Exit Zero (Book 2): Nuke Jersey

by Neil A. Cohen

  Juniper wriggled in her seat, trying to get comfortable the same way Ernie had before.

  He continued. “Not sure if you noticed, but not all Skells are the same. Some people weather the infection better than others. They don’t become so emaciated. From what I hear, if someone was a real tub o’ lard before they got infected, like a real pachyderm fatso, the infection kind of pauses, or stops completely. Leaving them not like a walking skeleton like the others, but more like one of those marathon runners. Still skinny, athletic skinny. Not healthy athletic looking, but ‘someone who exercises way too much’ type skinny. Those ones can be feisty. Those ones, headquarters want to know about immediately when we pick up.”

  Juniper nodded again. Seemed like she understood, but Ernie knew that even college kids who were supposed to be smart had a way of half-heartedly agreeing while being lost in their own brains. Still, this girl seemed like she might be made of harder stuff.

  So he tried to keep her attention with conversation. “One time in the prison, I had this marathon runner as an inmate. He was a lawyer who was involved in some sort of financial scam. This lawyer sued the prison, claiming that since he was a marathon runner and running was like his religion, he should be allowed to run every day. They were inhibiting his religious worship by not allowing him to run. The lawyer won and so this guy got to go running in the courtyard every day as his quote, unquote, worship time.” Ernie looked over to Juniper, but she was still staring out the window. He gripped the wheel and kept on. “Well anyway, this marathon guy looked awful to me. He was fit, but not in healthy shape. All bone, lean muscle and veins. Not sure what that was all about. Why would you want to look like that? Kept talking about resting heart rate and shit, but to me, I thought he was just running himself to death.

  “About a year later, this guy gets some sort of foot issue. The doctor tells him to stop running. He says no, cut my foot off. No shit, this asshole sued the state again for the surgery and won so that he can have his right foot cut off and this flat plastic prosthesis blade attached so he could keep running. Who the fuck cuts off his own foot, makes himself a cripple, just so he can keep running? So every day, this guy goes out to the yard, has the prosthesis attached, runs in circles for a couple hours, and then turns the foot back in. Real fanatic.”

  Juniper mumbled in agreement. “Mmhmm.”

  Ernie said, “Well, I think of that guy when I see some of these sturdier Skells. Headquarters has a lot more interest in those than others. When we pick up one of those physically fit Skells, we notify the drop off point ahead of time, and those Skells get taken elsewhere.”

  That seemed to get her attention back. “Where are they taken?”

  “Hell if I know. Supposedly, they’re housed away till a cure can be found, but I don’t see any doctors around the quarantine zones. Lots of contractors, lots of guns, and those intake buildings they set up. I hear, though, just idle gossip, mind you, and you did not hear this from me, but I hear they’re being trained.”

  “Trained?”

  “Yeppers. That is what I hear. A drunken contractor was shooting his mouth off at the bar one night. Something about a boot camp for special Skells. He called them Vinny’s or something like that”

  “Boot camp? Like a military boot camp?”

  Ernie shrugged a little. “Just what I heard.”

  They sat in silence while Ernie weaved his way to the second pick up point. As they pulled up, they could see this one had attracted Skells. It had also attracted taggers. Someone had spray-painted on the side of the Kraken unit: “Must Gut Them.”

  “Weird stuff,” Ernie said.

  “What?”

  “Jogging as a religion.”

  Juniper cocked an eye. Made a noise like, “Mrm.” That sort of noise that was a cross between “I agree” and “Go fuck yourself, I’m thinking bigger.”

  Ernie brought the truck to a standstill about fifteen feet from the Kraken. He jumped out of the cab and turned to his passenger. “Little lady, you can watch through the windshield if you prefer, just to get eyes on the process. No need to jump right in with both feet.”

  She opened her door and jumped down, landing solidly on both her feet. “Like that?” she asked.

  Ernie smiled. “Let’s see how long this bravado will last.”

  He opened a panel on the truck, one underneath the large PCRC Containment Team logo painted across the side. He pulled out his too tools for wrangling Skells. “Here’s the fishing equipment.” He said to Juniper, putting the two long poles over his shoulder. One appeared to be little more than a reinforced pool skimmer, only the skimmer mesh was loose like a butterfly net. The other was a shorter pole that could extend and retract with the push of a button.

  He walked over to the first male Skell. The man was a new infection, not fully turned. He plopped the net over the man’s head and then pressed the button that telescoped the other pole, which had a collar-like clamp that extended from the end. He placed the open clamp at the base of the man’s neck and a sensor on the back of the clamp detected the obstruction and snapped shut around the man’s throat. It locked tight.

  “It reminds me of a Venus Flytrap that I had when I was a kid,” Juniper said.

  Ernie walked the infected man into the back of the truck. It was sectioned into four cattle shoots.

  Juniper walked to the rear of the truck to watch how Ernie stored the Skell for safe transport and she noticed the Kraken hum was replicated in the back of the vehicle. Four speakers up on each corner played the sound, ensuring the infected would remain docile once separated from the Kraken.

  Ernie navigated the man down the first shoot, using the pool skimmer to guide the infected. He placed the male Skell up against the wall, released the neck clamp with his right hand, pushed the man backwards against the wall using the pool skimmer in his left, and a wall-mounted clamp with its own sensor locked around the man’s neck, holding him firm.

  She noticed how the wall-mounted clamps could be adjusted up and down, depending on the height of the infected that was being contained. She also noticed that in the second cattle shoot row, the neck clamps were all no higher than four feet off the ground.

  That must be where the children were contained.

  Ernie already had a second man clamped and was attaching him to the wall next to the first. “How about I leave the female up to you?”

  “Now, Ernie, that sounds a little sexist. You don’t think I could have contained the men?”

  “I do apologize, young lady, no offense intended,” he said, removing his ball cap and taking a deep bow as if he were a southern gentlemen meeting Scarlett O’Hara.

  She took hold of the two poles and marched toward her prey. The woman was in pretty awful shape. He had been infected for some time. Her skin resembled leather wrapped around bone. The stomach protruded.

  Juniper said, “Why do their stomachs swell like that? Acid or bloating?”

  “Damned if I know, but I sure hope none of them burst. I tell you, that would have me losing my lunch.”

  She gently placed the netting over the woman’s head. The bedraggled female Skell spun her head around and she snapped her jaws at Juniper, who jumped a little, but kept her grip on the pole.

  “They do that sometimes,” Ernie said. “You need to get that neck clamp on her lickity split.”

  Juniper placed the clamp up against the woman’s neck and it sealed shut. She saw then that between the woman’s teeth were strips of flesh and tendon.

  Juniper felt the bile rise up, but was able to control it.

  She got a whiff of the woman. The Skell did not smell like a corpse should. Juniper had been around fresh corpses when she went to a crime reenactment farm for a term paper. It was an FBI area that used actual corpses in differing states of decay to so that pathologists could learn the sequential states of decay.

  This woman smelled more like rancid ground beef. Like the time her mother had bought a pound of fresh hamburger and forgot it in the c
ar over a summer weekend. The stink was distinctive.

  She maneuvered the ragged woman into the back of the truck and down the aisle the first two men were housed. She put the female Skell up against the wall. The woman started to jerk violently. She shoved the woman against the sensor and the clamp closed around her neck. The woman kept flailing, even though the two men remained calm from the humming sound.

  Juniper lifted the skimmer off the female Skell’s head and rushed toward the back of the truck. The woman moved up and down like a piston, slamming her jaw into the metal clamp before shooting back up again. Each time the woman’s head came down, smashing her lower jaw on the clamp, it ravaged her skull and shattered her teeth. She made one last violent push up and pull down, and her head popped off her neck like a thumb popping off the yellow flower of a dandelion. The head hit the wooden slats on the floor and rolled in a circle. The body fell to its knees and then stood up. The body then ran in the direction of Juniper, unstable and bouncing off either side of the cattle shoot, but scrambling with purpose.

  Juniper screamed and even Ernie let out a horrified yelp. Juniper dove from the back of the truck and was caught by Ernie. The two tumbled to the ground.

  The headless woman kept on her manic race, leaving her rolling dead cranium behind. The body reached the back of the truck and slammed to the ground. It awkwardly made its way back to its feet and bolted down the road, weaving as if it were dizzy. Dizzy and headless.

  They watched in silence as the body charged down the empty street.

  Juniper panted. “Has that happened before?” She found her feet and secured them against the cracked asphalt.

  Ernie shook his head. “No, I can truly say it has not.”

  “Do we...go get her?”

  “Fuck no. She’s got no head, I couldn’t secure her if I wanted to.”

  They both stood in silence for a few minutes.

  Ernie said, “Young lady, would you like me to take you back to the HQ?”

  “No,” she said. She balled her fists at her sides as sweat poured down her cheeks. Breathed through her nose. “I really want to know what the hell just happened.”

  CHAPTER 2

  The zombie apocalypse had begun in New Jersey. While unexpected, no one was really all that surprised. After all, where else better than in the state that America loves to hate?

  The Skell virus had been an unintended consequence of research meant to help mankind. The road to Skell was paved with good intentions. The concept was proposed by Dr. Woodrow Coleman, who wanted to grow A-grade meat in a lab via cattle stem cells. Inexpensive, healthy, protein created without the need for raising and slaughtering growth hormone-injected livestock. It would satisfy the animal rights activists, the anti-GMO crowd, the carbon footprint reduction crowd, and the meat for dinner crowd.

  It could change the planet, if it only worked.

  But it didn’t.

  This failure did not stop the largest defense contractor in the country, the Post Conflict Restoration Corporation (PCRC) from taking on the challenge, and lucrative contracts, to make it so.

  After all, the President of the United States had already announced the Affordable Meals Act, which would provide this low cost, eco-friendly meat to “food deserts” around the country. Maxwell Gold, the president of PCRC, had never met a challenge he could not conquer. For decades, he had served powerful men, ensuring that the president received whatever he desired; be it a position of importance to satisfy, and distract, an ambitious first lady, or the removal of a troublesome Supreme Court Justice through “natural causes.” Maxwell was the man with the plan.

  The PCRC had been approached by the current president, as well as representatives from the Congress and Senate, to put in place a plan that would allow current elected officials to remain in office indefinitely, and for the American public to accept a new form of “democracy” that no longer involved voting.

  Maxwell’s plan was simple. First was to instill a sense of urgency into the public, a crisis so overwhelming that everyone would turn to the federal government to save and protect them.

  Second, he needed to spread a different kind of mindset throughout the country. To infuse the population with the type of people who would be more than comfortable living under dictatorship. A populace that would be so appreciative of what they had, what had been given to them by the government, that they would see no reason for change or dissent.

  The third part of the plan he did not share with anyone other than his closest inner circle. The president and congressional representatives and senators would indeed get what they wanted: an absolute, unchallenged ruling class. Unfortunately, none of them would live to benefit from this new arrangement.

  The president chose a live televised address to the nation, where he would explain that the new Skell pandemic was a severe threat facing America, and that extreme executive actions were needed to ensure the safety of the American public and stability of the nation. He was to demonstrate that the entirety of the United States government was in agreement on these actions, and to prove this bipartisanship, officials from all three branches of government would be in the chamber with him to listen to his speech and stand and applaud in unity. But, just prior to this historic, unprecedented speech, they gathered to enjoy a sumptuous dinner, with a main course of steak provided by the PCRC.

  Maxwell had enacted phase three.

  The nation watched as the effects of that meal kicked in midway through the live telecast. Congressmen began eating senators. Senators were eating cabinet members. Supreme Court Justices ate the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the president ate his VP. By the time the Capitol Police were able to break down the doors of the sealed room, there was no one left to save. They were all dead or dying. That is, except for the sole elected official who was not in attendance. A young, freshman congressman from New Jersey named Patrick Callahan.

  For the residents of New Jersey, the carnage was not just on the television. Soon it was on the parkway, on the turnpike, in their back yards, and in their bedrooms.

  Skells did not bring about the immediate societal collapse one would expect. The government did not cease functioning, business and commerce continued, and people moved on with their lives—it’s just that now it was a life rife with monsters.

  The people of New Jersey first reacted, and then adapted, to life among the infected, or Skells as they had been named, due to their skeletal appearance. Skells were not re-animated corpses, they were simply infected individuals who had an insatiable addiction to human flesh. An addiction brought about either by their own consumption of the Modified Embolic Animal Tissue or M.E.A.T., which they believed to be lab-created beef grown from animal stem cells. Unbeknownst to the consumer, MEAT had been created out of human stem cells.

  The Skell virus was also transmitted through contact with the infected. Those bitten, but who managed to escape before being entirely consumed, also became Skells. The amount of time it took infection to overtake a person depended upon their body mass. The more body fat, the longer it took the virus to burn through and melt the humanity away. Those that were morbidly obese even had the potential to survive the infection if it burned itself out before the wasting away was complete. For once, survival was not meant for the fittest.

  That was two weeks ago, but people were already accepting the new normal. Life with Skells meant new rules and regulations, new bureaucracy, and new authority to obey. PCRC security forces were deployed around the state to control the outbreak. Containment teams rounded up the infected for transport to quarantine zones. All universities in the state were closed and taken over by the state via eminent domain to be turned into holding areas to house the infected until a cure could be found. For the rest of the population, personal restrictions in movement and activities were enforced as part of the statewide enactment of martial law.

  Sure, there were a few hiccups. After the nation viewed the President of the United States and the Congress and Senate devouring each other
on live TV, the public became understandably concerned. The White House in Washington, D.C. was overrun with panicked and angry citizens, and while the Secret Service was eventually able to secure the building, it sustained severe damage. Perfunctory looting and mass civil unrest occurred in parts of the nation, but the National Guard and local first responders took control, and calm and civility was again restored. For most of the nation, life went on as normal, except for a couple troubled spots: Texas, California and, of course, New Jersey.

  PCRC was granted the sole source contract to provide security and restoration of operations for the state of NJ, which bore the brunt of much of the mayhem. Due to the unprecedented nature of events, unprecedented actions were needed and regulations were created and strictly enforced.

  While the rest of the country was handled by local elected officials and law enforcement, New Jersey, which was now the temporary seat of power in the country, was completely under the control of the PCRC.

  The last of the official US military presence within NJ was a temporarily established Forward Operating Base, or FOB, at Princeton University. This outpost was given the name FOB Prince, but the soldiers stationed there called it FOB Brains. It was to serve as the beachhead for the initial military response to the Skell outbreak. In command of this base was Colonel James Tindall. Events overcame the colonel and the end result was the calling in of an illegal air strike against chemical plants in Northern New Jersey. The Colonel had believed all was lost, and that the resulting toxic chemical plume from the strike would wipe out the Skells, as well as much of the uninfected, across NJ. But he did not plot the winds before launch and much of the chemical cloud drifted away from the state. Sorry, New York. After that, Col. Tindall fled and became a wanted man.

  California was also in chaos, but not for any Skell-related reasons. For over a year, a domestic terror group had taken root in Northern California. They called themselves G.R.A.SS, which stood for Green Rights Action, Schutzstaffel. Their followers were a loosely knit amalgam of outsiders with opposing, and even contradictory, gripes and demands who found commonality under the GRASS banner. There were anti-capitalists, anti-government, and general anarchists. Skinheads, and hippies, hackers and anti-technologists, anti-immigration groups and Hispanic gangs, and all religions from Atheists to Zoroastrians. Together, they had traveled from across the nation, and even from across the globe, to join the GRASS terrorist movement. By sheer numbers alone, they had turned much of Northern California into a law enforcement no-go zone. These new followers, some street thugs, some technical cyber guru’s, some media savvy propagandists, took to calling themselves The Blades of GRASS.