by Jack Wallen
“…hope. It’s a rare occasion the hope of man rests squarely on the shoulders of one person. That type of drama is generally reserved for comic books. When Superman saves the planet from Lex Luthor or Batman prevents Bane from tearing Gotham City to shreds you knew that one hero could save the day. But Superman had strength on his side and Batman had, well, a bunch of gadgets and an almost impenetrable suit to protect him…not to mention the soothing voice of Morgan Freeman. What about Bethany? What keeps the Zero Day Collective from taking her down and dissolving the hope of man? Is it truth? Is it righteousness? Faith? What gives Bethany Nitshimi the will to rip through the veil of lies and horror is a MacGyver-like ingenuity and a Stephen Hawking-level intellect. She’s brilliant, she gets things done, and she’s dead sexy. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen of the Zombie Radio Nation, I’ve seen pictures of Miss Bethany. I know how to use Google. She’s hot. Okay, I shouldn’t have said that. Now all you fanboys are going to be creeping on her and chasing her across this bloody nation in an attempt to score a date. Forget I said it. Bethany is twelve flavors of nasty. She’s built like a dude with too much crack, tiny feet, and an oversized gut. She’s a plumber’s plumber with the attitude of a construction worker. Walk by her and she’ll be grabbing crotch and dropping f-bombs at your feet.”
Jamal’s eyes were shining bright in the darkened cab of the truck. His mouth dropped open and he shook his head.
“Enough about the hot-or-not factor of Bethany Nitshimi. It’s time for some music. We need to turn this bitch up to eleven. Besides, you probably need a little music to serve as motivation for zombie slaying. That’s right. Remember, the modus operandi of the new world order is the destruction of the undead. And what better tune to cull the tragic herd than Pantera’s ‘Revolution is My Name’? Channel that negative energy into something useful, my darling darklings, and help Bethany Nitshimi take down the Zero Day Collective.”
The music ripped out of the speakers and threatened to do damage to anything the sine waves touched. Morgan grabbed her walkie and called up Joshua to tune in. Apparently, the big teddy bear had a soft spot for Dimebag.
Life’s little surprises.
Jamal was still grinning wide.
“What?”
“What do you mean what? B, you are seriously famous. That DJ called you our Obi Wan. It doesn’t get more flattering than that.”
“For a nerd…ya nerd.” I doled out a slap and punch to Jamal’s shoulder. “I can think of much better ways to compliment a woman than to call her Obi Wan, or—before you even start—Princess Leia in that stupid slave bikini!” Another punch to Jamal’s shoulder as a less-than-innocent grin spread across his lips. “Why are men so predictable?”
Before anyone could reply, Josh’s voice squealed from the walkie.
“Morgan, we have a situation.”
Morgan picked up the radio and replied.
“I read you. What’s up?”
“Looks like a gang of Moaners surrounding a car. That could only mean one thing.”
Morgan glanced at me as she spoke into the radio. “Survivors.”
“Time for some action, Morgan. Are you ready?”
Again, Morgan looked my way. I offered no indication as to my state of readiness to take on another gang of Moaners. She answered Joshua anyway.
“To protect and sever.”
Morgan sped up the truck to fall in directly behind Joshua.
“Are you sure it’s wise to be getting sidetracked? We really need to get to Salt Lake.”
Morgan glanced at me by way of the rearview mirror. “I get it, Bethany, I really do. It’s clear we have a bigger mission to accomplish. But the Zombie Response Team has a duty to protect the citizens. So you’ll have to excuse a sidetrack now and then—especially when that sidetrack means we save another life. If you have a problem with that…”
I held up my hands in surrender. “I don’t. You’re right; we can’t just ignore the pleas of survivors. We go down that dark path and we’re no better than the fucksacks who spun up this nightmare.”
Respect flashed across Morgan’s eyes. If she only knew the truth, that all I really cared about at the moment was making it to Salt Lake and locating Jacob, she would have kicked my ass out of the Hummer and bade me farewell. I couldn’t deny my feelings; I also couldn’t keep them from weighing down my gut like I’d swallowed a brick. I’d spent so much time trying to save the planet from imploding that I failed to remind myself what was truly important. Now that it was gone, it was all I could think of or care for.
Fat lot of good that did me now.
The Hummer came to a slow, quiet stop. I was so lost in thought I’d failed to realize Morgan had killed the engine a few hundred feet back. Inertia carried us directly to the side of Josh’s vehicle. Morgan carefully opened the driver’s side door and stepped out of the truck. She met Josh at the tailgate of the lead Hummer and, from the looks of it, nailed out a plan of attack.
They left me out. I didn’t like that one bit. I wanted to think ego was a thing of the past, that surviving the Grand Guignol meant chucking the “self” out the window. Even as the thought was given the spark of life, I realized how utterly impossible it would be to survive this wretched nightmare without thinking the slightest bit selfishly. Besides, had we all bothered to think of others first all along, none of this would have happened. But then, the human creature is impossibly insane by nature. In the decade leading up to the spread of the Mengele Virus, we had devolved into creatures of such hedonistic focus it amazed me we’d survived at all. Humanity’s predilection for power made it nearly impossible for the selfless to survive.
Joshua opened the door to the back of the Hummer and pulled out an assault rifle. Chills raced up and down my flesh as the barrel of the gun came to bear on the zombies that surrounded the car. Josh opened up the supports on the rifle and set the business end down on the secondary Hummer’s hood.
“What’s he doing?” Jamal whispered.
I turned so that Jamal could witness the incredulity in my eyes.
“Seriously, Jamal?” My voice was louder than I anticipated. I dropped the tone to a whisper. “Have you ever fired a weapon near a crowd of zombies? You’ll get one shot off before the entire zombie bunch is all over you like hairspray on a beehive.”
Confusion lined Jamal’s face when he turned to me.
“The hairstyle, not an apiary.”
Jamal nodded with a newfound confidence.
“I’m going out,” I started. Echo grabbed my arm and held on for dear life.
“You can’t go, B. If you leave, what will happen to us?
I stroked Echo’s arm. “I’ll only be twenty feet away. If you need anything, I’ll be right beside you the whole time.”
Echo eased off her grip and I slipped out of the truck. Morgan spotted me creeping across the divide between us; her eyes went wide with fear, her hands shot up in a gesture to make me stop. This was all so confusing. She knew I’d taken out my fair share of the horde—many of which I’d done on my own.
Josh dropped his right eye to the scope and lined up his sights. He took his time. When he finally allowed his finger to drop, all bets were off. I could almost feel the rhythm of the sniper taking hold of Joshua. As soon as he carefully pulled the trigger of the gun, I expected uproar to follow. It didn’t. In fact, the gang of four ignored the shot and continued giving the car the beatdown of its life.
Morgan’s hand reached up and came to rest on Josh’s shoulder. He turned back to her, purest confusion lining his brow. With the slightest nod toward the car, Josh communicated to Morgan his next move. She gently nodded and stepped back, her arms spread wide to indicate anyone and everyone alive should stay clear of the area.
I didn’t hesitate to find out what the next move was. I backed up until the cool metal of the truck chilled the skin of my back.
“Hey,” Josh shouted. “Over here. Fresh brain all around.”
The zombies didn’t so much as turn
toward the sound of life behind them.
“What’s in that car?” I whispered to Morgan, once she was within range. She shrugged.
Josh raised his gun and, without warning, dropped one of the Moaners with a bullet through the head. The corpse fell with a wet thud, completely unnoticed by its fellow undead who continued the laying on of hands.
“Bethany,” Josh called back. “Humor me and fire up the Obliterator. I want to see if these bastards will react to anything.”
Morgan nodded, as if to give the idea a final stamp of approval.
Under normal circumstances, the apocalypse dictated a “shoot first, ask questions later” attitude—especially when dealing with the undead horde. A part of me wanted to yank the gun from Josh and lay waste to the gang of monsters surrounding the car. Something about the situation was odd, though. Zombies never ignored a fresh brain buffet. In that regard, they were one-trick ponies. But here we were, facing a gang breaking the one and only rule known to zombiekind.
Without letting my eyes drift from the scene for a second, I managed to get into the truck.
“Echo, hand me my laptop, please.”
I was shocked when the device found its way into my grasp with nary a question or complaint. Everyone in the Hummer was glued to the windows—hoping to get some glimmer of understanding of the scene unfolding in front of them.
The laptop booted quickly and I jacked it into the truck’s sound system.
“Give me a beat,” I said, as my right index finger came down on the Enter key to fire off the Obliterator command. At the Janet Jackson reference, Jamal looked at me and flashed a wide, wicked grin and said, “Miss Nitshimi, if I’m nasty.”
The high-pitched oscillating sound tore from the speakers mounted to the undercarriage of the Hummer. With the vehicle not moving, the vibrations from the sound traveled straight up, through steel and glass.
I slammed my palms against the passenger-side window to get a good look at the attack. To my shock, the zombies didn’t budge.
“Bethany.” Jamal’s voice broke through my fear. “This isn’t in any way good.”
“No, Jamal. No, it’s not.”
Echo reached from the back seat and grabbed my shoulder. “They aren’t reacting at all.”
“If what we are seeing is real,” Jamal whispered to me, “the game has officially changed.”
He was right. The Obliterator was always the one assurance we had against the zombie masses. No matter what kind of situation we found ourselves in, if we could produce the sounds at the right frequency and pitch, we could drive the various iterations of zombies away: Moaners, Screamers, Berserker…Boners. But this, this was entirely new and entirely frightening.
Morgan gestured for me to power down the machine. I complied and rushed out to stand between her and Joshua. The sound of gunfire took over where the Obliterator left off. One by one the bastards dropped. Josh didn’t miss. Watching him go at it, weapon in hand, brought a level of assurance I hadn’t felt since Commander Leamy was taken from us.
There was one zombie remaining. Josh stopped firing. He nodded to Rizzo and a knife sliced through the air to embed itself in the skull of the last zombie standing. The Moaner dropped to the ground to spend eternity with its brothers.
From out of nowhere, Rizzo bounded toward the knifed zombie, placed her foot on the thing’s head, and retrieved her knife. The skull caved in from the weight of her foot and a thick brown-and-black paste oozed from the cracks. The smell that wafted upward was infectious death. Rot and putrescence danced their way into my nose and promised to never give quarter. I turned away and fought back a flood of bile. From the sounds at my back it seemed every member of the living brigade was busy fighting the same battle.
“What the hell?” Joshua spoke between heaves. “I’ve never smelled anything so foul.”
I wiped tears from my eyes, swallowed hard, and turned back to the macabre smoothie collecting on the pavement around the car. Curiosity already had its delicate tendrils buried deep in my brain. Nothing would stand in my way of knowing what this new stench of death meant.
“You might want this.” Morgan stood beside me with a gas mask in hand.
I grabbed the mask and slipped it over my head. The echoing sounds of my own breathing filled my ears. “Thanks.”
Puddles of brown and black slickness collected around my feet. What should be intestines, brains, blood, piss, and shit was nothing more than a lake of rot.
“Rizzo.” I turned to locate the girl. “Can I borrow your knife?”
She looked to me, her eyes wide with shock. “Why? Why do you need my knife? Get your own, there are many like it, but this one is mine.”
Rizzo finished her “ode de army” and stared on at me. Seconds ticked by before the corners of her mouth quivered.
“I’m just fucking with ya.”
She stepped toward me and handed over the knife, handle first. With a smile I wrapped my fingers around the proffered tool and winked, which brought a blush to Rizzo’s cheeks. Her usually brash personality led me to believe she hadn’t felt embarrassed in a long, long time.
Before she could figure out my plan, I plunged the blade into the torso of a downed zombie. From the gash, thick, rancid biological oil seeped. As the bubbles from the liquefied putrefaction popped, they released the same disgusting smell as before.
It wasn’t just the smell that bothered me.
“Morgan,” I called out. “Take a look at this and tell me what you see.”
She knelt beside me and took Rizzo’s knife to use as a probe.
“I don’t understand. The rate of decay is impossible. This woman’s remains aren’t that old.”
“But…” I prodded.
“The organs have all liquefied…even the brain. How in the hell were these things able to move?”
Morgan had caught onto precisely the perversion of nature that I saw.
“I don’t understand.” Joshua knelt between us.
Morgan nodded for me to continue.
“It’s simple—the rate of decay between the internal organs and the subcutaneous tissue is wrong. The necrosis between the two should be somewhat similar, but they aren’t. If I were to look at the internal organs, I would swear to you this corpse had been dead for, oh, at least twelve to eighteen weeks. But the subcutaneous tissue tells us another story—one that places death sometime between three and nine weeks.”
Joshua looked at me, concern lining his face. “What difference does a few months make?”
As much as I hated to admit it, I didn’t have time for science. We should be making up precious time, not chatting about the wonders of necrotic tissue.
Morgan stood and looked at Josh. “Once human tissue dies, it goes fast. That’s why when you lose a finger it has to be placed on ice so quickly. What B is trying to tell us is that their organs and their flesh don’t prove a similar time of death.”
I decided to chime in. “According to the liquefied guts on the ground, this thing has been dead for a long, long time; so long, in fact, that it should have already gone to dust.”
It was Rizzo’s turn to chime in. “I don’t understand. If they were rotted meat from the inside out, how were they standing or beating on that car? Without solid muscle and bone structure, wouldn’t they just collapse?”
And that was the million-dollar question. One none of us had an answer for.
Rizzo opted to not allow the moment to ruin our first serious win as a group. She tossed her hands into the air and offered up a celebratory dance for all to see. She then turned to our truck and blew a kiss to the rest of the crew. Who the kiss was meant for, I could only guess.
“Jesus fuck,” Josh shouted. “There’s nothing in the car. Nothing.”
“Then what in the hell were they doing?” Morgan chimed in.
Jamal stepped in beside me, a small device in his hand. He finally looked at me.
“Something’s not right, Bethany.”
“Besides these ba
stards bleeding gravy?” was all I could say.
Jamal turned the device so I could get a look.
“You two care to let us in on your little secret?” Morgan demanded.
“There’s a signal coming from that car. It’s actually a signal embedded in a sound beyond the twenty thousand hertz range, so the human ear cannot pick it up. I got curious as to why these zombies seemed to ignore everything but that car and fired up this little gadget. It turns out someone has planted a sonic kilo of zombie crack inside that car to lure the undead. I can’t say how long these bastards had stood there, but it was long enough for entropy to have turned their organs into little more than chunky brownie mix.”
Morgan looked my way, concern lining her brow. “I don’t get it; how did they function without major or minor organs?”
“By all accounts, they couldn’t. But then, we are talking about zombies, so anything goes. Right?” I bent down and again poked the knife into a chunk of flesh. “Even the muscle has started to rot. This is…I don’t know…impossible.”
Jamal bent down to get a closer look at the unsealed undead. “Let’s think about this with a nod to Vulcan logic. We know the major organs, the heart, lungs, and most of the brain cease to function when the virus takes hold. We also know the virus halts the decay process.” He took the knife from me so he could give the corpse a poke or two. “What we don’t know is if the virus keeps decay at bay for good. What if it can’t hold off the natural process of necrosis permanently? Eventually, every bit of living tissue would rot and these things would become, for all intents and purposes, walking bags of human waste.”
Jamal and I both stood and without prompting, wrapped our arms around each other and nearly shouted for joy.
“How is this, in any way, a reason to celebrate?” Morgan asked.
“Don’t you see?” I released myself from Jamal’s embrace and turned to address Morgan. “These monsters have a shelf life. We had been thinking all along the only way to cull the herd was to shoot, burn, behead, or otherwise end their existence.”
Jamal stepped in and took over for me. “The truth of the matter is, Mother Nature is on our side. We don’t know how long it takes, but every one of these things will eventually sluice rotten innards out their orifices and fall to the ground, officially lifeless.”
