A few moments later, police arrived. The reporter shouted to them from the balcony, pointing down to the two feasting zombies. As one cop pulled out his stun gun and prepared to “subdue, gag, and mask” the “suspects,” two other cops said, “Fuck that” and pumped several rounds into their heads.
And there was all the horrifying footage, available for the world to see in living color. I must have gone through two dozen other news reports of attacks throughout the Hudson Valley. After the first few, I started taking notes about how they moved, and their slow response time to sounds. I noticed that if a zombie came up to a log or large stone in his path, he had to look down at it and then raised his leg only high enough to clear the impediment.
I also took special note of their propensity to go after moving targets, as in three instances where they passed close by people frozen with fear. And it may have been an isolated case, but a switched camp counselor going after some screaming children on a beach in Harriman State Park had chased them all into the lake. However, the zombie counselor stopped at the water’s edge and didn’t take another step, even though fresh, young meat was just a few feet away. Of course, he may just have been pausing to decide who would be his first victim, but we’ll never know as another counselor came up behind him swinging a huge piece of firewood. The sickening crunching sound of skull yielding to wood ended that encounter.
It was probably a waste of time studying all these videos and taking such careful notes. The zombie problem would most likely be under control soon, now that there was a successful treatment, and more under development, but that Cam-instilled paranoid streak in me just couldn’t help thinking that when it came to survival, every little thing counted. Of course, big things counted, too, like that hefty .44 Magnum I promised to keep with me wherever I went.
First, Do No Harm: A sure sign that I was feeling better was that I started to get restless just sitting around the house. Though apprehensive about going out in public, my friends at the hospital urged me to stop by to say hi, and be officially welcomed back into the world of the living.
When I arrived at the employee parking lot one morning, it was ParGenTech all over again in terms of security, although unlike the army personnel at PGT, a private contractor had supplied the muscle and firepower for the hospital. Bright red signs warned that “Intruders would be subject to deadly force,” and from the looks in these mercenaries’ eyes, they would be more than happy to shoot first and ask questions later. So much for the first lesson of medical ethics: Primum non nocere—First, do no harm.
It was eerily quiet when I entered the hospital. While it was never very loud, there was always a constant hustle and bustle that created a background noise that’s hard to describe, but startlingly noticeable by its absence. It also just looked different, as half the doors which used to remain open—in fact, I can’t ever recall seeing them closed—were now closed and locked with “Restricted” signs nailed to their fronts.
I was supposed to meet everyone in the cafeteria at 10am, but a security guard at the door stopped me to check my ID, and then his watch, which I found odd.
“Is there a problem?” I asked, slightly irritated. I was beginning to feel that I couldn’t walk ten feet without verifying my identity or peeing in a cup (which I had to do again in a shed set up at the employee entrance).
“What time are you scheduled to enter,” the guard asked.
“Scheduled to enter? What do you mean? I’m meeting some friends here at 10am, so can I please wait inside?” I asked with increasing annoyance.
“You are ten minutes early. Please wait here,” the guard replied, placing himself between me and the door to emphasize that the point was not debatable.
“What do you care if I’m early!?” I asked, incredulous at his refusal to let me in.
“New policy, Ms. Truesdale,” he replied, staring straight ahead like a palace guard. “For security reasons, employees are granted access to the cafeteria in shifts to maintain manageable numbers.”
I thought back to the crowded ParGenTech cafeteria at the time of Marty’s shooting, and realized that wasn’t a bad idea.
“Oh, I see. Sorry, no one told me,” I said in a conciliatory tone.
I stood in silence with the stoic guard for precisely ten very long minutes. As he turned toward the cafeteria door, I started to move toward it, as well, until he put up his hand like a crossing guard, and I froze in place. He pushed open one of the swinging doors just wide enough to stick in his head, and I heard someone inside say, “Okay, now.” The guard then stepped aside and waved his hand toward the door, granting permission to enter. I was totally unprepared for what happened when I stepped into the cafeteria.
About 100 employees shouted, “SURPRISE!” and I almost jumped out of my skin. I was so startled, my right hand actually moved toward my purse—which held the .44 Magnum—but I am quite glad I contained my reflexes and didn’t blow away some my best friends.
A huge “Welcome Back” banner hung over a table containing an enormous sheet cake, and balloons were tied to every chair. They even had one of the lab techs, Henry, on his clarinet, and the maintenance guy, Max, on his saxophone, playing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” As everyone rushed up to congratulate me and give me hugs (a very rare occurrence during these times of infection), I did the only thing I could do under the circumstances—burst out crying.
But these were tears of joy, as for the first time since this whole mess started, I realized how happy I was just to be alive! Despite everything that had happened, I wanted to be alive, and to stay alive. That may sound stupidly obvious, but it was a revelation to me at that moment, and I can’t tell you just how much it strengthened my resolve to keep fighting.
I also hadn’t realized what a big story my ordeal with the treatments at ParGenTech had been. I was the first to beat the ZIPs and it had made national news. I missed all of the coverage during my recovery, and I never thought to Google myself when I was checking up on the archived news!
An administrator I never even met made a speech about my “heroic battle” against these “insidious mutant parasites” and somehow managed to spin it all in favor of the hospital’s “unparalleled level of care” and “fiscal responsibility.” Then a couple of my real friends made some very touching remarks and presented me with a gift. I opened the box to find a scrubs shirt on which someone had written with a Sharpie: “I was the first to undergo treatment to avoid becoming a zombie, and all I got was this lousy shirt!”
It was all exactly what I needed, what we all needed, to laugh again! What a concept. We tried to recall the last time we actually relaxed and enjoyed ourselves, and for most people it had been so long they couldn’t remember. As we parted, we hoped it wouldn’t be as long until the next time. Silently, I think we all just hoped there would be a next time.
Brains, It’s What’s for Dinner: News of more successful treatments of early stage infections continued to make headlines, and while it gave everyone much needed hope, I feared those may be false hopes. For example, just in Albany alone there had been 37 cases of complete cures, but 323 newly diagnosed cases of untreatable, late stage infections in men, women, and children. The QK drugs could not be synthesized quickly enough—especially as the number of infected grew both nationally and internationally—but the world’s best minds and finest research facilities were working around the clock for drugs and treatments that were better, faster-acting, and faster to manufacture.
I planned to rejoin that fight on the laboratory front lines at ParGenTech on Monday the 27th (of August), so I decided to get together with some other friends the day before, as I knew I would most likely be working seven days a week for the duration.
Over the years, I had worked at the hospital in Cornwall whenever I could squeeze in some shifts on days off or vacations from school and my other jobs. (Did I mention how expensive medical school is?) I had made a couple of dear friends there, so we arranged to meet on their dinner break at a nearby res
taurant. I was a few minutes early, but this time no one prevented me from going inside to wait.
I got a table in the back and perused the menu for a few minutes until Kathy, Anita, and Jerry arrived. I had to give them a quick recap of my treatments, but they respectfully kept their questions to a minimum so we could move on to more pleasant things. At least we tried to move on to more pleasant things, but conditions at the hospital were just as bad as everywhere else, and each of them had suffered the loss of at least one friend or loved one.
The conversation finally shifted to a positive note when the food arrived, and we started recalling some of our summer barbeques at our various homes, and “floating picnics” on my boat. We had all mercifully forgotten the present reality for the moment, when a little girl near the front window started screaming, “Leave my mommy alone!”
The crowded and noisy restaurant became as quiet as the grave, and all eyes looked to the little girl. She was seated at a table with her mother, who had blood spurting from her neck where an elderly female zombie had just torn out a chunk of flesh. The old woman was dressed in a housecoat and slippers, and her thinning white hair was up in a neat, even bun. She could have been anyone’s sweet, little grandmother, except for the crazed look in her cataract-clouded eyes, and the bloody piece of neck flesh she was slurping in through her lips.
The woman who had been bitten never even cried out—at least no one heard her cry out with all the background noise—and she just sat there blinking her eyes widely, her mouth opening and closing with no sounds coming out. The zombie grandma had stood up for a moment when the little girl screamed, but now bent over again for another bite.
A couple of young guys at another table rushed over and threw the old zombie to the floor, but then quickly backed away when two imposing figures came through the front door. They were tall, muscular men in jeans and t-shirts, and they looked enough alike to be twins. They also looked like they had just killed someone by the amount of blood on their faces and hands, and the insane look in their eyes.
Everyone had sat in stunned silence at the sight of the old grandma zombie, but now with the two powerful male zombies obviously looking for dinner, the crowd panicked. Screaming and knocking over chairs, everyone rushed toward the rear of the restaurant where we were sitting. Fortunately, a waitress had the courage to rush forward and grab the little girl and get her to safety in the rear. Of course, safety was a relative term, as the old lady had risen to her feet, and the three hungry zombies moved toward the hysterical group of people. The young guys held up chairs like lion tamers, but I knew that line of defense wouldn’t last for long.
They say when you are about to die, your entire life flashes before your eyes. Well, in that moment, my entire life didn’t flash before my eyes, but everything that happened since June 12 certainly did. I’ll be damned if I have made it this far only to be killed at dinner in Cornwall, I said to myself as I reached into my purse and felt the hefty, reassuring, cold steel of the pistol. I tried to tell everyone to get out of my way, but there was too much shouting and screaming for me to be heard, so I calmly climbed on top of the table and took careful aim of the closest male zombie. I hesitated for a moment as I realized this was a man, not a target, but I forced myself to concentrate on his left eye and imagine it was a dime.
I don’t even remember squeezing the trigger or hearing the deafening report the mighty weapon must have made. The moment had crystallized into a pinpoint focus of watching the first male zombie’s head explode like a watermelon with a stick of dynamite. I didn’t even notice when everyone hit the floor to dive for cover, all I could see was the left eye of the next male zombie an instant before his brains and fragments of skull splattered around him. A big chunk of brain landed at the feet of the grandmother zombie, and when she eagerly bent down to get it, I put a third round dead center into her bun. Her skull flew apart like an egg being hit with a hammer.
I don’t know how long I stood on the table, I just recall thinking how much I loved the smell of spent shells, and the fond memories of shooting with Cam when I was young and carefree. I didn’t snap out of this “fog of war” until I realized someone was pulling on my leg. Was it another zombie? I whipped the pistol downward, ready to take a fourth shot, but an instant before I pulled the trigger, I realized it was Jerry trying to bring me back to my senses.
Throwing up his hands in front of his face—like that would have helped—he shouted, “For fuck’s sake, Becks, it’s me!”
I pulled my finger away from the trigger as I yanked the pistol toward the ceiling. I apologized for almost killing him, and climbed down off the table. I sat right down as I felt woozy and sick. What had I just done? Me, a nurse, about to be a doctor, who had dedicated my life to helping others, just went postal on not one, not two, but three human beings! Okay, so maybe now they were zombies, but still, I had taken lives!
When the police arrived, I fully expected to be arrested. Instead, I literally got a pat on the back from the officer in charge, and every one of the cops complimented me on my impeccable aim. One even joked that he was glad I had been there to do the dirty work for them.
What madness had descended upon us? A woman with an unregistered handgun had just blown away three people at Sunday dinner, and she didn’t have to do more than provide her name and address and sign a form.
Paramedics had tried to save the mother who had been bitten, but she bled out in minutes. Anita recognized the two male zombies as brothers who owned a local landscaping business. She had seen them sitting in the waiting room of the hospital’s emergency room earlier that day. God knows how long they had been waiting there before they switched, or how they had made it into the hospital without the mandatory urinalysis. Kathy recalled seeing the old woman in the hospital parking lot earlier in the day, but didn’t know if she was a patient or not.
Anyone who was not wearing a mask (one would lift or lower their mask for a moment to eat or drink) at the time I was creating a triple-zombie “pink mist” of an infected blood aerosol, was urged to immediately seek preventive treatment. All of the bodies were quickly carted away—no crime scene investigation required these days—and disinfection procedures began within the hour. The restaurant was actually open for business again by lunchtime the next day!
My friends went back to work with a newfound respect for me (or was it fear?), and all the other people rushed home to take a stiff drink, a tranquilizer, or whatever they needed to calm their rattled nerves.
And me, well, I went home to clean and reload my pistol.
Chapter 5
Phase 5: My Dream Come True: When I got home after the shooting, I spent over an hour on the phone with Cam. I gave him all the gruesome details and I wasn’t sure how he would react to the news. For the longest time he was silent. Finally, slowly, after taking a deep breath, he said, “I can’t imagine how horrible it was for you, especially after everything you’ve been through. But damn it, if you spend one second feeling guilty about this, I’ll come straight down there and put you over my knee and smack some sense into you. This is war—ugly, brutal, terrifying war, and make no mistake that this is kill or be killed. You did what you had to, to save yourself, and save all those other people, too. I’m proud of you, my brave True Girl!”
In my heart I knew he was right, but still, I wondered how I would be able to live with this. Oddly, I really didn’t feel anything when I got into bed and turned off the light. I had expected that I would be haunted by the bloody and barbaric images of the shooting, and tormented by guilt and fear, but there wasn’t…anything. Perhaps that would come, but at that moment I was nothing but exhausted and fell right to sleep.
When the alarm went off in the morning I actually felt refreshed. I told myself I was still in shock, and it would all come crashing down on me like an emotional ton of bricks when I least expected it. For now, I would just go to ParGenTech and do my job, and see if we could put a more peaceful and less messy end to the zombie problem.
/> I had also told myself I wouldn’t check the news, as I didn’t want to relive the events at the restaurant again, but I had to see what they were saying about the shooting, and about me. To my astonishment, the only mention I could find was on the Broadcast Synergy website of “an incident at a restaurant in Cornwall, resulting in the death of one woman and the elimination of three zombies.” No names, no further details. What would have been splashed across every front page a month ago was now just a footnote, as the television station’s new Zombie Tally Board showed that there had been 37 such incidents in the Hudson Valley on the previous day. In the whole scheme of things then, one woman dying and three zombies getting popped was not newsworthy!
I was relieved that my Sunday dinner shooting had not made headlines, and I was hoping to fly under the radar on my first day back to work. Clearly that was not going to be the case, however, as I quickly discovered when Sgt. Pelton saluted me at the security gate, and said, “Most commendable, ma’am!” If he had heard about the shooting, I was certain everyone else had, too. I wondered how management would react. I might be headed right back out of that gate soon!
I went through all the usual checkpoints and got a wink, thumbs up, or a nod and a smile from just about all of the army personnel. I was starting to actually feel quite proud of myself, until at the third floor checkpoint, I was instructed to go straight to the company president’s office.
Shit, they’re gonna can me! I said to myself, as I got back into the elevator for the top floor. And then the State Police or the FBI will arrest me. I’ll plead temporary insanity. Yeah, that shouldn’t be hard to prove!
I had only been in the president’s office once for a brief and impersonal “Welcome Aboard” speech in which he said he made it a point to get to know all his employees and looked forward to getting to know me better. That was years ago, and he never spoke to me again, so clearly this was something serious. I wondered if they would use those cheap plastic strap handcuffs to take me away, or would they use the real metal ones? Cam had a pair of police handcuffs, and years ago we…well, I guess that’s for another story.
HVZA (Book 1): Hudson Valley Zombie Apocalypse Page 7
