This Rotten World (Book 1)
Page 19
Chapter 46: Becoming Chaos
Ace stood in the hallway looking at the body of Jungle Fever lying on a cell floor. His eyes were open, but unseeing. A bullet hole yawned black and bloody in his forehead. The hallway echoed with yelling. People shouted at him to free them. He didn't care about them. They could all go fuck themselves are far as he was concerned.
He ran down the hallway, yelling for Tak. Eventually he found him... or what was left of him. It looked like his cellmate had been eating him. There were bullet holes in both of their heads, but Tak's cellmate didn't look to have any major damage besides the bullet hole.
How was he going to tell Tak's mom? That was the first thought that popped into his head. It was a ridiculous thought when it ran through his head the second time. Tak's mom was 5,000 miles away, and even if she were here, what would he say? An American ate your son in jail?
Ace was still figuring out his next move as he walked up and down the cellblock, releasing everyone who was still alive. There were several corpses, but none of them seemed to be moving around. It was the head that did it. Pop the melon, drop the felon. It sounded like a good song lyric, but he knew that he would never write another song again.
This was the day. Today was the day that Ace became who he had always wanted to be, who he had pretended to be when he was on stage. Today was the day that Ace became chaos incarnate. In a country falling apart, with no ties or loyalties to anyone, 5,000 miles away from home. If today wasn't the day, then there would never be a day.
As Ace released the last person, they huddled in front of the door to the cellblock debating the next course of action.
"What are we going to do?" a bearded man shouted.
"I need to get back to my family," shouted another.
"What the fuck is going on out there?" said a man in an Electric Fever T-shirt.
Ace called for their attention, thumbing through his limited knowledge of English in his mind. "We got to live. They got to die."
They looked at him, each man privately deciding if he was a madman or a genius. The war went on for too long, so Ace said, "It's time. Time to fight for your life."
With that, Ace turned around and unlocked the door. He let them through while he calmly waited. When the last person had filed through the doorway he tossed the keys on the ground, and strolled out behind them.
They ran, screaming through the police station, their fear manifesting itself as violence, swollen, mechanical, and born from the unknown. Ace kicked down a door to an office that he passed. He fought the urge to riot with the mob, to let Ace Fever come to the forefront and assert his control.
They smashed windows, knocked over desks and broke anything that could be broken as they surged through the hallways of the police station. As they reached a stairwell that would take them up to the main floor, they were greeted by two cops, handguns and mace at the ready. They stood at the top of the stairs blocking the way. By now, the crowd, 17-men strong, had built up enough inertia that not even the sight of a policeman's 9mm could slow them down. They romped over the cops. Even when they lost one of their number to gunfire, they kept rumbling along, an avalanche of pent up rage, confusion, and fear.
Once they hurt one cop, they couldn't stop. No one said it, but they knew it. They had taken on a hive-like mentality now. Together, they would work to escape from the building or die trying. Perhaps they'd just keep running, right through the world, a nonstop whirlwind of violence and change picking up members and spitting them out, like seeds, ready to flower and blossom into bastions of destruction and degeneracy.
Ace walked slowly in this whirlwind, testing doors, and looking for anything that he could use as a weapon. He still had the ASP baton, but he wanted something sexier, something more definite. He laughed to himself as he heard the screams of another police officer from somewhere in the building.
After opening another door, Ace found himself face to face with a cop that was hurriedly putting on his utility belt. Ace flung open the ASP baton, and charged the man before he could pull his gun. As he brought the ASP down on his arm, he actually heard it break. The officer's arm hung there below the elbow, drooping as if there weren't bones inside. His scream was loud, so Ace clocked him across the face. Teeth clattered on the floor, and the police officer fell over on his side.
He dropped down to his knees, and pulled the cop's gun from its holster. He looked at it intently as the officer tried to crawl away from him with his one good arm. Ace wasn't familiar with firearms. He had once fired a few in a shopping mall in Honolulu, but other than that, he had rarely seen them. Guns were illegal in Japan.
He did manage to find the safety though. Ace stood over the officer, pointing the gun at the officer's face. A quick squeeze, and he would be gone. Ace's mind warred with itself. He waited for a sign, something to show him what to do. Chaos was hard.
The officer whimpered, on his back with his hands in front of his face. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth, as he spoke. "Please. Don't shoot. I have a family."
Ace smiled. "We all have family. Or else we would not exist." Ace turned around, and walked out of the room, leaving the cop lying there in a bloody heap on the floor. It was tough being Chaos. The ordered part of his mind, the part that had been conditioned to civilization kept telling him to kill the cop. It was justice. It was justice for Tak, justice for Jungle Fever, justice for himself.
In the end, he decided that more chaos would come from a broken and injured cop than from a dead one. He tucked his gun away, and walked through the police station. By now, the crowd had rushed on, their handiwork splattered on walls, floors, and desks. Some of their handiwork still quivered, but most were dead... or deadish.
Ace smiled to himself as he pulled a pack of cigarettes from a dead policeman's pocket. He strolled out of the police station, on a quest for some food. He was starving, and he had a lot of work to do.
Chapter 47: I'd Like to Make a Collect Call to Armageddon
The monitors glowed with a spectral blue light as shambling humans wandered in and out of frame. Joan and Clara were doomed. Of that they both agreed. Clara might be a feisty woman and Joan might be a doctor with a spine fashioned out of steel, but together they weren’t enough to conquer the sheer number of infected humans in the hospital quarantine ward alone.
Clara had ceased being angry long ago. She still wanted to sock Joan across the jaw every now and then, but the hopelessness of their situation was becoming clearer and clearer. Their only protection was a thick door secured by a keypad and some heavy-duty steel locks. Of course, this same door was also keeping them from the things that they needed, namely food and water.
She doubted that the designers of this office had envisioned a scenario where the entire hospital would fall so quickly. “There’s no way they would need their own water or food supply,” someone had likely said at one of the production meetings. Schmucks.
All they had was a phone, their one lifeline to the outside world… and no one was answering. The police emergency line was either busy or it sent out a stock recording that told Joan to hang up and try again.
The idea of waiting in the room and starving to death was unnerving Joan, and Clara wasn’t far behind her. They hadn’t talked for a while, so Clara had to clear her throat when she spoke. “We can’t just sit here.”
Joan didn’t say anything. She just stared at the glare of the monitors, cycling through room after room, watching her former patients wander around, looking for something to eat.
“Did you hear me? We can’t just sit here,” she repeated.
“What do you want me to do?” she said in a blunt voice. “The police aren’t answering, and if you think we’re going to make it through that mass of people, then you’re dreaming.”
Clara groaned in frustration, “There has to be something that we can do.”
Joan was silent, apparently lost in thought. “There is one thing,” she said. Clara waited patiently, even though she wanted to shake
the answer out of the woman. “We could notify the CDC.”
“What good is that going to do?” Clara asked.
“Maybe nothing for us, but we might be able to help other people.”
Clara threw her hands up in frustration, “Well, make the call. Someone ought to have a chance to live at least.”
Joan flipped through a binder labeled “Emergency Scenario” and pulled out a laminated sheet of paper with a phone number on it. She grabbed the phone and began dialing the number, then she waited as the other end rang.
“Speaker,” Clara prompted. Joan did as she was asked and turned on the speakerphone.
“Hello, you have reached the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention emergency information line. Please stay on the line.” The voice was robotic and not at all comforting, but it was better than the elevator music that began playing after its brief message.
It sounded like a flute solo version of Twisted Sister’s "We’re Not Going to Take It." For a second, as she watched the monitors in front of her, the infected’s movements synced up perfectly with the music, turning the entire scene into a macabre music video, their bloody bodies moving in time to some twisted waltz.
“Who the hell picks the music for these things? Do they just pick a song off of a list?” Clara whined. She was tempted to tell Joan to simply hang up the phone. It wasn't worth the torture. Just before she was about to grab the phone out of Joan's hand and rip it out of the wall, she heard a voice over the phone.
"Hello," the voice said. "Is anybody there?"
"Yes, we're here," Joan said hastily, a fevered part of her terrified by the prospect that the man would just hang up and they'd never be able to get through again. "We have an emergency."
"What type of emergency?"
"We're not sure if it's viral or bacteriological."
"Mmm-hmm, tell me more," the man said. They heard the sounds of typing over the speakerphone.
"As far as we can tell, we're in the middle of some sort of epidemic. Whatever illness these people have, it causes them to crave human flesh. They don't speak; there's no cognition whatsoever, they're just hungry," Joan's words were an avalanche, tumbling from her mouth. The finer points of the infection were forgotten among the more horrendous aspects of the illness.
"And how is the illness spread?" asked the man on the other end of the phone in his matter-of-fact voice. He sounded like a '50s news reporter. Clara imagined him sitting at a desk with a cigarette burning in an ashtray, the glow of an ancient computer monitor reflecting off of his thick, black plastic eyeglasses.
Joan thought for a second, and then said, "I'm not 100% on this one, but I know that bites seem to spread the disease. Earlier I saw a woman who was manifesting signs of some sort of illness, cold-like, but more intense, 15 minutes later she had become one of them. Also, I know this is going to sound crazy, but it seems as if the dead are coming back to life."
The man's complete lack of shock sent a chill through Clara's spine. Something wasn't right here. He wasn't incredulous, and he seemed to take everything they said as fact. That wasn't right. "Where are you now, Joan?"
"I'm locked inside the quarantine wing of Legacy Emanuel in Portland, Oregon."
"And are you experiencing any sort of symptoms?" the voice asked.
"I don't think so, and neither is my friend," she reported back.
Clara wanted to yell at Joan for assuming that they were friends, but when the only other living person that you know of is a voice on a phone thousands of miles away, you kind of bite your tongue.
Keys clacked as the voice typed in more information, "Well, folks, I hate to break the news to you, but you're not the only ones in this position. We've had reports of this illness all over the United States, and we have reports from other countries as well. This is not strictly a U.S. event. This is a world event."
"What do you mean a world event?" Clara asked.
"I mean that things are bad all over. We're doing what we can, but right now, we know about as much as you two do about this disease."
"What are we supposed to do?" Joan asked.
"My advice to you is to sit still, and wait for the military to roll in. The country will be under martial law soon. I have it on good authority that the National Guard is being mobilized. Things should be under control in no time at all. In the meantime, keep yourselves safe, keep from being bit, and if you have to try and kill one of these things, try and damage the brain. It seems to be the only way to stop them. Good luck, ladies."
With that, the voice on the phone hung up, and it was all over. Joan and Clara looked at each other, both thinking the same thing. "We're fucked."
Chapter 48: Move Over Rover, the Army is Taking Over
General Burt Hicks hated the sound of helicopters. He hoped that whoever invented the damn things had been shot. The noise level combined with the ever-present buffeting of wind from the rotors made you feel like you were in some sort of medieval torture device. When they landed on the second tallest building in Portland, The General couldn't get off the chopper fast enough.
He was greeted on top of the building by the usual fanfare, some suited men and women who didn't know their assholes from their elbows, and a handful of soldiers... only this time they weren't wearing their full dress uniforms. His soldiers were now decked out in their finest functional battledress. Grayish-green fatigues with digital camouflage and weapons with enough punch to rip a man in half... The General would have loved the sight if they had been mobilized for some other purpose. But in just a matter of hours, those weapons would be turned upon the average American citizen.
But that's why he had five stars, because he was the man that you could call when things got ugly. General Hicks had never been accused of having a personality, and he wasn't about to start now. The fate of the country, maybe even the entire world was at stake here. If some citizens had to die, well, then some citizens had to die.
The National Guard had been mobilized around midnight the night before. Things were moving slowly on the operation, and they were severely understaffed. Many soldiers hadn't reported in, and it was clear to see why as he was flying in. The city seemed like a warzone. Even on the outskirts of the town, he saw signs of the destruction, but as they neared the city, the smoke and fire had been impossible to miss.
"Good afternoon, General," saluted one of the suited women.
"Spare me the pleasantries. What's the sitrep?" he snapped, ready to begin the sordid task of bringing this bucking bitch of a city down to the ground.
"Casualties are high. The disease seems to be spreading at an exponential rate. We received the first reports about ten days ago, but last night it erupted into a full-scale epidemic. All roads out of the city are clogged with traffic or hordes of infected. At this point, we estimate 25% of the population has been infected, 15% of that within the last day."
"Do you have any good news?"
The woman's smile was pinched as she said, "The high is supposed to be 80 degrees with about ten percent humidity."
The General looked at the woman. "Is that supposed to be a joke?"
"No, sir. It was the only good piece of news that I could come up with off the top of my head."
The General stopped walking and looked the woman in the eye as he spoke, "The next time someone asks you if there's any good news, you say, 'I'm still alive.' That's the best news anyone can possibly have. If you're able to think and breathe, well, you've always got good news in your back pocket. Now let's get our asses on the news."
****
Around the city, handfuls of people watched as the grizzled man with the wrinkled face, the gray buzz cut, and the chest full of commendations spoke on the news.
"At this time, Portland is now under martial law. Those who feel ill need to put a white flag on their door. We will get to you eventually. Stay in your houses. Avoid contact with others. Curfew is at 5 o'clock. Anyone caught looting, or engaged in other uncivil activities, will be shot on sight.
The General disappeared, and a newswoman came on the air. Her eyes were red, and it looked like she had been crying. A number flashed across the screen and citizens were urged to call the number if they had an emergency.
Those that tried to call soon found the number just as busy and useless as 911. Throughout the city, gunshots could be heard as helicopters buzzed through the sky. Things were not looking good in Portland.
****
The General walked through the corridors of the news station, until he came to the room that had been set up as his forward command. He sat at the desk and began going through the maps. Known activity for the infected was marked on the first map, collected from unanswered police calls, satellite imagery, and their own soldiers' observations. He was disheartened by what he saw. It was all over the city. There wasn't a single area of more than a few blocks that didn't seem to be touched.
He flipped the page and saw another map; this one slightly larger. The outlying areas had experienced the same sort of growth. Things weren't going south. They had gone south before the call was even put in.
The General flipped another page... this time he had a map of the entire United States. He didn't even bother flipping to the next map, the one of the entire world.
Instead, The General stood looking out the floor to ceiling window on the 35th floor of the second tallest building in Portland. The tallest building was on fire, burning from the ground up it looked like.
He stood with his hands behind his back, trying to put together a plan that would get this country back in order, a plan that would keep the dead in the ground.