Forest Park: A Zombie Novel

by Jamie Marks

  All the while, Tyler was constantly being confronted by family, and friends demanding more humane conditions for the newly dead and sick alike --- conditions he couldn’t give, even if he had wanted to.

  Susan raised her head with a moan --- to Tyler it seemed more for a show. “Did the story go out?” she asked Charlie.

  Charlie nodded. “It was the biggest story of your career. You’ll be a Sixty Minute’s reporter after all of this is over, Susan,” Charlie said. He could barely contain his excitement, they were on their way to the top, and surely, Susan wouldn’t leave him behind. Not now, now that they were a real team.

  Tyler shook his head. “Before you break open the champagne, I want you to know that you’re responsible for sending a lot of people out of their homes, Ms Shaw, against all the advice given.”

  “God only knows how many people who watched that crap across the country abandoned their homes and took to the streets in the hope of finding refuge. I can’t even raise support from Fort McPherson. Because they, at this present time, have civilians running around out of control. Soldiers are being used as baby-sitters instead of being on the streets assisting the police in rounding up infected individuals.”

  Susan sat back and listened as Charlie came to her defense.

  “Captain, I think ---” Charlie said before Tyler jabbed his index finger into his chest. Tyler’s eyes were aflame with outrage.

  “You keep your mouth shut. Do you understand?”

  Charlie did indeed understand.

  “I have thirteen in total regular bodies on the ground, lady, and I don’t see anyone coming to help soon. Thirteen regular bodies and one police officer. You had no right to say anything about this base being used as a first-aid station or anything else. Those orders I received were in case of a worst-case scenario, and now we have one, thanks to you and every other fucking reporter who immediately relayed the same bullshit to beat one another in the ratings.” He took a deep breath. “You sent half of the town here, and hundreds more from outlying areas. The roads are jammed, the interstate is a car park! We have eye-witness sightings of people getting dragged out of their car windows by the infected, and of hitch hikers being mobbed, and I don’t have a spare man to help a damned soul because we’re knee-deep in shit here.”

  Susan continued to sit wide-eyed. He has the nerve to blame me, she thought.

  Tyler turned to leave but stopped dead in his tracks.

  “One more thing, you live feed, twitter, Facebook, fucking blog or even semaphore my orders, or what you perceive are my orders again, I’ll throw you out into the street myself! And don’t think I won’t.”

  Charlie took a step away from the pair, this is way too intense.

  With everything he needed to say said, Tyler stormed out.

  It was then when Susan noticed she was in a room full of people --- mums, dads and their children --- people who had left their homes on the dream of safety. Some were in beds like hers, surrounded by loved ones, others lay alone and scared.

  So, this was the first-aid station she had informed everyone to travel to for safety. She knew the people would thank her in time, but for now, Susan chose not to notice the scowls, or to hear the snide comments. Hell, I’m a hero, you people owe me, she thought.

  The first aid may only have been a corporal with some headache pills and a box of band-aids, but it’s better than nothing. They’ll thank me one day.

  “What an asshole,” Susan said to anyone who would listen. “It’s people like him that caused all this stuff to happen --- jar heads and their orders? Unbelievable!”

  Charlie nodded in agreement. “Tell me about it.”

  However, nobody else who had heard her said anything.

  “So what’s really been happening?” Susan asked Charlie.

  “People have been flooding in here since the report.”

  “Screw that, Charlie, what’s the word from Paul? Has he said anything?”

  “He loved the story, loved my framing of the shots…”

  “What about me?” Susan said with her usual impatience.

  “He wants to do a live cross to you as soon as you’ve woken up. I can organize it now if you want; everything is ready to go. The camera was slightly damaged but should hold up --- we can do it bedside.”

  Susan looked about her. “Where’s my makeup?”

  Charlie paused. “In the truck, I think. I’ll go look.”

  “Hurry up, and no fucking about like usual --- and make sure you get a mirror!”

  Tyler trudged out of the first-aid station and marched through a mass of people. He was pissed, real pissed. Fort Gillem was at capacity, and a tent city was beginning to form.

  People came from everywhere; their bags and other belongings were lying scattered across the once manicured lawns, and the road that led to the gates of the base was full of parked and abandoned vehicles.

  Tyler wouldn’t allow any civilian vehicles on the base. Space was at a premium.

  He stopped walking for a moment and contemplated what was happening around him, his mind struggled to take anything in, though. He felt tired, so tired he didn’t notice as Lieutenant Anderson came toward him yelling his name.

  Before he knew it, Anderson had snapped to attention, and after a brief report, he left him alone again in the middle of the green, surrounded by people but totally alone.

  One of the first protective measures Tyler had undertaken since the beginning of the crisis, was to remove all weapons from the civilians who had entered Fort Gillem. If people expected military protection, then they would have to do so without being armed themselves. Things were dangerous enough without adding armed and jumpy civilians to the mix, creating chaos or trying to rescue their loved ones from the near overflowing cages. Of course, there were some exceptions, such as retired military men who were now issued a badge-less uniform from the stores and who’d been formed into a small general militia under the command of Sgt. Williams. These men assisted with new arrivals, preparing their accommodation and organizing orientation.

  They had been a godsend, but as yet, they were not armed and wouldn’t be either, not unless camp security was under the threat of being compromised.

  Tyler saw Charlie rummaging through the Wolfpac, and sighed.

  That damn woman was more trouble than she was worth, but Susan was the least of Tyler’s problems. Behind the Wolfpac, smoke was rising high into the air from a thousand fires which were burning from Atlanta to Forest Park, over-stretching the Metro and County fire departments. I only hope they’re over-stretched. I don’t remember the last time I heard a siren or saw a helicopter dumping water on the horizon. Most of what Tyler heard now was the heavy murmur of a thousand conversations, babies crying, and children yelling and screaming, while playing games to take their minds off what was happening on the outside and in the cages.

  In between the children and their games, were others who wandered in a daze, lost in their own thoughts. They were alone and scared with no one to help. There were no grief counselors to aid people with their heavy burdens, and if there were some counselors among the teeming lost, they had their own problems. Everyone had problems.

  We’re not handling this crisis too well at all, Tyler thought. The straight bare-bone facts about what was happening were sketchy, and the many experts whom the major networks relied upon were only experts on giving opinions --- wide varied and uninformed opinions. Opinions don’t solve problems, Tyler thought, they just add fuel to the argument.

  Who’s to blame, and why had they done it?

  The remaining television and radio commentators knew who to blame, as did the Evangelical movement --- internet sales for Gospel mp3’s and E-book Bibles, sky-rocketed until page error 404 begun to appear with a depressing regularity for the digital born-again. Tempting treats, such as the live healing of the infected, turned online churches and broadcasters into vaudeville performances.

  On one occasion, a live healing had turned into a complete fiasco wh
en an Evangelist had to run for his life, as an infected child had gotten loose from their holy bindings and chased the Holy Roller about the stage.

  It was hilarious to the point of depression.

  The sickness was the work of the devil.

  It was an attack on the soul, said the religious far right, in a world where homosexuals spoke from the pulpit of major churches and the state-supported babies being sucked from their mother’s womb with industrial-strength vacuum cleaners. Satan had everyone in his grasp, they warned, and the only way to avoid the hell fires was to ask the Lord Almighty for his forgiveness and to abstain from pre-marital sex --- but some went further. Some called for the burning of all mosques and synagogues. Burn their temples down!

  The sinners and the heretics were then barricaded in their temples of unholy sin, and fire was set to the buildings. They chained the doors shut on nightclubs and porn stores --- the mosques and the liquor stores --- anywhere sin undermined Jesus, and his message was lost or cast aside. The cleansing fire solved almost every problem except the Police and National Guardsmen, who fought the good work of the Shepherd, so the Shepherd’s followers gunned them down on the street.

  Within days, the world went mad.

  Mass hysteria, nurtured by a misguided belief in the end of times turned normal, good and innocent people into violent lunatics without the help of infection.

  Others took a different approach toward the chaos --- perched on rooftops. Snipers would take random pot-shots at passers-by, and strangers who appeared on the outskirts of uninfected towns and neighborhoods. Cities and towns had succumbed to odd angry shots, which generated frightened eyes and mournful outcry. Mass transit had come to a grinding halt --- driver-less trains remained in their rolling yards, and buses were left abandoned to the side of the road, and the drivers cast into the breeze.

  How could it be?

  How could it be that civilization could disappear in almost an instant? Where could it have run off too, how could it have been so tenuous?

  From man to beast within moments --- from kind and courteous to wild animals at the slightest stumble, Tyler thought.

  Tyler then thought back to the dark days of Hurricane Katrina, when the city that he loved suffered as much from its hidden divisions as from the destructive winds and flooding. New Orleans rapidly became a city lost in an ocean of dislocated bodies, floating through its ruined streets until becoming snagged on a collapsed house or tree. As time passed, those bodies that could not be retrieved and refrigerated, quickly became bloated in the warm sunshine and then popped like over-ripe melons. He remembered how the authorities distributed emergency relief supplies by tossing them from the back of flatbed trucks. How did it come to that? Katrina was an isolated incident, and this...this was causing planes to fall from the sky.

  Like millions of other Americans who saw the planes fall from the sky, Tyler woke from a dream. High above JFK International airport, airbuses laden with passengers circled for hours about 1000 feet apart. A few minutes before midday, an airbus radioed air-traffic control, and told the handler that a passenger had passed away on their flight between Boston and New York. Minutes later, the pilot radioed again, this time his voice was unsteady when he told air-traffic control that the passenger had attacked, and killed the in-flight Air-Marshall. Soon after another airbus confirmed that they also had suffered their first casualty on-board, this flight had originated from Atlanta. The decision was then taken to Washington, not to allow any of the circling airbuses to land --- ignoring all protests.

  The first airbus fell from the sky and slammed into Rockaway Boulevard, killing everyone on board in a giant fireball a little after two in the afternoon. The entire disaster was broadcasted around the world in seconds, and passengers who Skyped and Twittered from the other denied planes, expressed their outrage at being left to die in a similar fireball to any television network that would listen --- there was not a single one that didn’t.

  Realizing that the same fate awaited them all, the other circling pilots had to consider what their options were quickly. Should they attempt a landing, regardless of the consequences at JFK or if fuel allowed, should an attempt be made to reach another airport? Alternatively, should they dump their planes into the sea, and hope for the best?

  The pilots whose planes were the lowest on fuel decided to land at JFK regardless of the consequences, and the consequences came fast. Before long, the runways of JFK were crippled with flames. Plane after plane slammed into one another, others skidded from runways or collided with emergency vehicles.

  A schoolteacher from New Jersey, using her I-phone, captured the image of an airbus, falling from the sky and crashing into a suburban street. Across New York State, planes could be seen plummeting to the ground, dropping into the sea, smashing into highways, shopping malls --- everywhere.

  Soon after, reports from LAX confirmed that they too had closed their landing strips and threatened that any pilot who attempted to land, would be dealt with by the US Air-force. It had begun a chain reaction. Boston, Portland and Atlanta shut down, and pilots were threatened with being blasted from the sky. CBS News, Fox News, CNN --- all showed live footage of aircraft crashing to the ground, and repeated it over and over. Nothing was heard from Washington, as families pleaded for the lives of their relatives directly, by speaking out on the networks, while the people on board the doomed flights begged for their own lives from laptops and Android touch screens.

  What asshole could have allowed this to happen?

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  Ambrose leaned back into his chair and crossed his right leg over his left, and placed one hand on his knee. To anybody watching him it would seem as if he had an unhealthy male interest in good grooming, but Ambrose was simply trying to avoid making eye contact with anyone at the table.

  Since his failed visit to New York, the situation had grown steadily worse. He thought of the planes falling from the sky, both in the US and across the globe: Heathrow, Frankfurt and Sydney. Seeing those falling planes captured the world’s imagination, the horror, the loss of control. Everything was disintegrating before his eyes, everything but the bureaucracy of Government, the drudgery of meetings and the endless, now mostly pointless discussions. The more they talked, the less time we have, Ambrose thought, as he pushed his cuticle back with his thumbnail. In a world where the Dead walked the streets as if in a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, the time for long-winded speeches and rubber stamp decisions was truly gone.

  Ambrose was sitting behind and to the left of Harris, who also was leaning back in his seat with one arm lying on the highly polished table in front of him. Next to Harris was the President’s Homeland Security Advisor, Kurt Schwartz, a retired general and a close friend of the President. He was a tall, heavy-set guy, which to anyone who met him had an imposing air about him. Across from Schwartz was Alan Lieberman from the Justice Department. Lieberman was a short, dynamic man who had thick black hair and intelligent deep brown eyes. Lieberman was known to everyone on Capitol Hill as a rock in a crisis, a stand-up guy, and a family man who was married to a Hampton heiress who he had remained loyal to for over twenty-five years of marriage and three children.

  However, Ambrose knew differently. What Ambrose and Harris both knew about everyone at the table that day could fill volumes. They were the keepers of secrets. Harris once told his young protégé, “Never waste your time helping them to office, only pull their strings once they get there.”

  It was helpful advice.

  The other attendees of the meeting being held in the White House’s situation room, were Air Force General William Anderson who represented the USAF --- a non-entity both within and outside of Washington. Representing the Navy was Admiral Scott Gardner, a Gulf War veteran who had recently racked up more gambling debts in Atlantic City and was on the verge of filing for bankruptcy until the crisis.

  However, of all the military representatives who attended, General Tex “Cash”

  Carnegie, was
the most notorious, and at one time was the youngest general in the US Army.

  The public first became aware of Carnegie during the second Gulf War; Carnegie had received the Congressional Medal of Honour, the highest award that could be won while serving in the military, but heroes are forgotten fast in a twenty-four-hour news cycle.

  However, according to Harris, there was a hidden story behind the award --- or so he had told Ambrose over a drink or two one stormy night while they both sat sipping scotch and watching the lightning flash over Washington --- long before all of this began.

  The story, as Ambrose had heard it from Harris, was that Carnegie had not so much won the award for bravery, or anything close to committing an act of bravery. If there was an act of bravery somewhere involved, then according to Harris, it was purely accidental.

  The story was Carnegie had bought the award! To some it was purely gossip and character assassination, to Harris and Ambrose it was so close to a fact, it didn’t matter either way. Carnegie led a lavish lifestyle before he had stepped foot in Iraq, but for several years before the invasion, he had scaled much of that lavish lifestyle down. Nobody knew why exactly; some hinted at the Dotcom crash, but others thought that Carnegie was at last showing signs of maturing.

  Nearly all the general’s money was old money, passed down from one crooked dealmaker to another. It was old money, which had been wisely invested by “Tex’s” father, and his father before him. Tex Carnegie Senior was a thrift and shrewd cutthroat businessman, who had grown his father’s fortune ten-fold until he passed away late one winter’s night in an escort’s apartment in lower Manhattan.

  Not that the coroner ever saw the old man’s body laying prostrate on his favorite call girl’s couch, as pale as a snowflake.