HVZA (Book 1): Hudson Valley Zombie Apocalypse

by Zimmermann, Linda

  I immediately sent out a message to all of the research sites and by mid-morning found that two other zombie test subjects given the Israeli ZIPs had also died. No one knew why, so autopsies were ordered on all three subjects. I was to assist one of the army doctors in Barney’s autopsy and we got to work immediately.

  It was a long, slow, meticulous procedure as we didn’t want to miss anything that might be of vital importance. I was very impressed with the doctor’s skill with a scalpel and he joked that when things returned to normal I should consider becoming a surgeon.

  “Why mess around with those little bugs you study when you can cure someone with this several times a day,” he said holding up the scalpel to the light and admiring it like a marksmen admires his rifle.

  He told me about his tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, and saving the lives of soldiers who had been stabbed, shot, and had holes blown in them from roadside bombs. As he cut Barney into little pieces, I tried to take mental snapshots of everything he was doing and I asked a million questions. He even let me remove a few organs and have a crack at the bone saw.

  I hate to say I enjoyed the autopsy, but in a way I really did. Watching a skilled craftsman or artist at his work is always a pleasure, and this surgeon was most certainly an artist with a blade and flesh. I only wished I could have seen him at work actually saving lives.

  But back to Barney—his internal organs stunk to high heaven, as did the rest of his flesh. It was evident that a zombie operated on minimal life support systems. Essentially, the ZIPs kept just enough of the human body functioning for it to move around and eat. (And drop egg sacks in their feces, of course, to spread the infection.) If some parts started to rot, well, no biggie.

  It was difficult to tell what had killed Barney (I mean, the second time) until we opened up the skull. The ZIPs overlaying network of mature parasites formed a slimy, white membrane encasing the brain and permeating it in branching strands. I had seen photos of these membranes, but none like this. There were hundreds of tiny, black, inflamed spots, which under magnification appeared to be lesions of some sort. The spinal cord showed the same lesions up and down the length of the ZIPs membrane that encased it.

  “So, Dr. Truesdale, what do you think?” the army doctor asked as I stood a little straighter at the sound of an experienced surgeon calling me doctor and asking my opinion. I wondered if it was something I would ever get used to?

  “Hard to say for sure,” I replied, trying not to sound like I was stalling for an answer as I pondered the possibilities. “But I don’t think this is merely a coincidence. We detected no such lesions in our pre-test scans. I would like to think that this is somehow the direct result of the interaction between the two ZIPs, that their competition was so fierce it caused a disruption in the nexus severe enough to put Barney out of action once and for all.”

  “If that’s true, this is fucking huge!” the doctor replied, then curbed his enthusiasm just a bit and added, “Excuse my rough soldier’s language.”

  “You’re fucking excused,” I replied smoothly.

  I took a long, hot shower after the grueling autopsy, and despite how anxious I was to get the lab results from the tissue samples, my “ten minute nap” turned into a deep sleep for several hours. It took Phil shaking me rather vigorously and calling my name in ever-increasing volume to rouse me back to consciousness.

  “Becks, good news! Great news!” he practically shouted as I rubbed my tired eyes. “Are you awake enough to hear this?”

  I sat upright on the edge of my cot and told him to fire away.

  The news was even better than I hoped. It appeared that the introduction of the I-ZIP (Israeli-modified strain) really pissed off the HVZIP. Both strains started attacking one another with their arsenals of biotoxins. These toxins were highly concentrated at the sites of the lesions, so it was assumed that they had killed one another at these points. The warring ZIPs had actually caused enough destruction that the nexus was riddled with holes, to the point where the damage was irreparable and Zombie Barney was finally able to rest in peace. Preliminary results of the autopsies on the other two zombies appeared to confirm the hypothesis.

  Phil and I hugged one another and allowed ourselves a full five minutes to relax and feel good. Then it was back to work. We still had yet to see any effect on Betty with the Dutch Blend, although there were some promising results with many of the human subjects. They had indeed seen a reduction in the HVZIPs, but not nearly enough to be treatable yet. But the research was clearly on the right track.

  Too bad the rest of the world was derailing.

  For Christmas a few years earlier, my parents had gotten me the book Rockland County: Century of History, which was full of photos and stories of local history in the 20th century. Naturally, I was drawn to the medical references (like the doctor who used to make house calls on horseback or snowshoes, imagine that!) and one story really stuck in my head.

  The Spanish Influenza epidemic which began in 1918 had hit Rockland hard. It was an incredibly deadly strain of flu that took an estimated 50 million lives worldwide. It’s hard to grasp such a number, but one small example in Rockland really brought home the intensity of the tragedy. Four women sat down to play cards one evening, and the next day three of them were dead. That’s how fast this virus did its work. And that’s just about how fast the infected populations of the world suddenly began to switch.

  Civilization began to tumble like a house of cards.

  Chapter 8

  Phase 8: It’s Not Unusual: During the fourth week of the Hudson Valley quarantine, hundreds of towns across the country were just initiating their own quarantines. Massive outbreaks of infection had occurred in Miami, Atlanta, New Orleans, Phoenix, and just about all of Texas and California. Someone joked that the ZIPs must like the warmer climates, but there may have been some truth in that. In contrast, northern Canada, Alaska, Iceland, the Scandinavian countries, and the northern latitudes of Russia had relatively minimal levels of infection.

  I had a teacher who used to say that one occurrence is of no consequence, two bears watching, and three is a trend. And he always emphasized that no matter what the situation, “Exploit the trend!” About three dozen other researchers beat me to it, however, when they posted messages on the international ZIPs project website suggesting that the role of temperature be explored.

  Something else came to light during that fourth week; something far more disturbing. A couple of young guys wearing Halloween masks to hide their identity caught a bald, paunchy, male zombie, and chained him to a support column in their basement. (Think of these idiots as the zombie version of the “Jackass” show, only far more dangerous.) They said they were “at an undisclosed location in the Hudson Valley,” but I happened to know it was two brothers in Poughkeepsie, as they were the sons of friends of a friend.

  Anyway, I usually didn’t waste my time with such nonsense, but some lab techs in the cafeteria were laughing hysterically and called me over to the laptop they were all watching. These Poughkeepsie guys must have had a stun gun or some other way to safely subdue the zombie, as they had dressed him in baggy pants and gold chains—P. Zomby, they called him—then they had made a video of him that was a combination of stop action and varied-speed motion, all to the 1990 hit song U Can’t Touch This, by MC Hammer.

  Honest to god, you couldn’t help but laugh. I tried my damnedest to dismiss it as utter foolishness and walk away, but it was so freakin’ funny I found myself laughing harder than I had in weeks. In fact, I don’t think I had laughed in weeks. We must have watched it five or six times, then at least a dozen of us formed a line and actually attempted to “bust a move,” which was even funnier than the video. (Although, perhaps the term “pathetic” would be a better description of our dancing.)

  The next day, the Poughkeepsie guys put a blond wig on P. Zomby and played Big Girls Don’t Cry by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. They must have also doused him in pepper spray or some other irritant,
as the zombie’s eyes were red and watering. The video was still kind of clever, but I didn’t find it funny.

  And no one laughed on the third day when the brothers decided to exploit their success and broadcast live. They had dressed the zombie in tight pants, a satin shirt open to the navel, and a dark brown wig, and started playing their parents’ old 45 record of the 1965 Tom Jones hit, It’s Not Unusual. They had tied ropes to the zombie’s wrists and ankles and had planned to jerk him around like a marionette to the music. But as soon as the song started, the zombie stopped growling and fighting and stood perfectly still. The brothers tugged on the ropes, but couldn’t get any reaction out of their undead plaything. It was almost as if the zombie was listening to the music, as if he recognized it. But that couldn’t be possible, could it?

  “Come on, dickhead, change the fucking record, this is no fucking fun,” the brother holding the camera complained. “We’re live, for Christ’s sake.”

  The needle on the old record player squealed across the vinyl disk as the other brother yanked it off the turntable. As soon as the music stopped, the zombie started growling and struggling against his restraints again, which they took as a good sign that the fun was about to begin.

  “Let’s try this one,” the other brother said as he pulled another record from the dusty stack and put it on the player. “It says it’s Crazy.”

  He obviously thought the music would be something wild to make P. Zomby “dance” to, but it was, in fact, Patsy Cline’s Crazy, a rather depressing song which just happened to be the number one juke box hit of all time, for you trivia buffs. (I don’t only have medical knowledge rattling around in my brain, you know.) Anyway, a few lines into the sentimental song, the zombie became very still again. It was creepy, he just stood there and the killer look in his eyes shifted, and almost became…human.

  Fascinated by the sudden change in expression, the camera guy zoomed in so the zombie’s face filled the entire frame, just as Patsy was crooning, “I’m crazy for trying, and crazy for crying, and I’m crazy for loving you.” A moment later, tears began rolling down the zombie’s cheeks.

  “What the fuck, did you pepper spray him again?”

  “I didn’t do anything to him!” the other brother protested. “He’s crying all on his own!”

  The camera guy zoomed out and put the camera down on a chair where it fell over on its side. He then stepped toward the zombie while fumbling with something in his pocket. Even at the odd angle, you could still see the gun come out of his pocket and then be aimed just inches from the zombie’s face, right between his tear-filled eyes.

  “This isn’t fucking funny anymore,” he said as he pulled the trigger once to drop the zombie, then twice more just to be certain it was over.

  The other brother yanked the USB cable from the camcorder and the screen went blank.

  I felt sick.

  I felt sick because here was a zombie, an undead piece of meat, an eating machine with no thoughts and no feelings, a virtual robot who never stopped in his quest to feed. Or so everyone thought. Yet here, this zombie stopped, listened, and cried. Did some level of consciousness still remain? Were his memories still intact? Was some part of this person still alive within the zombie, knowing exactly what had happened to him, aware of what was happening, but now a helpless prisoner in his own dead body?

  I couldn’t sleep that night. I thought of all the tests that I had personally subjected Betty and Barney to, and all the other awful procedures I had witnessed being conducted on zombies. Anyone with a conscience who watched those tears well up and fall from that zombie’s eyes couldn’t help but feel sick.

  A graduate student of neuroscience in Moscow also saw that video and probably couldn’t sleep either, as he immediately began running numerous fMRIs (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) on seven captured zombies. He ran these scans while different types of music were being played. Fortunately, none of the zombies reacted to any Tom Jones songs—that would have just been way too creepy—or any Patsy Cline songs, either.

  However, it was a different story when he started playing popular Russian folk music and songs that would have been familiar to these people when they were adolescents or young adults. All seven of them then exhibited some level of activity in the medial pre-frontal cortex, the area of the brain where music is known to evoke memories—especially emotional memories.

  Five of them actually had this region of the brain light up on the scans when a very sad song about the death of young bride (a Russian pop hit ten years ago) was played. Two cried, and all of them lay still, and lost that crazed look of hunger as long as the song was being played. It was a startling confirmation that something was going on that no one previously considered. Was there a way to reach the human part of the zombie? Was that part of the brain still alive?

  The next step the grad student took was to dissect the brains of these zombies. In each one, he found that for some reason, the ZIPs parasites had formed a particularly dense network within the medial pre-frontal cortex. Somehow, their intimate interaction with this region of the brain sparked a response to music that had special memories to the person in life, but it wasn’t anything conscious, he concluded.

  The student’s brilliant report, entitled “It’s Not Unusual,” explained in detail that while the reactions appeared to be those of human emotions, they were simple automatic responses to specific stimuli, due to some complex chemical reactions between ZIPs and the human brain tissue in the medial pre-frontal cortex. In other words, this was a dead end, so to speak.

  On the one hand, it was wonderful news that it didn’t appear as though any conscious part of the human being remained trapped after switching to zombie mode. On the other hand, our hopes were dashed that some shred of humanity remained that might stop a zombie from killing.

  June Cleaver Goes Zombie: One of the mysteries of the infection was the manner in which people switched. Some exhibited a host of symptoms that were impossible to miss, such as severe spasms, confusion, and extreme pain, which could last for days. Others switched quietly and quickly, like Marty Chang had at the soda machine in the ParGenTech cafeteria, or like the family on the train in the Beacon Incident.

  This “group switch” of families or roommates switching simultaneously led to the speculation that the ZIPs released some sort of pheromones that regulated their biological rhythms. A human example of this is when girls in a college dorm all begin to have the timing of their monthly cycles coincide. (And believe me, an entire dorm full of girls with PMS isn’t too far removed from a zombie apocalypse!) It’s also possible that these ZIPs pheromones are what the zombie-sniffing dogs were smelling.

  A prime example of a group switch occurred—at of all things—a PTA bake sale in Rosendale, NY, just prior to the start of quarantine. Jessica Marsico was the typical All-American, single mom who didn’t shy away from being called a housewife. In fact, she embraced it. She had two children, a daughter, Aeonna, who was eight, and a son, Issah, who was five. The newspapers described in detail what Jessica was like, but to sum it up, think of June Cleaver, the quintessential 1950s mother from the show Leave it to Beaver.

  When quarantine was first announced, Jessica’s first reaction was to quickly arrange for a bake sale to be held the day before confinement was to begin.

  “No one should be locked up without fresh-baked cookies, brownies, and cupcakes,” she had said.

  While everyone else in the Hudson Valley was scrambling for food and supplies, Jessica was melting butter, folding egg whites, and grating bittersweet chocolate, being particularly careful not to dirty the lace-trimmed apron she had made herself. At 3pm on Wednesday, September 12, the day before the quarantine was to commence, the bake sale began at the local elementary school. And by all accounts, at about 3:30pm in the crowded gymnasium, Jessica, Aeonna, and Issah quietly and quickly switched.

  At first, no one realized what was happening. After all, June Cleaver and her kids would never hurt a fly. But it wasn’t
flies that the family was after.

  Jessica had just sold a bag of her famous snickerdoodle cookies to a neighbor, when she leaned forward toward the woman’s face. The neighbor also leaned forward as she thought she about to hear a juicy bit of gossip. Instead, Jessica bit off a juicy piece of the woman’s cheek, and blood dripped all over her clean, white, lace-trimmed apron. The Marsico children were busy with victims their own size; classmates they had grown up with, and now wished to consume.

  No one had thought to bring a gun to a bake sale. The doors leading into the school were locked, as it was after hours. Only the doors to the outside were open, but the three Marsicos took up a position right in front of those doors, trapping all the defenseless women and children. Several women called 911, but the pre-quarantine chaos had law enforcement scattered and perpetually busy, so no help would be arriving anytime soon.

  There was a stand-off for several minutes—the women tending to the wounded and contemplating their options, the zombie Marsicos contemplating their next victims. Five women finally rushed forward, pushing the zombie family clear of the door so all the others could escape, but all five of them were bitten. Infection was the price of their heroism. In the mad race for the door, several children slipped and fell on the blood that had sprayed onto the floor, and they were also bitten.

  Everyone ran screaming into the parking lot, with the Marsicos close on their heels. While others sped away, clutching their gushing wounds, one woman was not so lucky. As she fumbled with her car keys, Jessica and her children descended upon her with vicious bites. She was the first casualty. However, like one enormous and deadly domino effect, at least a hundred others would later die and switch, either from the bites directly sustained from the Marsicos, or from the infection these people spread to their own families during quarantine. As for the June Cleaver-turned zombie and her undead offspring, they wandered off and, for all I know, may still be out there killing.