by catt dahman
“If I said I needed to be kissed, would you oblige me?”
“You really are a pig.”
Kim and Len came in laughing. Bryan pulled a face, “Since when is it swinish to ask for a kiss? Isn’t that extreme?”
“I think she’s been taking lessons on a smart mouth from Julia.”
“I already had my smart mouth, but I have learned new names to call people. Give it up, Bryan. Epic failure.”
“I can’t believe I’m failing.”
“Bryan, I’m sure you’ve been shot down before...many...many...did I mention many times.” Beth sat back.
“True, but you gals are more valuable now.”
Len chuckled, “You have done stepped into it, now.”
“Valuable?”
Bryan shrugged, “Well, I’m blunt if anything…and females are going to be a valued resource.”
Beth cocked her head. “You have gotta be kidding me…”
“Boy, you have got more mouth than sense to be getting her wound up,” Len warned.
“What? What’d I do?”
“You ran your mouth, but he’s got a point, Beth. Women tend to care for the ill, care for children…do cooking and stuff, but if you think about it, not that I have any idea why I am even helping Bryan get out of this shit topic he waded into, he does have a point. Men are pigs. Men like women. Not all men are good pigs.”
“True. But…you think…?”
“That some men will raid for supplies and women? Yes.”
“See?”
Beth shot Bryan a dirty look. “Rape. Cave men.”
“It’s instinct, too, to rebuild population. The prime male will want to share his sperm and impregnate all the women he can.”
Kim slid to the floor beside Beth, laughing at Len. “Share his sperm? Oh my, God, is that a nature channel commentary or what?”
“Well, that’s what I meant, too.” Bryan protested. “Survivors pairing off and repopulating…the fittest males and females. Len’s right about males. You haven’t seen Roy with his feathers fluffed out, pounding on his chest?”
“Okay, you just mixed two animals. Bad enough to be facing zombies, bombs falling out of the sky, and a virus killing, but adding a bunch of horny men, looking to pair off with the women left behind, and I am saying I’m not sure there is a damned thing to live for. Someone end it for me now,” Beth complained.
“You’ll get plenty of attention,” Bryan said.
“Unreal if you think that is a compliment. We get to be the prizes?”
Len laughed harder. “I figured it as in we are the prizes…good, strong men…handsome, protective…I figure there must be a lottery among the gals, seeing who gets me.”
“Johnny gets you ‘cause she can whip your ass,” Kim said.
“Wait ‘til I tell Misty and Julia about all this…you may have more looking to whip your ass,” Beth said. “And when Julia does it, she’ll call you names in Mexican.”
“She bi?”
“Bye?”
“Bisexual. Her hair is lopped off,” Bryan said.
“Not to hear her talk...she likes men a whole lot. She just had me cut her hair off so the zeds couldn’t grab her hair.” Beth threw a shotgun shell at Kim’s feet. “But I bet Bryan could love a woman straight.”
“You’re a cold one, Beth,” he smiled.
Beth left the inventory list on a desk, going to look for her friends so she could share her humorous, newfound information with the other women. Misty went bright red, saying she thought Mark was attractive.
“You go for him, Chica. I’ll see who wins, Bethy, and then I’ll take the leftovers…all of them.” Julia whooped; she laughed harder when Beth told her that the boys had asked if she were gay.” Maybe I best grab one of them and show them how straight I am.”
“I think they’d like that,” Beth laughed. They teased Misty about her crush on Mark and then joined the rest.
Sally sobered up the group by letting them know that Rachel, the woman who had been so terribly burned, had passed on. A few glanced at George, but his eyes didn’t betray a thing.
Three more came in uneventfully, following the routine that Sally had set in place.
Alex was unhurt but for a few cuts, and he and the third man helped another from a wheelchair that they had uneasily pushed from across town, even carrying it over the rubble. They transferred him to a new wheelchair as Alex explained that the injury was from long before. As a preacher, he created a big stir, for many had wanted some spiritual guidance and reassurance.
Sally was all but dancing in place over the other man.
Once he was cleaned up and seated, she hugged him repeatedly, introducing him as a fellow doctor who had been at one of the rescue stations. “Didn’t anyone else make it?”
“I don’t know. People kept trying to get in, and we were just over loaded; everyone had gone into that deep sleep or coma, and just a few were cleaning up and watching. We had a full house with family members helping and kind of camping out. A few military kept order, but it felt as if every thing were at a stand-still with a not-so-nice outcome.” Doc shook his head.
“I’ve never smelled anything that bad…even working in medicine all my life…the people, we couldn’t keep them clean from waste and blood…I was sure cholera and even worse was about to break out. I think it was like being in a war long ago with the smells of blood, sweat, and all…”
“It sounds horrible.” Sally shuddered. “We just had a few here, and the smell was bad.”
Doc told his story. All his patients were sinking into comas, and family members were increasingly worried and upset. Sanitation was failing, food was running out, and no one was bringing in supplies.
“My God, it was bad; they were just lying there, and the filth…nothing we could do with so little help. The floors that we washed down were a half-inch deep in water and gore. We just kind of hosed them off and hoped for the best; nothing was left that we could do.”
“That many?”
Doc looked surprised. “Sally, we had maybe five hundred at the school.”
“Five hundred people?”
“Patients! They came from the small towns, and the military brought them for a while…until they quit coming. Others showed up: gym full, classrooms full. We had some in an open courtyard. It was horrible. For every patient, we had two or three family members trying to help. ”
He rubbed his eyes. “Then they…changed…like the reports said. Mothers attacking children, husbands attacking wives, children attacking…madness. Screams. Flesh ripped, sounded like duct tape being torn off or Velcro. Then everything went bright, and the building started to fall in. We ran like rats. Eight of us were huddled in a bathroom for hours.”
It was hellish as they climbed out of the rubble of a downstairs bathroom, amid the debris. Many had been crushed by the concrete and bricks.
“We dug out one, moaning and wiggling. His arm was crushed, chest a mess; he had Red and was awake.” Doc said.
“We had one that Sally said should have been dead: he was so torn up and so crushed and all; but he didn’t react to pain and shock; he was trying to attack and bite us. If he hadn’t had crushed legs, he would have gotten us,” Alex said. Doc said they were scared to dig people up but did so a few times, only to find moaning zeds. A few were uninfected, only injured, and their number had swollen to fifteen.
Then a horde came at them. They had been his patients, but now the doctor and the others had to fight them off with pieces of wood and pipes, smashing at their heads. They threw themselves at the survivors, bringing down those injured and bleeding.
More mangled and tattered zeds dug themselves out of the rubble and gathered to lurch at the doctor and others.
“Alex grabbed a wheelchair, and this big guy with us, Ed or Fred… something…picked up the Reverend and carried him. We ran.”
“Amazing you made it, considering how they gang up or flock together like damned birds,” Len told him.
; “Ed saved my life,” Bob said, “I owe him and Alex.”
Alex joined in. “So we ran, and they kept coming. I never could have imagined hitting anyone with a piece of pipe, but I swatted those bastards right down. Some were burned; they smelled horrid. They smelled even worse when we popped their heads open.”
They hid and ran, trying to stay ahead, with the hospital as their goal. “Most two stories fell in; one stories took damage; windows were blown out; pushing the wheel chair was a bitch,” Doc said, “sorry, Reverend.”
“I felt helpless in this damned chair; they were pushing me or carrying me. I asked them to leave me, but they wouldn’t.”
“Of course, we wouldn’t leave you here alone.”
The Red Zeds took down all the injured, causing bloody, violent battles that the survivors kept losing. “They are hardly human; these filthy things are covered in shit and blood, nasty smelly things. The Reds.
Then, after we had rested and eaten, we saw worse…bloody ones who had torn up bodies…missing parts and all...the ones they call dead zeds, but they were alive, just crazed.” Alex shivered. “And they hunted us. We ran into a big herd of them, and we split up, just scrambling. Doc and Bob and I hid. The others ran, and we heard the most horrible screaming.”
Sally told them about the ones who were not alive but yet attacked.
“That’s bullshit,” Roy added.
“Really? Did you check them and find them cold with decomp in place? Did you find rigor mortis?” Sally snapped at him. “I may not know everything, but those people were dead when they came out attacking us. I don’t care what you believe. Facts are facts.”
“Sally, that’s impossible.” Doc held a hand up. “Not saying you’re wrong, just that it’s insane and scary as hell. We know some things. The CDC was in touch. The hemorrhagic virus hit first, a Lyssa virus. It weakened the body, but Lyssa viruses are not really airborne, except for rabies found in caves where bats live; the rabies virus becomes concentrated in the air.”
“So it was a combination?”
“Pretend you’re a mad scientist cooking up a bad-ass disease. You see rabies has gone airborne in extreme circumstances, so that means it is possible. So if I am that scientist, I start with the rabies virus. It does double duty: it can go airborne, and it can cause increased saliva to more readily spread itself, causing aggression. I add a bit of hemorrhagic fever to my mix; now, I have a disease that is passed by air or bites. I knock down half of the population straight off with the hemorrhagic fever; then, what can stop me? No society can handle that many patients.”
“But they become…zombies?”
“They go into a coma; both viruses affect the nervous system, and they are weakened. They are replicating at an unstoppable rate and affect ever tissue in the body.”
“They said the problem was mad cow.”
Doc chuckled. “Not really. That causes holes in the brain. We have people who can only shuffle, who can’t speak, only moan; they piss themselves and have open ulcers that leak pus.”
Sally gasped, “But that sounds like a prion…kuru.”
Doc winked.
“What’s kuru?” someone asked.
“It’s a disease passed on by cannibalism. Prions are sneaky things and can actually communicate between cells in the brain. So it’s simple; as a mad scientist, I piggy-back this prion, which I have tweaked for symptoms that I want on a virus, and send it on with an airborne virus I tweaked from rabies.”
“That makes perfect sense except I know those were dead.”
“Ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent dead. For all purposes, we can say dead, but the prion and virus become a puppeteer and keep the body moving to its last known point. It has one objective: to reproduce in more hosts.”
“That’s what George said.” Len pointed out. “He says it is evil.”
“George?”
“That’s me.”
“Are you a doctor?”
“No, I was a cop.” He laughed.
Roy rolled his eyes dramatically, earning a few frowns.
“Well, in a way, you are right. It is evil. Not saying it thinks like we think, but it would like to be the top species, which means eliminating us.”
George pondered that. “Well, then what? Once it’s top dog, what does it do? It’s stuck in people’s bodies, and it’s just a disease.”
“I don’t suppose it has a plan beyond that. It just wants to live, to reproduce, and to be the top life form. That isn’t so different than we are. What do we really do besides that?”
Bob pointed at Doc, “Now that would be my cue to jump in with religion.”
“You haven’t told us anything to help.” Roy sneered.
“I can tell you this: I appreciate the caution you took in taking us in, and we should keep that up a few days, but I don’t think the bombs were meant for radiation, only to kill zeds. And it didn’t, but that’s beside the point. There isn’t radiation like they had at Hiroshima; it wasn’t a regular atomic bomb. That’s good news.”
“How do you know?”
“Before we dumped it, we had something from the military, a Geiger counter.” Doc smiled like a Cheshire cat.
People went back to work on details so they could think that through. Doc asked if he could help Sally, and she sighed in relief. Several asked Bob to have prayer services and a gathering for them. For a while, Bob was the busiest person there.
19
Monsters
“What do you think?”
Len rubbed his jaw, thinking. In searching with Dallas for survivors, Len found a pocket in the destruction, an opening to a hallway full of closets and rooms, an oasis in the debris that offered hidden supplies and survivors as well as possible deadly adversaries.
It was a rough climb upwards and through a maze of fallen trash and concrete, metal spiking in places, but then seemingly easy-going into the mysteries of this newly found area.
“Sally and Doc need so much more than what they have now, and we can use more linens, scrubs, and blankets. The area looks enormous; I can’t believe an area this big is still intact.”
“We could find survivors.”
“Or we could find zeds.”
Len told them, “We are going in, but in very strictly organized teams who can follow the letter of orders. We take no chances but do this methodically. I’ll tell everyone where I want each to be, and if you think you can’t be on the team, tell me. Don’t play hero.”
He had them load up rifles, handguns, and extra ammo, and make a stash of some heavy pipes that they could use as melee weapons. They went over the plan.
Len, Kim, and Bryan would take point, exploring the area, slowly and quietly. Behind them, for backup, would be Hagen, Beth, Julia, Tink, George, and Mark.
Once an area was clear, a larger team made up of Johnny, Thurman, Benny, and Roy, would stand guard, while many more relayed any usable supplies to the rest of the survivors. He had more rifles if needed. Len checked and re-checked with them to see if they understood the team plan. He made it clear the plan could alter on a dime’s turn.
“Stop second guessing. It’s a good team plan. You have everyone where he or she is the strongest, with people you trust on the third section so nothing gets screwed up,” George said.
“Okay. Remember…we stay stealthy if we can.”
The first door was to a supply closet full of sheets and blankets that were needed. It was easy to secure a spot so close to the start and to insure they would at least have those supplies.
In the next room, the smell of decomposition from a corpse in the bed, turning into a messy black and green puddle, almost knocked them over: dead of some natural cause or lack of care over the last days. Fluids dripped from the bed to the floor, causing the group to retch.
Len closed the door and motioned to his back up. George quickly used a marker to make an x on the door, indicating clear, but to keep the door closed.
Beth snapped her fingers. When Len turned to her,
she pointed to her ear, tapping twice and then to a room beside her. She had heard something. He motioned her to put her ear to the door. Yes, she heard noise but could not determine what caused it.
When the door swung open, again, the smell was bad, but it was a different bad, one that they later would come to understand as meaning a Red was inside; the smell of feces and vomit was always stronger with the Red victims.
A heavy woman stood by the window beside a skinny person, gender undetermined. Both moaned.
Len and Bryan fired. But there was still a moaning coming from a pile of lumpy, bloody clothing on the floor.
Len stepped over to look, gagging. He squeezed his eyes closed for a second, shivering in distaste and fear. It wasn’t a pile of clothing, but the remains of what had once been a person, before the other two had eaten the poor sod down to the bone. Stringy tatters of flesh and blood coated the bones; some limbs had been torn off, and while parts of the head remained, the scalp was gone. Thus, this didn’t fit the theory of their not being hungry for flesh but only for spreading the virus. He couldn’t imagine being left with any kind of consciousness in a pile of gnawed bones and nerves.
It moaned.
Len almost jumped out of his skin before he put a bullet into the head. It was, by far, the worst thing he had ever seen. To the side, Bryan vomited, and Kim had turned greenish pale.
The door was marked by another x.
Several more rooms were empty, but the group, with tensed muscles, didn’t relax.
Kim lunged backwards. “Zeds. A bunch in a lobby, glass doors.”
“I’d rather they just not see us, but how do we get past the glass doors?”
George grinned.
From the last room the group had been in, he grabbed a screen and brought it out. Quickly, they got two more. Moving quietly and slowly, they managed to put the screens outside the doors of the lobby, blocking the view.
Len asked for the doors to be guarded and that if anyone heard a noise, he should indicate the zeds were coming out. Then, Len would gather the group and fight. It wasn’t a great plan, but for now, the idea was to avoid the danger.
