Sustainable Earth (Book 2): Death by Revelation

by Jack J. Lee

  I didn’t have a clue of what to do now. I grabbed the last two bottles of hard liquor in the kitchen and went up into my room. I don’t have much memory of the next few days.

  I heard a knock on my bedroom door. “Mike, wake up. Your dad is on the phone.”

  “What?”

  “Open up man, I’ve got your dad on the phone!”

  I got up and opened the door. Alex was there holding his cell phone. “Here’s the phone man. Get out to the backyard so you can get some reception.”

  I stumbled downstairs and went out back. “Dad, is that you?”

  “Mike, what have you been doing? We’ve been calling you for the last 24 hours ever since the cell phones started working again. Why haven’t you been answering your home phone or cell phone?”

  “Dad, how’s Mom? What’s going on with Jeff and Bill?”

  “Mom, Jeff, and Bill are fine. Why weren’t you answering your phones?”

  “My land line has been down since the 11th. A truck ran into the telephone line down the street a few minutes after the zombies started swarming. Ever since my exterior walls got armored with metal, I haven’t been able to get any cell coverage in the house. I haven’t been outside for awhile.”

  “I’m glad I thought to call your roommate Alex. Your mom has been frantic for the last couple of days. Here’s your mom.”

  “Mike, honey, how are you?”

  I had been able to fake being strong with my dad. I couldn’t with my mom. My chest heaved; my voice changed. “Not good, Mom. I haven’t been good. I had to shoot a lot of people I knew a couple days ago.”

  “Oh, honey, you should have called.”

  “I know, Mom. I’m sorry.”

  “Well I’m glad that you and Alex are ok. Is there anyone else in the house besides you two?”

  “Yeah, a neighbor and two Mormon missionaries are in the house.”

  “Good, I’m glad you have other people with you.”

  I spoke to my mom until Alex’s cell phone started to run out of power. I told her that I needed to take a shower and get some food and that I would call them back.

  I looked at the phone as I turned it off. It was the 1:32 pm on the 14th. I’d been in an alcoholic funk for three days. I went back inside. The others were waiting for me in the kitchen.

  “How’s your family doing?”

  “Pretty good, Alex, they’re all ok. Thanks for taking my Dad’s call.”

  “That’s just luck, dude. I was outside trying to reach my family when I got your father’s call.”

  “You haven’t been able to reach your family?”

  “ Not yet. The rest of us haven’t been able to reach anyone.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Alex.” I looked up at everyone else. “I’m really sorry.”

  I was starving. I poured myself a bowl of the perfect food, cereal. I mumbled between spoonfuls, “Did anything happen while I was in my room?”

  Alex shrugged, “Timmy Janga didn’t last long.”

  “What?”

  Alex told me that all of them had gone to bed on the 11th around 9. When they woke up, 101.9 was off the air. The only stations that they could get since then were automated loops listing the locations of Federal Emergency Aid centers. Alex, Steve, and Wayne had been going out into the backyard several times a day to try to reach family and friends. None of them had succeeded.

  “I’m such an idiot,” Cecilia said. “I left my purse with my cell phone in my house. I don’t have any of my friends and family phone numbers memorized. I can’t call anyone.”

  After my third bowel of cereal, I was full. I made my excuses and went up to my room to clean up. The others were still in the kitchen when I came back down. I could tell that they were envious as I walked past them. I called Jeff.

  He picked up, “Yo, you dumb shit. What the hell’s up with not calling or answering your cell phone for days? Mom was going crazy worrying about you.”

  “I’m fine, Jeff, thank you for asking. How are you?”

  “Not bad now, but I have to tell you bro, it was a little hairy on Saturday.”

  Jeff hadn’t been on call on Saturday. It was his day off and he had been sleeping in when he got a call from the hospital. All the patients had begun to vomit. Every nurse, resident, and attending doctor was being called in to help.

  When Jeff got to the inpatient rehab floor for the brain and spinal cord injury patients, it was a madhouse. Nurses, aids, medical students, and doctors were running around dealing with one patient crashing and then another. Jeff was in the middle of trying to start an IV in a dangerously dehydrated patient when he got violent. A nurse and a medical student tried to restrain him while Jeff worked. Jeff realized what was going on when the IV needle went in and instead of blood, thick black sludge dripped out.

  The patient began to scream and tried to bite the medical student. Jeff had put an IV into a zombie. The University of Michigan Medical Center is located in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Ann Arbor is a liberal’s paradise. It is totally and completely illegal for a civilian to carry a handgun in the city. Right around the time my parents moved to Michigan, Jeff started wearing sport coats and blazers to work instead of wearing his white lab coat. Jackets hid his Glock better.

  He pulled out his Glock 21 and fired a .45 ACP round into the zombie’s brain. The nurse and medical student looked stunned for a second and then stumbled away from him. Jeff expected to attract attention with the gun shot. No one even peeked into the room. He realized that screams were coming from the hallway. It dawned on him that every single sick patient in the hospital had been infected with the zombie virus.

  He told the other two, “Follow me if you want to live” and bolted out of the room. The entire hospital was overrun with zombies. Jeff said that he shot everything that got in his way as he ran to the stairway and out of the hospital. He was on his 3rd and last clip of 13 .45 ACP rounds when he got off the Hospital grounds and into the Arboretum.

  The nurse and medical student didn’t make it. Jeff thought that he might have nailed some uninfected people on his way out. He couldn’t be sure. It had been a madhouse and he had been moving and shooting purely on instinct. If he saw a head that didn’t look right, he blew a hole in it. When I asked him how he felt about it, he said that he didn’t have regrets. Jeff was sure he was one of a very small number of people that got out of the hospital alive. Everyone he had shot had been bitten, moving too slow, or going the wrong way; in his mind if they weren’t zombies they would have died anyway.

  Nichol’s Arboretum is a collection of native and exotic trees and shrubs planted over a couple square miles. It’s landscaped to look like natural woodland. It takes up a couple square miles and is right next to the Medical Center. My family’s house was on the other side of the Arboretum a little over a mile away through the woods. It took about ten minutes for Jeff to get home. He didn’t see a single zombie in the woods.

  Jeff finished his story with a little laugh. “Man, it was intense.”

  I asked “Have you been able to get in touch with anyone from the government or the military?”

  “No, which is weird. You would think that high level government officials like the president would survive. His security had to have been ridiculous. He hasn’t been on the radio. There hasn’t been anything from him or any other government official on the internet. It looks like all our elected leaders are dead.

  “Our internet service is down at home. I’ve been using my droid to surf the web. Bloggers are like cockroaches, impossible to completely eliminate. The ones that are still online are civilians and besides describing what’s going on right in their area, they don’t have much useful information.

  “No. I take that back. There’s a group of bloggers from Canada that are convinced that vampires exist.”

  “Vampires?”

  “Yeah, that’s the rumor. There’s a conspiracy theory out there that vampires have taken out all the government and military officials. The bloggers think that we are in a
war. Only we don’t know with who or what. The zombies are the grunts and the vampires are the Special Forces. None of them have any proof of this, but it does make sense. There has to be something besides zombies taking out all our leaders.”

  “Shit, so we got vampires to deal with, too?”

  “Maybe.”

  “So how do we deal with vampires?”

  “I’ll tell you what we’ve been doing. We don’t go outside at night. We’ve been making sure to keep the windows blacked out. There’s no point in making it easy for anything including vampires to notice us at night.”

  “I guess you’ve been going crazy with boredom, holed up in the compound with the family with nothing to do. I can’t see you spending a lot of time surfing the web on your phone.”

  “What are talking about? I’ve been working like a maniac.”

  “Huh?”

  “The solar panels died a few days before the Outbreak. So I’ve been working on a replacement power source.”

  “You got two windmills and the natural gas generator.”

  “Yeah but there’s barely any wind here and sooner or later the natural gas lines are going to run dry.”

  “So what’s your replacement source?”

  “We’ve gone completely eco-friendly. I took apart one of our windmills and set it up on the ground so it looks kind of like one of those kid merry-go-rounds you see in playgrounds.”

  “What the hell, man? You’re making power by pushing the generator by hand?”

  “No.” Jeff started to giggle. He was so happy with himself. “Me and Bill have been capturing zombies and chaining them to the merry-go-round. We’re hanging pieces of dead zombie about three feet in front of them. Zombies don’t get tired. They don’t even breathe, completely renewable and zero carbon emissions.”

  “What the fuck! You’re messing with zombies to get electricity!”

  “Why not, they’re messing with us to get food, might as well get something useful out of them.”

  “How are you capturing zombies? Mom must be going crazy!”

  “Mom’s not happy but she isn’t stupid. She knows we need a reliable source of power. Zombies seem to stay in their own territories. Sure they will give a chase if they see or hear something edible, but on their own they tend to stay in one location. Luckily most of the homes in our neighborhood are on two to five acre lots; fewer people means fewer zombies. Zombies are stupid and are really slow. It’s not that hard to capture one as long as there aren’t too many of them.

  “Hunting for zombies also gave me and Bill an excuse to go outside our compound. We ended up saving four lives. Remember the jailbait high school girls we saw waiting for a bus a couple blocks from the house?”

  “I guess so. Pretty girls are everywhere. Who remembers them?”

  “Whatever, like you don’t remember good looking girls. Well, our next door neighbor used to be the Chairman of the English department. He had three daughters, one a freshman at the University and two in high school. Classic highly educated liberal who thought he was a genius who wasn’t. He had a mansion on five acres and money to burn but didn’t fortify his home. When zombies attacked all he had was an antique double barreled shotgun. He got two shots off. The dweeb aimed for the zombies’ chests. Luckily for his wife and daughters, he was able to distract the zombies long enough that they were able to climb up on their roof.

  “When we came up to their home, almost all the zombies in our neighborhood were circled around their yard and in their house. They spent two days up on the roof without food, water, or shelter.”

  “How did you get rid of the zombies?”

  “There were probably less than sixty zombies in and around their house. We each had a brick of five hundred .22 rounds. By the way dude, you did a good thing when you convinced Mom and Dad to buy 10/22 rifles and suppressors for all of us. We just climbed up a big tree and started pegging the zombies in the head. After a few minutes, they were all right below us. It was as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. For little while there I was wondering if me and Bill had screwed ourselves because the sound of our suppressed shots attracted another hundred plus zombies. In the end though it all worked out, we cleared out almost all the zombies for at least a quarter mile around us.”

  “Were the women ok?”

  “They’re fine physically, mentally not so hot. You know how Mom is -- her house, her rules. She told me that she remembers this kind of shit from when she was a kid during the Korean War. She’s got those girls and their mother running ragged. Mom thinks keeping them busy is the best therapy for them; she’s probably right.

  “Hey, Bill wants to talk to you. Oh yeah, before I forget, according to the bloggers, vampires are drawn to strong electromagnetic signals like radio broadcasts and electrical transmission lines. Weak signals like those in home generators and windmills or walkie talkies don’t seem to be a problem, but commercial radio stations and/or major power lines are supposed to draw vampires like candy. The vampires will destroy live power lines. For some reason, they don’t destroy radio transmission towers; they just eat everyone they find around them. Don’t go near a radio station; according to the bloggers it’s the kiss of death.”

  It was great talking to my family. When I found out that they were all right, it felt like a five hundred pound weight was off my chest. I was relieved and stressed at the same time. It was a familiar stress. I’ve been living with it my whole life. Most people don’t know what it’s like to come from a family of overachievers.

  My mother took up painting when I was in high school. A few years later her paintings started selling for 10 to 20 grand. Last year one of her paintings was exhibited in the Chicago Art Museum. My father was an extremely successful Ob/Gyn. When I was a kid it seemed like everyone I knew had been delivered by my dad. I know I’m a smart guy. I got straight A’s in high school and graduated with an A minus average from Cal Tech. If you know how many geniuses go to Cal Tech, you know how difficult it is to get an A minus average. The problem is that I have to study to get these kinds of grades and no one else in my family does. Bill only got one question wrong when he took the SAT’s; he has a genius level IQ. Jeff is a speed reader and has close to a photographic memory. It was a fricking pain in the ass growing up and trying to keep up.

  Of the three of us, I have the most gifts athletically. I’m the most coordinated. The problem is that my brothers are both freaks of nature. Bill doesn’t seem to feel pain. As a kid, he would often jump off our roof onto the grass because he said it didn’t hurt when he hit the ground. Do you know how hard it is to wrestle someone who doesn’t feel pain? Jeff’s one of those weird ducks that perform better under stress. I’m like most people. If it’s match point or if money is on the line, I tend to do worse. Jeff’s the opposite. Under pressure, he almost always outperforms. I had a fence between me and the zombies and three other guys helping me last Saturday. It still could have gone either way. If I had been in the same situation as Jeff, on the fifth floor of a hospital filled with zombies, I probably would have died.

  Three days ago, I killed twenty-seven zombies. In any other family this would have been impressive. Compared to what my brothers had done while saving four people, it was chump change. Until I talked to my family I thought having symptoms of PTSD was justified. Now I felt like a wuss. I needed to man-up.

  Chapter 12: Ari Levin, July 14th, Year 0

  The last four months had been interesting. Reading about zombies had been just a way to kill time on my flight to the US. I figured in a few weeks that the news about zombie attacks would turn out to be an interesting hoax. I was wrong. Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran were no longer major problems for the US. The Palestinian and Israeli conflict was solved. I no longer had old terrorist enemies to worry about.

  On April 1st, the US government left a coded message on an internet forum offering me a job. The message indicated that they wanted me to scout out Iraq. They offered me 4 million. At the time of the government’s post, the zombi
es had already spread throughout the Middle East. By August, they upped their offer to 20 million. I didn’t respond.

  Their attempts to hire me told me that the US brass didn’t have a clue. Intel of the sort they wanted, going into the infected areas and coming back out, should have been easy. Zombies were slow and supposedly stupid. The CIA and the US military had plenty of operatives that should have been able to do the job. The fact they were offering this much money for a scouting job meant that their operatives weren’t getting it done. I know how good their men are; I used to be one. In my line of work the price of a mission is a good indicator of the risks involved. It’s my rule to never accept a gig worth more than a million. A little bit of danger makes life interesting; I’m not into suicide.

  Zombies spread quickly through Africa. This didn’t worry me. Most African countries aren’t known for their military prowess. Egypt has a large professional army. Since 1979, the US has on average given 2 billion dollars of aid to Egypt every year; most of that money was used to build up their military. The Egyptians should have been able to hold their borders for awhile; they didn’t. Egypt shares a heavily fortified border with Israel. I knew the world was in trouble when Israel fell. It didn’t take long for the zombies to get to Iran and Iraq.

  All my money had been deposited in a Swiss bank account. I transferred my money to the US in April. When you bring this much money into the US, banks have to report the transfer to the IRS. Half of what I brought in went to taxes, but it was worth it. The last thing I needed was to have my cash frozen by the government.

  In July Switzerland got overrun. Every healthy adult male aged 18 to 34 is part of the Swiss militia. By law all of these men have to keep their military rifles close at hand at home. The mountains surrounding the country act like fortress walls. If a country like Switzerland couldn’t keep zombies out, the US didn’t have a chance.