Zombie Apocalypse Serial
Book One
by
Ivana E. Tyorbrains
Copyright 2012
Episode 1
How To End The World In 3 Easy Steps
Timothy Frye
There’s a scene in Stephen King’s The Stand where a kind-hearted deaf dude is roaming a post-apocalyptic landscape and he meets a sex crazy vixen named Julie in a department store and the two of them get it on right then and there at the perfume counter.
Man…I love that scene.
You’re probably not remembering that scene because you’re one of the putzes who didn’t read the book but just watched the TV mini-series instead. The mini-series left that scene out. They had to get the novel ready to play on network TV, and a scene where Rob Lowe and Shawnee Smith got busy for no good reason wasn’t safe for prime time in 1994.
Critics of The Stand said that scene didn’t make any sense. They said it wasn’t in the deaf guy’s character to drop his pants for a woman he just met. They said Stephen King was just being gratuitous, like he always was.
They don’t get it. That scene is one of the greatest in the history of literature. That scene is the genius of the whole novel. It’s a shocking but awesome demonstration that maybe our civilization isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, that maybe the good people would be better off if the world went to shit. In that moment, the reader is the deaf guy, and in that moment, the deaf guy’s life is way better than it had ever been when the world was a normal place.
I bet Stephen King didn’t even know he was writing something so genius, and that makes it even more brilliant. He was probably just amusing himself, realizing he had a girl and a boy on the page together and fucking around with it. That’s how it goes sometimes. A Spaniard goes out to find the East Indies and discovers America. A black woman is tired and refuses to give up her seat on a bus and it leads to a revolution. A writer messes around with a dirty scene on the page and writes the greatest scene ever written.
A reader enjoys that dirty scene, and finds his purpose in life.
My name is Timothy Frye. I am thirty-six years old. I live in a mansion on a sprawling ranch in Southwest New Mexico. On last year’s listing of the five hundred richest people in the world, I came in at four-hundred-thirty-four.
I would have been number one a long time ago if I gave a rat’s ass about that sort of thing.
But it’s not safe for me to be number one. Or even number two. With high rankings comes increased attention from the media, and I don’t want that. I’m perfectly happy in my role as a star on Where Are They Now: Rich Guys Edition.
You see, I was famous once. When I was twenty-three I invented a new kind of nanotechnology that lit the scientific world on fire. I made the cover of Time magazine. I was invited to the White House for dinner with the president. I was on 60 Minutes.
My nanotech company was named Project Blue (in homage to the virus in The Stand), and through that company I invented a set of self-replicating micro-robots we named "Peebees." In animal trials, Peebees were able to latch onto white blood cells without causing any harm to the host. The biotech companies immediately saw the potential. Once attached to white blood cells, if Peebees could be programmed to attack invaders, they would revolutionize modern medicine.
I licensed the rights to my technology to the six largest biotech firms in the world and retired a billionaire at age twenty-four. The biotech companies have been in a race ever since to figure out how to make use of the little boogers. They’ve offered me ten-figure sums to come out of retirement and help.
But I’ve refused to help them. I’ve got better things to do.
You see, just like the deaf guy in The Stand, my true greatness won’t make itself known until the world goes to shit. And, believe you me, that day is close. I’m making sure of it.
Existential catastrophe. That’s what Wikipedia calls it. A risk to all of human civilization, or even the earth itself. I love a good story about existential catastrophe.
While The Stand remains the pinnacle of the art form, there are many great stories of existential catastrophe. For me, it began with The Day After.
Remember that flick? You don’t? It was only the most watched television movie in history. Maybe you’re too young. Or too old. Or you’ve blocked it out. I imagine that would be the response of some people. Bodies turning into skeletons in a flash, the United States transformed overnight into a radioactive wasteland—some people might choose to forget about that. Or change the channel.
The Day After aired on ABC on November 14, 1983, when the Cold War was still hot and mutually assured destruction was less a strategy and more an inevitability. Reagan and Gorbachev were racing to see who could make the biggest stockpile of death sticks. The hottest movie of the summer imagined Matthew Broderick racing against a super computer intent on throwing the world into global thermonuclear war. My second grade class had to practice duck and cover drills, as if a veneered plywood desk would protect anyone from a nuclear blast.
And The Day After capitalized on it all in the most horrifying way imaginable. In a crazy stroke of luck, my mom had to work the night it aired, which meant I got to watch it (my dad didn’t care what I had on the TV, so long as I was quiet about it). Damn, that movie…for whatever reason, nuclear apocalypse is much more realistic in the grainy colors of 1983. Missiles in the air, traffic accidents, people going apeshit, and then it happens. As a kid, a part of you thinks there’s no way the movie-makers are gonna go there. It’s just too grim. But then they do it. They show nuclear holocaust hitting the United States, and you feel like Satan himself is behind your TV screen and nothing will ever be the same again. If you don’t know this movie, check it out on Youtube, and imagine a hundred million people with a 1983 sensibility watching it. It scared the shit out of everyone.
I loved every minute of it, from the scary buildup to missiles in the air to the nuclear blast to the long, painful aftermath. For years afterwards, I imagined myself wandering in a post-apocalyptic landscape, fighting off the crazies, surviving on my wits and my own extraordinary toughness.
The Day After gave me a taste for existential catastrophe that just couldn’t be satiated. It turned me into a junkie for the old movies on the far end of the cable box. Planet of the Apes was a good one, especially Part 2. Day of the Triffids was another. Soylent Green. Logan’s Run. Death Race 2000. Mad Max.
I should take a moment here to mention Michael Jackson’s Thriller video, which was also scaring the bejeezus out of little second graders like me at exactly the same time. Thriller has become so ubiquitous in our culture that we who love the end of the world don’t give it due credit. George Romero might have invented the modern zombie, but Michael Jackson made zombies cool. Perhaps we all should take a moment now to bow our heads and say a prayer of thanks to the King of Pop.
Thank you Michael Jackson for breakdancing zombies, a chimp named Bubbles, and Captain EO, in the name of the kid who is not your son we pray. Amen.
The next great bit of Cold War apocalypse in my life was, in some ways, a response to The Day After. I didn’t know it at the time, but there was an intellectual debate in the eighties about which would be worse: nuclear holocaust or Soviet occupation. The Day After was one side of Hollywood making its case. Red Dawn was the other side’s response.
In Red Dawn, a communist mega-army from both the Baltics and the Caribbean comes rolling onto American soil and just crushes everyone. The world gone haywire (and the US military mostly AWOL for some reason), Red Dawn presents an Amerikastan where the only hope for the good guys is a group of wily teenagers played by half the Brat Pack.
My dad and I watched Red Dawn toge
ther on HBO when I was in fifth grade. Something about it moved him. Watch Red Dawn now and you’ll see that it’s kind of a spit in the face to any hippie or Hollywood pinko who thought we should give peace a chance. When the movie was over, my dad turned to me and asked me if I wanted to learn how to shoot a gun.
Hell yeah I want to learn how to shoot a gun, Dad.
Here’s something you may or may not have figured out by now. While I loved to imagine myself as a badass like Patrick Swayze, capable of fending off the entire Cuban army with my bow and arrow, I wasn’t anything of the sort. Nature blessed me with the sort of scientific mind that comes along once in a generation. And with all that genetic energy aimed at my brain, there wasn’t a lot left for the rest of me. Chicken legs, goofy, uncoordinated arms and hands, bad eyesight, bad reflexes—the boys at school told me I threw the ball like a girl, and the girls were insulted at the comparison. When I was watching was a wake-up call. In Red Dawn as a little fifth grader, a part of me knew that it was more than a movie. It Red Dawn, I had the future laid out in front of me, and it wasn’t pretty. I was not growing up to be Patrick Swayze, or even Charlie Sheen. I was the kid in the science lab. The one you felt sorry for when the Cubans lit him up with a machine gun.
And so I entered middle school with two parallel storylines going in my life. On the one hand, I was the nerd at school who aced every test and got the shit beaten out of him at least once a week. On the other hand, I was the budding survivalist whose dad took him to the shooting range on the weekends.
If you’re thinking this story is about to take a twist in the Columbine direction, fear not. This was the late eighties we’re talking about. Kids didn’t shoot up their schools yet, and even if they did, that isn’t my style. Sure, I spent plenty of time fantasizing about revenge on the bullies who tormented me. But I was and still am too smart to take such a near-sighted view. A classmate killing frenzy is a one-time jubilee that comes and goes and when it’s over you’re either dead or in jail. What's the point of that?
I’ve always thought on a much larger scale, and even in my pre-pubescent fantasies, revenge on bullies like Bart Corning had to be much bigger than a single incident. Revenge should be long, sweet, and complete.
We’ll get to that. I think you’ll be quite impressed at how I’ve gotten even with Bart.
After Red Dawn, the next great piece of existential catastrophe in my life was The Stand, a book I read in two blurry-eyed days the summer after seventh grade. I devoured The Stand like a final meal, confident in the knowledge that the novel was changing me for life.
I have a theory that every boy has some experience in the preteen years that determines the course of the rest of his life. It might be a girl who rejected you. Or maybe one who didn’t. It might be a slow dance at a twelfth birthday party, where you rub a bit too close to your partner and she feels your boner. It might be that the girl rubs back.
My game changing experience was that two-day reading bonanza when I dove into Stephen King’s masterpiece.
The Stand didn’t cure me of being the class punching bag, but it did give me the tools to deal with it. I no longer cared that Bart still beat the snot out of me at recess, or that Bart’s toadie John gave me a wedgie every day before PE. I quit caring about the spitballs, the wet willies, the lunch trays dumped in my lap, the playground taunts in which the popular girls dared the ugly ones to kiss me.
I was able to let it all go because I had a purpose now. The Stand had given me a larger vision of the world, and through that vision, I knew who I was and what I was supposed to do. Funny how things can change when you have a purpose. After reading The Stand, I welcomed the bullying. I opened my arms to all of it, as if saying, Bring it on, you motherfuckers, because when it all goes down, I’ll be the one laughing, and the more you abuse me, the more reason I have to flip out on a scale never before seen in all of human history.
*****
The Stand inspired me to make my own mega-virus that would wipe out 99% of humanity. In my vision, as the inventor of the virus, I would also be the inventor of the cure. With cure in hand, I could choose who lived and who died. In this new world, every girl with breath in her lungs would owe her life to me, and if I happened to be the only man left on the earth some day, so be it. I had plenty of sperm to go around.
While this might sound like pure fantasy to you, to me it was a viable plan that could be executed in three easy steps. Step One: learn the ins and outs of microbiology and infectious disease. Step Two: gain access to a multi-million dollar laboratory. Step Three: Create a pandemic that destroys the world.
While we’re enumerating things, let me go ahead and tell you five important things that happened to me in high school.
1. I geeked out on Star Trek: The Next Generation (mostly because of Counselor Troi, who infected my fantasies with as much virulence as the disease I wanted to make).
2. I won a National Junior Achievement Award for my science fair project titled Stress Testing the Protein Structure of a Rotavirus.
3. The wedgies and swirlies quit happening by sophomore year, and Bart Corning quit kicking my ass, provided I gave him all my money and wrote all his term papers for him.
4. A physicist in Japan discovered carbon nanotubes.
5. One of my friends on the Apocalyptico Listserv scored me a VHS copy of Peter Jackson’s zombie bloodfest, Braindead (some of you might know it by its American title: Dead Alive).
Number 5 (Braindead) was important because it rekindled a love of zombies I hadn’t known since the eighties. Carbon nanotubes (#4) laid the groundwork for my own future nanotechnological inventions. Number 3 (a no bullying for cash arrangement) allowed my relationship with Bart Corning to grow and evolve. My Junior Achievement Award (#2) won me an invite to study microbiology at Johns Hopkins.
And Number 1, an undying love for Deanna Troi, had my butt in the chair during one of the seminal moments in the history of television.
The date was June 18, 1990. Star Trek: TNG was completing a highly successful, but slightly unnerving third season. Those of us who watched with great faith were impatient by the end of Season 3, having waited more than a year for the return of a fascinating alien race introduced ever so briefly in Season 2.
That alien race, of course, was the Borg, and we fans wouldn’t have to wait any longer. For the 3rd season finale,the Borg came back, and assimilated Picard in the greatest cliffhanger in TV history.
If I had any real friends in school, we would have gotten on the phone and talked incessantly about the Borg the minute that episode was done. But since I didn’t have friends, I had to fire up my 300 baud modem and chat with people about it on the Internet (and yes, there was an Internet back then, even though the web as we know it was still a few years away).
At first, the Borg were simply too cool to be anything other than fun sci-fi fantasy in my mind. A race of badass zombie-like aliens, all of them interconnected in a giant hive mind like the universe’s ultimate distributed computer network, who didn’t just kill their enemies, but assimilated them…Could it get any more awesome than that?
It took me a couple years to realize that, yes, maybe it could get even more awesome than that. For instance, what if someone created a robotic pathogen like the one living inside each Borg, used that pathogen to create the horrifying zombies of Braindead, and unleashed them on the world like the plague of The Stand, turning all of earth into a post-apocalyptic wasteland where we had to go animal like the Wolverines of Red Dawn, and maybe, just maybe if it was done right, even the losers could find a pretty girl who wanted to fuck them on the perfume counter of an abandoned department store?
I set off to Johns Hopkins with that vision in mind, and earned a double PhD in Microbiology and Quantum Engineering. And, being that this was the late nineties, when any enterprising biotech scientist who wanted money got money, I also amassed thirty million in venture capital for my new company before I graduated. From there, Project Blue and our little robotic Peebees
just fell into place. I sold the company, became a billionaire, and turned into an eccentric recluse that everyone forgot about.
It’s almost time to make them remember.
Bart Corning
Once upon a time there was a boy named Bart who was strong and handsome and the ladies liked him but then he got sick and his medicine made him fat. The End.
One second please. I need to inhale.
Okay, maybe three seconds.
Or five.
Hang on.
Just a bit….
Okay, there. That was a good one. A fluffy bud straight from Isabella. She’s always been good to me. Her whole family’s been good to me, but she’s been the best.
Isabella is a mature woman who likes distilled water, the songs of Carol King, and a nice sodium lamp. Her roommate, Elizabeth, has similar tastes, only she prefers mid-seventies Neil Sedaka.
Isabella and Elizabeth are two of twenty plants in my thriving indoor marijuana garden. Together with Mary, Victoria, and Catherine the Great, they are the most important ladies in my life.
Except for my mother, of course.
Isabella in particular is really coming through for me this week. She’s a full-bodied high with staying power and lots of smooth overtones, which are so, so important.
My name is Bart and I am a pothead. A hopeless, chubby, spaced out loser whose only real goal in life is to get the perfect high.
But it’s all on the up and up. Well, the indoor garden might not be legal, but no one will fault me for it. I have a prescription.
A week and a half after my twenty-first birthday, I was awakened in the night by an explosion of pain behind my right eyeball. If you can imagine someone pulling a glowing hot branding iron out of a fireplace and stabbing you in the head with it, you’ll have some idea what I felt.
I would have called an ambulance if I could, but the pain was too great to do anything except writhe and moan, so that’s what I did, for an hour. And then it faded. It turned from a worse than death sort of pain into a bad migraine into a headache into nothing. When I woke up the next morning, I was on the floor in my bathroom, and figured the whole episode was some weird nightmare brought on by too many vodka tonics.
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