’s important,” I explained. “The undead are like sharks, Jed. They hear noise – it sounds the same as someone splashing in the water does to a shark – so if you start screaming, they are going to hear you. They’ll find us and kill us all. Understand?”

  Jed nodded, but it was a jerky, spasmodic gesture that spoke of his fear. He was tense in the chair. I could see the thick corded veins in his neck beginning to swell. His jaw was clenched tightly shut. Walker leaned over him.

  “Open up,” he said.

  Jed hesitated. His eyes flicked to me, then up to the ceiling. His mouth opened reluctantly.

  “Wider.”

  Jed made a sharp hissing sound through his nostrils, like a bull about to charge. I turned the flashlight round and shone the bright light into his mouth.

  Walker hunched down a little and his voice became perfunctory and practical. I crouched down close beside him. Jed’s breath stank. I
t smelled like a skunk had crawled between his lips and died. Walker reversed the pliers in his hand. They had a yellow plastic grip. He eased them inside Jed’s mouth and rested the edge of his hand on Jed’s bottom jaw to stop him slamming his mouth shut. Using one handle of the pliers, Walker gently tapped at a lower back tooth that was barely visible, surrounded by infected red swollen gum.

  “Is this the one?” He touched the tooth – and Jed’s body went stiff with an electric jolt of pain. His hands clawed at the armrests of the chair and he thumped his foot on the floor. Harrigan jumped in alarm and locked his big beefy hands down on Jed’s shoulders, clamping like a vice.

  Jed wailed in low pain and said something that was distorted by the shape of his mouth.

  Walker straightened and turned to me. “It’s nasty,” he said. “Very nasty. The gum is swollen so that it will be hard to get a grip on the tooth.” He looked thoughtful, and then bent back down to look inside Jed’s open mouth again.

  “See the tooth?” he asked. I peered over the rim of the flashlight. “See the cavity in the middle? That’s going to make it tough to get a good grip with the pliers,” Walker explained. “Because if I grab too hard, the tooth might shatter completely.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Is that bad?”

  “Very,” he said. “Then I’d have to dig around, trying to remove the broken fragments. We could be here for hours, and I might not get it all.”

  I caught a glimpse of Jed’s expression. He was going white. The blood was draining from his face, and his eyes were wide, rolling in their sockets with absolute terror.

  “Jesus,” he said in a quiet, fearful whisper.

  Jed was a big guy, and he had spent over a decade in one of the country’s toughest prisons. He was as hard as nails – utterly fearless and grim-faced in the fiercest fight – and yet here he was, confronted with having a simple tooth extracted, and he was on the verge of sheer blind panic.

  I concealed a grin of pure enjoyment.