by L. D. King
Gafar was overcome with revulsion. Tears began to run down his face. “The zombies are ripping them apart. Their screams are horrifying. The police officers have abandoned the guards to their fate in order to protect the bystanders. It’s horrible, so very horrible…”
Everyone on Gafar’s crew was busy doing their different jobs. There were several areas of zombie activity, so they had to juggle what they would film when. As Gafar and his crew were working, none of them had time to look around. If they did, they would have seen the zombies coming up from behind them or those that were coming at them from both sides of the buildings that they had parked between. They all focused on the wholesale killings that were taking place right in front of them.
As Tetsuo looked back over his shoulder, he saw the first zombie grab Taha by his neck. It bit into his shoulder ripping large chunks of his shoulder muscle completely off of his body in one swift movement spitting it on the ground. Taha screamed. He grabbed the zombie by its head with his only arm that still worked, but he was too late to do anything to help himself. As Taha grabbed its head, the zombie pushed him to the ground face first, kneeling next to him. The zombie started to rip the meat off of Taha’s back using full swings of its clawed hands. Tetsuo stopped what he was doing as Taha cried out. He shouted to Gafar.
“Gafar, watch out! Zombies are coming towards our van! They are coming down the side of the building! Gafar! Taha has been killed! Allah have mercy on his soul!”
As Tetsuo was shouting, three more zombies circled around behind the van, grabbing Shamz by his head. Rizwan was grabbed from behind. The three zombies pushed them to the ground. They knelt on the ground next to Shamz and Rizwan shredding flesh off the two men as quickly as they could. Tetsuo was still shouting warnings to Gafar. Unfortunately, Gafar, with his headset on, could not hear Tetsuo.
“Gafar! Those zombies have Shamz and Rizwan behind the van! Rizwan has lost an arm! They are dying before my eyes! We must do something… We cannot just let them die! I do not know what to do! Allah have mercy on them! There is no hope.”
At nearly the last moment, Gafar saw Tetsuo waving his arms. He took his headset off to hear what he was shouting. Then Gafar looked back towards the van and saw the torn bodies of his three friends.
Gafar shouted to Moiz. His microphone was still on, so anyone who was watching the broadcast could hear him shouting as well. He pointed down the side of the van to get Moiz to look.
“Moiz, turn around! Look! Tetsuo, drop everything where it is and get in the van! We need to get out of here now!”
“Gafar! What about Shamz?” asked Tetsuo. “What about Rizwan? Listen to them, they’re dying! Do you hear their screams? We have to help them!”
“Tetsuo, there’s nothing we can do for them. They are in Allah’s hands! If we do not go now, we will be the next to die! We must get out of here now!”
The three of them abandoned their equipment and ran to the van. Tetsuo jumped into the driver’s seat and starting the engine. Gafar jumped into the passenger seat.
Moiz jumped into the open side door and pulled it shut. The back doors of the van were wide open as they raced out of the stadium parking lot. The production camera fell over onto the ground, but it was still recording and broadcasting to the van via a wireless connection which had a range of 15 meters. The van would continue transmitting the camera’s signal back to the studio until the van was out of range of the camera.
Tetsuo was driving as fast as he could, wiping away the tears in his eyes. Gafar, sitting next to Tetsuo, was calling Kamal through the station operator.
“Please connect me with Kamal Saab. This is Gafar Rahal calling.”
Kamal picked up the phone on his desk.
“This is Kamal. How can I help you, Gafar?”
“Kamal, we are returning to the station. Have you been receiving our signal? Right now there are only three of us left. Myself, Moiz Ajam, and Tetsuo Amjad. Shamz Kader, Taha Ahmed and Rizwan El-Mofty are all dead, killed by zombies at King Fahd Stadium. It was horrible.”
He sook his head in disbelief. “If you watched our signal, you saw what is happening there. We recorded everything in case you did not receive the transmission. So many people died… The stadium’s security guards were all killed by zombies, so many that you could not begin to count them.”
He looked into the distance. “I think what we are witnessing is the start of a very real catastrophe that is growing out of this zombie outbreak. In just the last 30 hours, it has grown to this level, just since the first report in Melbourne. There is death everywhere. I don’t know of any place that is safe.”
“Gafar, my friend,” said Kamal. “Perhaps you might be exaggerating a little?”
“Kamal, did you watch any of the footage we sent back to you? If you have not, you need to do it now. After you have watched it, we can talk about it. There was so much death… It was sickening. We are pulling into the parking garage now, and I will be in your office shortly.”
In a few minutes, Gafar and the other two men were in Kamal’s office. Gafar inserted the memory stick into the computer on Kamal’s desk and pressed PLAY. As Kamal was watching it, Gafar told him, “Kamal, this is the raw footage. This is what happened to our friends. This same thing happened to probably 150 to 200 people at the stadium.”
He gave Kamal a hard look and said, “If anyone at all got out alive, they were fortunate. You need to stop what you are doing now and watch this without any interruption. This is where our world is heading. The zombies are taking over. They will kill anyone that they can catch, anywhere, anytime, day or night.”
“Fine, Gafar,” said Kamal. “I will do nothing else but watch your footage.”
They sat in silence, watching the footage of the stadium. When it was over, Kamal looked Gafar, his eyes wide open, unblinking, with tears rolling down his face. His mouth was hanging open. After a minute or two, he shook his head and cleared his throat.
“I did not know it had gotten so bad. I told Ahmed to broadcast this live with no editing. I need to make sure that Ahmed did as I asked. Gafar, will you have my secretary call the head of security, please. She is to tell him to lock down the building. Also tell her that we need to clear the large conference room.”
Kamal called Ahmed Samara, the production manager. He was in charge of what was broadcast over the air. Kamal told him to come to his office immediately. When Ahmed arrived, Kamal motioned to a chair and asked him to sit.
“Ahmed, did you broadcast Gafar’s transmission from the stadium as they sent it live?”
“Mr. Saab, I did as you told me. We will be closed down for doing this. This will be the end of all of our careers.”
“Ahmed, did you watch it as Gafar sent it in? I just watched it myself. I am not worried about our careers at this point. What I am worried about is our survival. This zombie outbreak is going to bring the world to its knees. We are responsible to our viewers. Our job is to make news like this available to anyone that who wants to view it. People need to know the truth. People around the world need to know that they are not safe anywhere outside. I want you to put this on a repeating loop and keep playing it until we lose power. Call all of our remote crews back to the station, now. They are to stop what they are doing and get back here as fast as they can. Right now it is 1:00 PM; I want to meet with everyone at 4:00 PM in the large conference room. No one is allowed to leave the building.”
“Yes, Mr. Saab. I will call all the crews that are out and tell them to return now. I will put Gafar’s footage on a repeating loop to play until we get shut down or we lose power.”
The three field crews were called back to the station, and the station locked down. They brought the emergency generator online and disconnected from the city’s power grid.
In a few minutes, all of Saudi Arabia would know how deadly the zombie outbreak was.
As the loop began to play, the panic started, first in Riyadh, and then less than thirty minutes later throughout Saudi Arabia. Those
that had the ability to leave took what they had and ran.
At 4:00 PM, all of the station’s personnel gathered in the large meeting room.
Chapter 8
University Medical Center
New Orleans, Louisiana
ADZ +5d
August 19, 2036, marked five days since Australia Day Zero began. Layla Gallot had been home for a much-needed — and much too brief — sleep, and was getting ready to go back in to work. She worked as a Registered Nurse in the emergency room at the University Medical Center in New Orleans.
Layla had been a bridesmaid at the wedding of one of her friends. Her future husband, Landon Gallot, was a friend of the groom. He was also one of his groomsmen.
Throughout the wedding rehearsal, the actual wedding and the reception that followed, the two of them could not take their eyes off each other. At the reception, they danced the night away.
The next day, Layla dialed Landon’s number eight or ten times, only to hang up as quickly as she pressed send. She was standing in her apartment kitchen, staring at her phone, working up the will to try again, when it rang. It startled her so much she nearly dropped the receiver.
Looking at the Caller ID display, she could see that it was Landon. She let it ring five times before she answered it. They talked for an hour and a half, and made plans to have dinner that night.
So it was with them. Since the wedding they had been together almost every day. After two weeks of dating, Landon proposed to Layla. She quickly agreed to marry him.
They set a date for three months from that day. The planning for her wedding through to the honeymoon was a whirlwind of excitement. Upon their return to New Orleans from their honeymoon, Layla moved into Landon’s home. With the encouragement of her new husband, she quit her job as a grocery clerk at the neighborhood market and enrolled in nursing school. Less than two years later, Layla was a newly graduated Registered Nurse. Her first job as a new nurse was at University Medical Center in New Orleans.
Marrying Landon came with a new lifestyle. As a firefighter, Landon wanted to keep in shape for his job. He was a fitness fanatic. Layla wanting to be a part of her husband’s life, so she began following her husband’s fitness routine.
Shortly after beginning her workout routine, she started to lose her body fat and build muscle. Ten months later, Layla was becoming a fit and trim woman. She was a short, fit, happy wife of a firefighter. At five feet, two inches tall and 121 pounds, she was nothing to mess with. As a nurse, she had many patients who could be demanding. Layla was not going to have any of that. She would tell her patients that she was in charge. If they did not behave, she could make their lives a little rougher than it was already. Before the zombie outbreak began, she worked a regular schedule of three twelve-and-a-half-hour shifts each week. The hospital normally ran two shifts a day, beginning at either 7:00 AM or 7:00 PM, depending on whether the staffer was assigned to the day shift or the graveyard shift.
Now, five days into the outbreak, Layla was getting ready to work her fifth 12-hour day in a row. Since the outbreak began everyone at the hospital was working as long as they could stay awake, only going home to sleep when they reached the point of exhaustion or not being able to stand up any longer.
The City of New Orleans was nearly empty. The majority of the residents had either fled the city, were dead or were simply missing. No one knew why or where the missing people had gone; all they knew was that they had simply seemed to disappear. For as long as UMC had the staff to operate, however, they intended to remain open.
Inside the hospital, every gurney was full. Every patient room held two or three times as many patients that the room was designed for. Looking at the emergency room, it was hard to believe that so many of the city’s residents were gone. The majority of the complaints that brought people to the ER were things such as shortness of breath, chest pains, cuts, broken bones or high blood pressure. Now, however, the reason tended to be wounds from a zombie attack. Those patients would die no matter what the staff did to help them. Their deaths were generally quick.
Because of the number of deaths that were occurring at the hospital, they had been forced to set up an area as a morgue. The usual method of handling a death in a hospital was once a patient passed away, the hospital staff would call the coroner (if the death was suspicious) or a funeral home (if the death was due to natural causes) to come and retrieve the body. Now the coroner’s office was closed and the funeral homes were no longer operating. Dealing with the bodies was left up to the hospital itself.
At UMC, they had decided to use a storage room in the basement as a temporary morgue until they could set up a place to burn the bodies. The room that they chose for a temporary morgue was not big enough from the start, and was filling with bodies quickly. It had already become so crowded that they had begun taking the bodies off the gurneys that had been wheeled in and begun stacking the bodies on the floor. As more bodies were added, they were forced to stack them on top of each other. The bodies were coming faster than they could handle them. No one was able to get a place ready to burn the bodies. All they could do is keep up with the growing morgue full of the dead.
The hospital was not alone in having to make changes to survive. The rest of New Orleans had gone crazy as well. The police and fire departments had already shut down. Without staff to maintain the equipment to keep the utilities online, they were failing as well. The power was sketchy at best; it was on in some areas of town for a day or an hour, then it went out. Sometimes it came back, other times it was out for good.
Today Layla woke up from her rest when Landon came home early. He was one of the city’s firefighters. His shift was normally two 24-hour days in a row, and today was the first of his current two-day schedule. What he had to tell her made her worry even more. As he walked into the house, he called out, “Layla, are you home? Where are you?”
Startled, Layla answered him, “Landon, are you okay? I’m upstairs. What’s going on?” She hurried downstairs. “Is everything all right? I thought your shift started today. It’s 2:30… you should be at the firehouse.”
They found each other in the kitchen. Landon said, “Honey, I don’t understand what is going on. Nothing makes sense to me any more. Ever since this damn zombie thing started, it’s like the whole damn world has taken a huge crap. The fire crew that works the other side of our shift had nine of their fourteen men not show up for work. They didn’t call, or message, or anything. They just didn’t show up. On our shift, eight of our fourteen guys didn’t come in today. It was the same as the other shift. No call, nothing. Our shift’s fire chief came in, but he wasn’t in uniform. All he was doing was stopping to tell us to close up the firehouse and go home. He had his family with him in his truck, with the camper mounted on the back. He was leaving town and taking his family with him. With everything going to hell, he wanted to find a better place for his family. Without water in the hydrants or fuel to run the trucks, we couldn’t do the job that the city hired us to do.”
“So, sweetheart, what do you want to do?” Layla said. “I’ve been working steady since this crap started. Today will be my fourth straight day. There’s so many doctors, nurses, aides and other staff that aren’t showing up… they need me. I have to go in. This is what I do. I have to help until I can’t stand up anymore or the hospital closes. We’re already running the hospital on emergency power. We have water stored in a huge tank on the roof. They told us that we could possibly run for a month or more. We’re gonna stay open as long as we can to help the people of New Orleans.”
“Honey, I don’t want to run either. I think this might be over before too much longer. The CDC has to be working on a cure for this right now. One of the guys has a radio that can pick up stations from around the world. He has a generator to run it, too. He told us that the outbreak that is happening here in New Orleans is happening everywhere around the country, and I guess it’s in other countries as well. It seems like there’s nowhere to run that’s safe
. From the firehouse, we saw five or six zombies in the houses behind the station. It was the first time I’d really seen one of them. They’re horrible to look at. So the firehouse is shut down. You told me that most of the hospital staff aren’t coming in either; it sounds like the world is going to hell. How long are you going to work?”
“I’ll work as long as I have a hospital to work in. I worked too hard to get my nursing degree to just throw it away. When this is over, if I don’t go to work, I could have my license taken away. Right now it sounds like there’s nowhere to go that is any safer than right here. If you want to stay home, you can, but I’m going to work. You know what you can do? You have medical training. Since the firehouse is closed, why don’t you come to the hospital to help me? You know we’re shorthanded.”
“Layla, if I go with you, they’re not going to let me help. I’m not part of the hospital staff. Their insurance won’t allow them to let me work. You know that.”
“They’re so shorthanded now, they’d welcome you or anyone else who knows how to start an IV, splint a broken bone or bandage a wound. Just come with me, honey. I’m sure they’ll let you help out. When I left this morning, there were only two doctors left to cover the entire hospital. The other hospitals in the city are no better than we are. If you come, you can keep me safe. Come on, come with me.”
“The firehouse doesn’t want me to come in. I’ll come with you. I can do something to help. I’ll wear my firehouse uniform. Are you still on your 7 PM to 7:30 AM shift?”
“No, they aren’t using shifts anymore. Everyone works as long as they can before they stop to get some rest. I want to take my car because I think I can get another trip out of it; then it’ll be out of gas. I know you keep your truck full. We can leave it in the parking garage to use after my car dies. It’s 3 PM right now. I want to leave for the hospital in an hour. Believe me, we can use your help. They wanted me to stay over this morning but I told them I couldn’t work anymore without some rest. I’m sure that they’ll be asking again in the morning.”
