Zombie Apocalypse Serial #2

by Ivana E. Tyorbrains

  “No, Caleb. My throat started hurting when I woke up this morning. It’s not in my mind. It’s for real.”

  “Does it hurt bad?”

  “No…well, I don’t know. Not that bad.”

  “Don’t worry about it. It’s too early for your throat to be the bad sickness. People aren’t going to get sick until Monday.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Like I said, your mother and I got some secret information. Information we weren’t supposed to have.”

  “Why weren’t you supposed to have it? If the government knows people are getting sick--”

  “The government doesn’t know. Not this time. People will get sick because a bad man in New Mexico was doing evil experiments and one of his sicknesses got out.”

  “But how did you find out?”

  “It was on the radio, Sweetie,” I said, practicing the lie I intended to tell anyone else who asked me why I was so ready for the end. “The problem is, most people have chosen not to believe it. We’re being careful. We’ve decided that what they said on the radio is true, and we’re going to hide out where we know we’re safe.”

  “For how long?”

  “Not too long, Baby. We’ll keep our eyes and ears open. When we’re certain it’s safe to go back into the world, that’s what we’ll do.”

  Timothy

  So…I was in front on a high speed chase down Highway 60 when the name came to me.

  Aphrodonis. It’s like Aphrodite, goddess of love, but it’s a dude.

  What do you think?

  Aphrodonis, destroyer of men, seducer of women, ruler of all…

  Maybe it’s too froofy. On the one hand, Aphrodonis could be the ultimate handsome bad ass. On the other hand….well, he kinda sounds like Fabio’s gay cousin, doesn’t he?

  I resigned myself to keep trying as I threw a hard left on Bullock Boulevard.

  “He’s turning west on Bullock! Repeat, suspect is headed west on Bullock!”

  I was using the radio in Yvette’s cruiser to listen to all the chatter as the police tried to get organized. It was comical. The State Troopers were half a mile behind me. The cops they had called in to help somehow ended up behind them. The FBI was nowhere to be found, except on the radio, where everybody was screaming a bunch of nonsense at each other.

  Breaker 10 tire trap on north 25 for a hot rod, over?

  Get me a chopper! We need a chopper pronto!

  Code eight, perp in a stolen cruiser.

  Where’s that chopper?

  West 23 round tipper train tonto, over.

  I’m gonna nail that son of a bitch!

  Headed to Tech. Repeat, suspect is headed to New Mexico Tech. Notify campus police!

  Damn right I was headed to New Mexico Tech. As easy as it was to stay ahead of this blundering bunch of baboons, eventually, through sheer numbers, they would trap me, just like they did at my compound. I had to get out of this stolen car and find a place to hide.

  The New Mexico Institute of Mining & Technology, Southern New Mexico’s pride and joy, was crawling with people who admired me and my work. Since I’d broken ground on my compound more than ten years ago, not a week went past that I didn’t get a letter or an email from somebody at New Mexico Tech. There were grad students who wanted to come meet with me, professors who wanted me to come comment on my research, librarians who wanted to create exhibits about me and my work, and administrators who saw me as the great white whale, and harassed me day and night for my money.

  One such administrator was a woman named Lola Romero, who had visions of me giving the university a pile of money in exchange for naming a building or two after me.

  As if I cared.

  It was only because Lola put her address on every single letter she sent me that I knew where to look.

  Lola Romero

  Foundation & Grant Administration

  Wells Hall

  Office 211

  I tore into campus from the entrance on Leroy Place, hearing my every move broadcast on the radio. There were no campus cops on site to greet me, but there was a lot of student traffic. I stopped right in front of Driscoll Hall, skidding the cruiser sideways to block the whole street. Then I hopped out and made a beeline for the trees and the crowd of students just beyond them. A cadre of State Troopers crowded onto campus, got out of their cars….and did nothing. The students all around made it impossible to fire at me. Some of them tried to pursue me on foot, and found me to be surprisingly spritely and quick, almost unnaturally so.

  That’s what a million helpful nanorobots can do for a guy.

  I ran into Wells Hall and turned to go up the stairs. As the students crowded to one side to let me pass, I heard one of them say, “Hey? Is that Timothy Frye?”

  Sadly, among this collection of super geeks, I was a very recognizable face.

  I charged onto the second floor and followed the numbers to Office 211. I found the door wide open, and Lola Croix standing at the back window.

  She turned to me and jumped in surprise. I came inside and closed the door behind me.

  “Dr. Frye?” she said. “Is that you?”

  “Hi Lola, how are you?”

  “I’m….fine. I was looking out the window. There are a bunch of police on campus…They’re…they’re looking for you, aren’t they?”

  Lola was a tall, slim woman. She once told me, during a lunch meeting I had never agreed to but that happened anyway, that she ran marathons. She had dark, shiny skin, long hair the color of chocolate milk, and chubby cheeks that moved up and down when she spoke, which, when combined with her propensity to constantly ask me for money, gave her the appearance of a greedy chipmunk.

  Still, I’d enjoy doing her. With Erica gone, and Yvette likely to get incarcerated, I was now looking at the new girl who would join me for the start of the apocalypse. She looked like a woman who would be aggressive in the sack. She had been pressing herself against the back window when I first arrived, but now she was opening herself up to me, coming closer, boobs first.

  “Yes, Lola, they’re looking for me. But it’s all a big misunderstanding. I need you to help me hide from them. Will you?”

  “Dr. Frye, what kind of trouble are you in?”

  “Bad trouble, but they’ve got the wrong man. I need to hide so I can get away. I need to get back to my home so I can exonerate myself. Will you help me get there? Of course I would be glad to make a sizable donation to the school if I were to receive such invaluable help.”

  Her eyes lit up at the mention of money, and beads of sweat formed on her temples.

  “How much money, Dr. Frye?” she said, slithering closer to me.

  “A lot of money,” I said.

  Now we were face to face, her hot breath blowing on my cheeks. Lola put her hands on my chest.

  “Enough for an endowed chair?” she said.

  “And a scholarship fund,” I said.

  Lola tilted her head to the side, closed her eyes, and let out an erotic little moan.

  “But first I need your help, remember?” I said.

  “Yes, yes. There’s a closet over there,” she said. She was rubbing her hands up and down her flanks, whispering the words ‘scholarship fund.’

  I went in the closet and closed the door behind me.

  “I’ll get them out of here,” she said.

  I listened as Lola stepped out into the hall, and called for the Troopers as they approached.

  “He went that way!” she shouted. “Back down the stairs. He was mumbling something crazy about the library!”

  “The library?” said the Trooper. “What was he saying about the library?”

  “I just heard the words library and hostages,” said Lola. “You need to hurry!”

  The static crack of a handheld radio, the Trooper said something that sounded like, “Perp is headed for a Code Sixteen on the mezzanine latrine, over,” and his footsteps faded into the distance.

  I pushed open the closet door to see Lola steppin
g back inside and closing the door behind her. She grabbed the chair from behind her desk and propped it under the doorknob. Then she ripped open her blouse, sending buttons flying everywhere.

  “Tell me more about the scholarship fund!” she cried out.

  Twenty minutes later (just an estimate…don’t hold me too it, but I know it was longer than with Yvette), Lola and I tiptoed down the hall to the elevators. She was all over me during the short ride from the second floor to the basement. When the doors opened, she took me by the hand and led me to the far end of the building. We exited through a utility door and hid behind a dumpster while we waited for some walkers to go past. Then we sprinted to her Prius in the south parking lot. I rode out of Socorro in the back seat of her Prius, hidden underneath a pile of papers.

  Thirty minutes later, we were on Highway 60 headed to my compound.

  “So….I’m finally going to get to see Timothy Frye’s fabled house in the woods,” Lola said.

  “Yes you will,” I said. “And you get to stay as long as you’d like. But we’re going to have to take a backwoods entrance.”

  “Are you afraid cops will meet us at the front?”

  “Yes. In fact, it’s likely the whole place is going to be crawling with FBI agents. But it’s too large for them to canvass the whole thing at once. I expect we’ll find the back entrance quite deserted.”

  The back entrance, known only to me, required one to travel on makeshift dirt roads I had cut on the west end of Cibola National Forest. The fence that met us there was covered in ivy so thick that no one could see the portion that acted as a gate. Using my ten-digit code, I keyed us inside.

  The first agent who saw us, a guy roaming around in the woods with a German shepherd, ignored us altogether. My presence on the compound was such an impossibility in his mind that he assumed the Prius was just part of the team.

  The second agent who saw us knew something was amiss, but he had his pants down (he was shitting in the woods), so he did nothing to stop us.

  About twenty yards later, a third agent stepped into the road and held his hand up. I told Lola to floor it.

  “I don’t want to kill the guy,” she said.

  “Don’t worry. He’ll get out of the way.”

  He did. And by the time he’d gotten word out that the Prius in the compound was an intruder, we were already at the casita.

  “Come with me,” I said.

  “Anywhere,” said Lola, looking at me with an earnestness that was going to get annoying.

  We ran to the garage. I opened the door with the keypad, then closed it again just in time to seal us off from a truck full of FBI agents who came running to the house with guns blazing.

  “Lola, what you’re about to see won’t harm you in the slightest,” I said. “So don’t be scared.”

  “I’ll never be scared again, Timothy,” she said. “Thanks to you, I’m done living my life in fear.”

  Oh boy.

  “Okay, Lola. Just be warned, this is a little horrifying.”

  Quee was the first one out after I opened the airlock.

  Lola screamed.

  “Come with me,” I said. “It’s alright.”

  I led her into the zombie playground and told her to wait for me there. The presence of the two of us, with our foul-smelling Team Bruce bodies, sent five of my zombies scurrying into the garage. Whick, who sadly lay dead on the far end of the playground, couldn’t join the others, and Blick just stood in place, looking at us both like a chimp at the zoo.

  “Bon appetite, my friends,” I said. Then I pressed the button to lift the garage door. The agents outside stood frozen in place while Quee bared down on one of them.

  “Holy fuck!” somebody yelled and started shooting.

  I left my zombies to enjoy their lunch and stepped back through the airlock, to join Lola and Blick in the safety of a zombie romper room.

  “Timothy, who is this?” Lola asked.

  “This is Blick,” I said. “And although he smells truly foul, he’s harmless. It’s the others who have a taste for blood, as those FBI agents are about to find out.”

  “They’re like….”

  “Zombies,” I said. “Yes, they’re all zombies. A very misunderstood creature. I hope they survive out there. I bet they will. In my experience, even a trained cop can’t get it together to shoot at the head in the heat of the moment. Come on. I have to grab something then we’ll be on our way.”

  I led Lola past the skeletal remains of the zombie’s last meal (Agents Stamps and Martin) and over poor Whick’s un-undead corpse, which I’d left to rot after one of the IRS agents shot him in the head. It was reassuring to see that normal decay had begun again with Whick. In the future, for those who survived it all, we wouldn’t be stuck with five billion never-to-rot bodies. Once one of my zombies was dead for good, his flesh belonged to the worms just like everyone else.

  I opened the airlock at the other end of the room, and we took the staircase into the house. No one was there to greet us. It appeared the entire group was out in my driveway now, shooting my pets in the torso, just like they’d been taught, and freaking out that the shots had no effect.

  I went to the small bedroom of the house, which had been my working space for Project Retwems (the name based on the acronym for “Repopulate the Earth With My Spawn).

  Fifty handwritten invitations from me, to go to fifty women throughout the world, each laced with a weaker version of Team Bruce…Project Retwems was going to be my hobby after civilization ended. It would create fifty beautiful survivors across the country, each of them filled with nanobots I could use to track them down. It would give me a reason to go on a road trip across the post-apocalyptic landscape. It was going to be awesome.

  Those invitations had to get in the mail today.

  Erica, God rest her soul, had already helped me get them all addressed and stamped. Taking them with me was as simple as picking up a single cardboard box in which they were all neatly organized.

  I grabbed the box and handed it to Lola, saying, “Hold this.” Then I stepped outside into the chaos.

  I found a gun on the ground near a now-beheaded corpse that Flick was enjoying. Grabbing the gun, I put bullets in the foreheads of the five FBI agents who were still standing.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” said Lola. “You’re a good shot.”

  “In more ways than one, Baby,” I said. “Toss me your keys. Let’s ditch this popsicle stand.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “The envelopes in that box have to be mailed out today,” I said. “So that’s first on our agenda. After that, I don’t know. I was thinking maybe you and I could hole up in a hotel room somewhere until this all blows over. What do you think?”

  Lola smiled, her chubby cheeks forming a cute little circle around her mouth. “I think that’s the best idea I’ve heard all day.”

  Caleb

  We arrived at the Sawtooth National Forest on Saturday afternoon, passing thirty-eight cars on the highway before pulling off on an old logging road that leads right into the mountains.

  It was weird seeing the other drivers. For all I knew, they were all infected, and only the glass and steel of our cars separated my family from whatever deadly poison those people exhaled. The last car we saw was a yellow Jeep. Although they didn’t follow us as we exited the highway, they too were clearly going into the woods.

  I wondered if the people in that Jeep were regular listeners to Planet Gulag.

  Despite three days of non-stop hysteria on the Planet Gulag radio show, the world had taken no notice at all of the warning we tried to share. The big news networks talked about the economy in Europe, the big murder trial in the Midwest, and a hundred other banalities that occupied the masses. When the apocalypse came, it was going to take everyone by surprise.

  Cori complained of a sore throat again on Saturday, but she had no other symptoms, and seemed to be in fine spirits. As we entered the mountain refuge that was to become our n
ew home, neither Sabrina nor I had any signs of sickness at all.

  The logging road was all dirt. Smooth at first, it started to get bumpy about a mile from the highway. We rode it for nearly two hours, winding our way up the mountain until our vehicles couldn’t take us any further. We parked under the fir trees near a bubbling stream, then hiked up the mountain. We set up camp in a hidden patch between two peaks.

  “This is home now, isn’t it?” Sabrina said when we finished the tent.

  “For awhile, yes.”

  *****

  “Caleb. Caleb, wake up.”

  Funny thing happens when you spend three nights in a row in a tent. You get really tired. And for the first time since leaving the comfort of my home, I had fallen into a deep, restful sleep. It wasn’t too cold. It wasn’t too hot. My body was used to the ground. There were no crickets or cicadas or bullfrogs or smoky shadows of imaginary bears outside.

  It totally sucked that Sabrina was waking me up.

  “Look,” she whispered, pushing her iPhone at my face.

  Less than half awake, my first thought when I saw the words on the screen was that I was dreaming, and I closed my eyes and went back to sleep. But as I lay there, my brain kept on churning, and I realized I had to get up.

  It was bright outside. I’d slept in late.

  “What day is it?” I asked, knowing the answer but wanting Sabrina to verify it for me anyway. We had spent two quiet days in the mountains. We had built a fire, we had fished, we had laid out our snares…I had become so at peace with my new surroundings that a part of me almost forgot the ticking time bomb that brought us here.

  Almost. The line of text on Sabrina’s phone took me back into the real world, and reminded me that we had come up here for a reason. Now the reason was making itself known.

  “It’s Monday,” Sabrina said.

  Pray that you don’t wake up on Monday feeling sick.

  I took quick stock of my own condition. My throat was fine. My nose was fine. My head, my lungs…I actually felt pretty good.