by Gareth Wood
Oh no. Not Eric. He dropped the last three feet and turned to me. My expression must have been grim, because he stopped and asked, “What’s wrong?”
“We have to go. Now!” That was Sanji, and he started off towards the houses where the undead were thinnest. Darren and Amanda followed, leaving Eric and I standing there. I looked him in the eye, and I knew I had to tell him. He’d find out soon enough. There was the chance it was just a scrape, after all.
“Eric, check your leg,” I said. He stared at me, then reached down and touched his calf. He winced, and raised his bloodied fingers up to look at them.
“Aw, hell…” he said, and sagged back to lean on the barricade. Amanda, Darren and Sanji were still moving towards the houses, but I stayed put. Eric lifted his pant leg and looked at the wound. It was definitely a bite. Small and really only a scrape, but those were teeth marks. Blood still seeped out, flowing sluggishly down his skin.
“It must have happened when I was getting into the back of the truck. Damn it.”
“Eric, I-”
“No. Shut up for now. We have to go.”
“But—”
“No. You can take care of it later. For now, we have to go.” He looked at me, and I knew what he meant about taking care of it later.
“Alright,” I said, and we turned to follow the others.
* * *
The standard issue Cold Lake euthanasia kit consists of an auto-injecting syringe inside a sturdy plastic case. All you have to do is press the injector firmly against the thigh or bicep and the drugs are delivered with a minimum of fuss. These drugs are a combination of a very powerful painkiller and a fast acting poison. Once injected, the drugs produce a pain free euphoria followed quickly by drowsiness and unconsciousness. The heart fails soon after. Typically, the brain is disrupted at this point, either with a surgical drill if the body is in Cold Lake, Athabasca, or some other secure location, or with a bullet if the body is in the field. The kits are issued to each member of every salvage team, every member of all the military units that operate outside Cold Lake, and to the gate security teams.
In the event that a member of a salvage team or military search and rescue group is bitten and manages to survive the immediate encounter, there are steps the other members of the team are supposed to take right away. Disarming the bitten individual is at the top of the list, for a number of reasons. There have been instances where a bitten member of a group has attacked his fellows when they attempted to administer the euthanasia syringe. There have been messy suicide attempts, not all successful. There have been planned revenge homicides and even one case where a woman didn’t tell her team she was bitten, and then died and reanimated.
The next step is isolation of the affected individual, if possible. Get them into a safe and secure place where they cannot harm anyone if anything goes wrong. Out here in the field such a place is harder to find than you might think.
Finally, repossession of the gear of the bitten individual. We are supposed to keep anything that might help in our chances for survival. Anything. So the protocol basically requires us to strip the victim naked and share out his stuff. I was pondering all of this as we walked along, Eric and I following the others, perhaps a dozen meters separating us from Sanji at the front. Darren and Amanda were a few meters back from him, walking to either side.
Dusk found us in the countryside outside the south end of the town. We had evaded the few wandering undead in this area, and managed to get to the outskirts unmolested. Neither Eric nor I had mentioned his bite yet, though we both knew it meant he was a dead man. We had shared a few looks during the last few hours, and I could see the fear in his eyes behind the determination he usually shows. He wasn’t the only one who was scared. Our situation was grim, and not likely to get any better in the immediate future. We had done a quick inventory on the way, and we were desperately low on supplies. Between us we had less than three hundred rounds of ammunition for all our guns, a couple of bottles of water, and only a few small bits of food. We had no tools other than a few knives, flashlights, Darren’s multi-tool, and a small mirror Amanda was carrying in her jacket. I had my handgun, Darren and Eric had C7’s and handguns, and Amanda and Sanji were carrying shotguns. Sanji still had his Browning, but Amanda had left hers in the truck.
This left us in a bad predicament. With night approaching, we needed shelter rapidly, and finding a house to spend the night in was essential. We had followed the road down as it ran southeast and eventually came parallel to the Columbia River, which would eventually reach the Pacific. We had seen signs of a hasty evacuation in the streets south of the bridge. Roads were cleared of vehicles, and the undead population was a lot thinner on this side than to the north. Several bodies were found lying in the streets, nearly skeletal, some with scattered bones. But the feeling of the place was one of orderly retreat, not panicked flight. I couldn’t say why, but I had the feeling that the survivors here had left via the same road we were walking along. If we’d had the opportunity, I would have bet that checking out the hospital and police station would reveal no supplies left behind, and everything packed up neatly for travel. It made me wonder if we would run into them anywhere.
A few kilometers southeast of the town we came upon a few houses. They were larger homes, the kind that would have been inside fenced estates in Calgary—five or six bedrooms each, with three car garages and spectacular views of the valley and mountains surrounding the area. These homes were nestled on the slopes of the mountain, up above the road. We climbed up towards the nearest ones, and stood to watch. The first house was clearly the site of a conflict. There were three skeletal bodies in front of the white door, and large faded blood stains on the door itself and the wall beside it. There was a blood-spattered Jeep parked in the driveway, all of its doors open to the mountain air, and more bloodstains inside. A once silver, but now rusted revolver lay abandoned on the pavement nearby. The driveway itself was showing signs of surrendering to the roots of trees and the invasion of grasses and weeds.
We searched the house and found it empty except for a nest of black squirrels and the insects that lived in the carpets. There were leaves on the floor, and small sticks and weeds scattered in the entrance. The doors were sound, the windows intact, and there were beds with reasonably clean sheets. The kitchen was in disarray, and it looked like whatever food was once here had long since been taken away. We suspected the place was completely empty until Darren found a small stash of alcohol in bottles hidden in the back of a closet in the master bedroom. Five bottles of very strong Jamaican rum had been tucked into a box and stuffed into the back of a closet behind bagged clothing.
I took two of the bottles and went to sit with Eric in the dark ruins of the living room. He had sunk down onto the couch when we walked in, and dropped his gear in a pile around him. I dropped one bottle into his lap, and sat in the nearest chair.
“You okay?”
He shrugged. His eyes were distant. “Not so much,” he said, twisting the top off the bottle.
“What’s going on?” asked Sanji from the entrance to the room. He walked in and stood in the middle of the space, between landscape paintings and in front of a large screen television silently gathering dust in one corner.
“I got bit. Back at the barricade.” Eric took a long pull of the rum, and made a face. “Damn, that’s terrible.”
“Sorry,” I said, “they were fresh out of beer.”
“Can I see?” asked Sanji, concerned. He knew what even the smallest bite meant.
Eric pulled up his pant leg and turned so we could see the bite on his calf. It was looking worse. The wound was no longer bleeding, but the flesh was puffy and red, with a black core where the teeth had broken skin. Sanji touched the red area, and Eric winced and drew his leg back. He took another gulp of the rum, grimaced again, and passed me the bottle. I took a sip. He was right, it was terrible stuff. I felt it warming me all the way down my throat, but what it really needed was some kind of mix
. I passed the bottle on to Sanji, and he took a swallow too.
“Not bad,” he said, “just needs a little Coke with it.”
Darren came in then, saying “The house is clear, and the back yard is empty too.” He looked at our faces, and not being stupid, asked “What’s going on?”
Eric laughed, rather bitterly. Sanji held the bottle out to Darren, who took it, and looked at us. Looked at me, waiting for a response.
“Eric got bitten, back in town.”
“Oh fucking hell, are you kidding me?”
“Darren—” I began, but he cut me off.
“Eric? Is that true? Jesus Christ!”
“Darren—” I tried again.
“Holy shit, we have to do somethi—”
“DARREN!” I yelled. He spun towards me, his mouth open, his face white.
“Get Amanda. She needs to know,” I told him.
“Jesus, Brian, we need—”
“Now!” I said sharply, and pointed out of the room. He glared at me, but he went.
Sanji looked at me. He was thinking about the protocols, I was sure of it. I shook my head slightly. I wasn’t going to mention them to Eric at all.
“I can feel it happening,” he said suddenly, looking at the floor. “It’s like my leg is hot and cold at the same time. I feel a little fever starting, I think.”
Amanda came in quietly just then, looking at Eric, Darren right behind her. Her eyes were huge. He must have already told her the news. She didn’t say anything, but went to Eric and knelt down in front of him. He looked up at her, and then closed his eyes and sighed.
“I want to get shitfaced,” he said.
And so it was that Eric drank most of the first bottle of rum, and then half the second bottle. We shared the rest out between us, and drank with him, using glasses and mugs we found in the house. No one was on guard. No one was armed, since we took all the weapons and left them in the kitchen. We just sat in the living room of a dead person’s house with our dying friend, and drank until we were shitfaced. I made sure that Eric got drunk and stayed that way, and as the next few hours passed we told stories, laughed at jokes, and cried and yelled and generally carried on in an undignified manner, not giving a damn about anything.
Eric told us what it felt like, the sickness that was killing him. He got visibly worse as the evening progressed, his skin taking on a grey pallor, and the bite on his leg turned black and blue. The flesh around the bite started to burn, he said, and he had a fever. He drank more, and that helped numb the pain and made him happy again. His colour never improved, and his hands started to go numb. We drank more.
Around midnight he passed out. His final words to me were a slurred promise never to drink this awful Jamaican shit again. I smiled, and sat looking at him. The others gathered around and we sat, watching Eric sleep.
Finally, I got up and went to the kitchen. I gathered the things I needed and went back to the other room. I knelt down by Eric, and pressed the auto injector onto his thigh. It hissed, and injected the drugs into his leg. He didn’t wake, or even flinch. I realised I was crying, and wiped the tears away after dropping the euthanasia kit on the ground.
We waited, and it didn’t take long. He relaxed, slipped deeper into slumber, and then died. No fuss, no cries of agony or desperation, and no fight. He knew what was going to happen, and had freely chosen his way out—mostly pain free and fairly pleasant as these things went. In a way I envied him. No more would Eric have to see the horror and suffering that the world now endured. No more the struggle to survive in the face of an unrelenting and unreasoning foe. No more.
There was one final thing to do. I stood, and we all stepped back. I raised my Browning, and aimed with both hands.
“Goodbye, Eric,” I said, and granted my friend the mercy of the gun.
Part Three
We buried Eric the next morning in a grave we dug in the back yard of the house we’d spent the night in. We wrapped his body in sheets taken from the beds inside, and I broke off the detachable half of his dog tags. We left the rest of his gear with him.
We dug the grave with two shovels that we found in the basement, and the earth wasn’t yet frozen, so the digging wasn’t too hard. We all took turns, two of us digging while the other two were on watch.
We were all hung over. The rum had left me nauseous and with a terrible headache. We had no food, but none of us wanted breakfast. We did have enough water for the moment, and we all paused for a drink once the grave was deep enough. I took a couple of painkillers with the water.
Of the other three, I think Darren looked the worst. His eyes were red, his complexion was green, and he winced at the sound of the shovels hitting rocks. Amanda seemed to be dealing with the hangover alright, merely grunting and wearing her sunglasses. I think Sanji must have felt about the same as I did, though I did see him taking a couple of painkillers while he walked around the area.
Darren and I carried Eric’s body outside. Some blood from the bullet wound to his skull had seeped through the sheets, leaving a dark red stain on the white fabric. We laid him down beside the grave and took another break. Eric was a heavier man than he looked.
I climbed down into the earth and gently pulled Eric’s body in, laying him down as carefully as I could. Darren pulled me up and we shoveled most of the earth back into the hole. Amanda took over for me, and I stood a few feet away, watching them bury my friend.
It is difficult to express how I was feeling right then. There was a certain unreality to the moment, as if everything was happening at a distance. I felt hollow, like all this was going on around me, and it didn’t affect the real me. If I thought about it too hard it would lead me to unpleasant places, and I didn’t want to feel anything just then.
It was my fault that we were all in this mess. I had led us onto that bridge, and I had failed to see the danger that was waiting for us. Now Eric was dead, and the fault was mine. I should have been the one to pay for that mistake.
When the burial was over we all stood there waiting. I had nothing to say, and I sensed reluctance in the others to make eye contact with each other. I made a decision. I walked inside after a few minutes, and gathered up my things and Eric’s C7. The weapons were the only things of his we kept. I checked the magazine and walked back outside. The others looked at me, waiting to see what I would say.
“Alright, let’s go get our trucks back.” I turned and started walking towards Golden, not looking to see if they followed.
* * *
The good news was that the vehicles appeared to still be in good condition. The undead had no more interest in them than they did in anything else that was not a living human, so it was likely that none of our gear was missing.
The bad news was that there were still nearly two hundred of the living dead scattered along the bridge. I was staring at them through my binoculars from the roof of a two car garage a few hundred meters southeast of the bridge and barrier. There was a clump of the creatures surrounding the F-250 and the Highlander, but the rest were dispersed along the surface. The bodies of the destroyed ones still lay unmoving where they had fallen in our hasty retreat from the barrier.
I watched a few of them wander aimlessly about for a few more moments, then passed the binoculars to Sanji, who lay on the garage roof beside me. Sanji and I had hardly spoken since this morning when we had buried Eric. I hadn’t felt like talking about it at all; the loss was still too raw.
I had led the way back into Golden, my mind alternating between brooding grief and some dim attention to the road I walked on. My mood was foul, and I had snapped at Amanda when she tried to talk to me, so she was pissed off with me and walking at the back of the group. I had heard her call me an “asshole” when she walked off. Not that I cared. I was too busy hating the bright sunlight, the river running past on our left, and the leafless trees and shrubs erupting from the ground all around us.
My mood only changed when we saw the first zombie on the road ahead of us an hour
later. It was probably the only one that had managed to follow us this far when we had fled the town. It was standing all alone on the road, staring towards the river. It was a male of about forty-five, I guessed. It had on a filthy pair of jeans, and a green shirt that was more rag than actual clothing. A broken pair of glasses hung from its face, dangling down where its nose had decayed and fallen off. Not a pretty picture, but it was something for me to take my anger out on.
I decided to deal with it quietly, in case there were others lurking nearby. I shouldered Eric’s C7A1 and drew my Browning instead. I pulled out the silencer and screwed it onto the front of the barrel as I walked closer. The rotten thing finally heard me approaching and turned towards my steps. I got a waft of its reek, and my stomach lurched. I was glad I hadn’t eaten this morning. It hadn’t looked too badly damaged from behind, but when it faced me, I could see that it had been horribly mauled. The right side of its face had been mangled and torn, and shreds of blackened flesh hung, skin and hair peeled away from the right side of its head. The ear on that side was missing as well, and the blood had stained its clothing all down its side. I swore that as long as I lived I would never get used to the look and smell of these things.
I stopped walking, and let it come to me. I was dimly aware of my team behind me, spreading out to watch for other walking corpses. When the zombie was twenty feet away I raised my Browning and took aim. It came onward, eyes fixed on me, jaw moving in anticipation of eating. It raised its left arm, and the right hand twitched spasmodically. When it was ten feet away I pulled the trigger twice. Twin holes appeared on the dead thing’s eyebrow line, and a grey and reddish mess sprayed out behind it. It took one more step and collapsed face down. The silenced shots sounded like loud coughs, and shouldn’t have carried far. I waited, looking around for more of the undead, but the only things moving were the river and my team.
