by David Wong
The driver’s-side door yanked open. Amy screamed.
Fredo’s corpse was yanked out into the night. She screamed again. She pulled her knees tighter, and twisted her hair in her fingers, and squeezed her eyes shut and tried to make it all go away.
There were tearing and smacking sounds from outside, set to the tune of the open door chime from the RV.
* * *
Bing …
* * *
Bing …
* * *
Bing …
* * *
She needed to get out, to run, to hide. Or to get behind the wheel and stomp on the gas. Instead, she balled herself tighter, and clinched her eyelids.
Inhuman feet crunched through the glass in front of her. Warmth spread across her thighs and she wet herself for the first time since she was five years old.
The steps came closer, and closer, crackling through the broken glass until she could feel warm breath on her cheek.
* * *
Bing …
* * *
Bing …
* * *
Bing …
Book III
Posted on FreeRepublic.com
by user DarylLombard, Nov. 11, 1:31 P.M.
They laughed. They laughed when I stocked up on canned goods, they laughed when I stocked up on ammunition, they laughed when I said the storm clouds were gathering. Same as they laughed at Noah. And, as with Noah, they come clawing at my door as the flood rolls in. Sorry. This is why I was building an ark while you were doing drugs and watching reality TV.
I appreciate all of the prayers and expressions of concern from you over the last week (for those of who you don’t know, I live not three miles outside of Outbreak Ground Zero in [Undisclosed]). But we are safe because we have prepared. We have food to last a year. We have water from our own well. We have fuel to last three years. We have guns, and everyone in our family is trained to use them.
On the day of outbreak, one of my son’s (the “musician”) druggie friends and his little girlfriend came by. You can picture him even without my description—long hair, covered in tattoos, track marks on his arms, showing early signs of HIV infection. A pro-Atheism bumper sticker on his car.
He wanted to shack up with us, eat our food, drink our water, sleep under our protection while the pestilence and depravity ran rampant outside. I pulled him aside by his scrawny arm and said:
“What can you do?”
He looks at me with that slackjawed look and says, “What do you mean, dude?”
“I mean what can you do? Can you shoot a rifle accurately at fifty yards? Do you know how to gut an animal? Or make a fishing net and clean what you catch? Can you fertilize a garden? Or purify water? Can you repair a small engine? Or even gap and change a sparkplug? Can you wire an electrical outlet? Repair a roof when it leaks? Set a broken bone? Can you make your own clothes? Field strip and clean a rifle? Reload ammunition from spent brass? Disinfect and sew shut a wound?”
Of course he said he didn’t know how to do any of these things.
He had spent his life playing video games and doing drugs and had probably fathered five welfare babies, demanding the whole time that I pay for their health care. When a pipe leaks, he calls the landlord (at best) or (more likely) just lets it leak. Let the next tenant find out the floorboards have rotted and that every wall is covered with mold. His little girlfriend would be the type to cry about rights for animals because she thinks meat grows in the grocery store display counter. Smoking pot and spitting on our soldiers when they return home from fighting terrorists because she lives obliviously in a little cocoon built from our sweat and blood and tears.
I said to him, “Imagine there’s a meteor coming to destroy the world. But some rich men have pooled their resources and built a big rocket ship to get people off the planet. They don’t have room for everybody, but you want a seat on that ship. Now, your having a seat means somebody else doesn’t get one. Space is limited. Food is limited. What would you tell the man standing at the door? What case would you make for getting a seat on that rocket ship at the expense of another person? What can you offer that would justify the food you would eat, and the water you would drink, and the medicine you would use?”
He said to me, “I don’t know, dude. I don’t see no spaceship here.”
And I said, “What you didn’t realize was that you were always in that situation. Only the spaceship is planet Earth, and your creator built it for you. And you had your whole life to make your case for why you should be allowed to stay. Instead, you did drugs, and played video games, and collected welfare. Well, this ship is taking off without you.”
That boy walked away without a word.
Maybe I’ll see him and his little girlfriend again, out among the diseased and the starving, running from the riots and the chaos. And I will say, “You had your chance. All your life those ‘crazy’ preachers were trying to tell you that the day of reckoning was coming. You chose to ignore it. Now it is too late.”
This is the way it should be. There are two kinds of people in the world: producers and parasites. When a society gets too many parasites, we need the disaster, the tsunami, the earthquake, the war, the flood, the disease to wash away the garbage, to rinse the safety nets of the slugs that use them as a hammock. Let them fall into the fire, so that the strong, the faithful and the capable will be left behind to rebuild, and renew humanity.
That day has come.
They laughed at me when I stocked up on food and fuel and ammunition.
Who’s laughing now?
12 Hours Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed
John was rocked out of unconsciousness by the blast of a shotgun and the warm splash of brains in his hair.
Hands were grabbing him from all over, tugging at the spindly legs of the unholy daddy longlegs creature. When he was free of the monster, John rolled over and saw a cowboy-looking dude in incredibly tight pants holding a smoking double-barrel shotgun. He was wearing earmuffs.
The crowd of people standing around John were surprisingly human-looking for infected, and were pretty well-dressed for zombies. The cowboy said, “You all right, buddy?”
John couldn’t think of how to answer that. His ribs hurt and it was kind of hard to breathe. The back of his neck was wet with monster blood, and he had gotten all worked up anticipating his own mortality only to find out it was on back order. He needed a drink so badly he was wondering if there was a gas station nearby that pumped ethanol, and if there would be a way to crawl into the underground tank.
Three burly guys were wrestling the spider monster. The human head at the center was shattered from the shotgun blast, but the parasite inside was still thrashing for life. A massive pickup truck sporting dual wheels and flared rear fenders backed up in the street. There was some kind of machine in the bed, a big red thing with a motor and chutes and wheels. Somebody started it. It sounded like a lawnmower. Only when they started cramming the giant, squirming daddy longlegs into the chute did John realize it was a wood chipper.
There was that terrible shriek, and red slush went spraying into the neighbor’s yard. When the last of the creature’s eight legs vanished into the jaws of the machine John thought, well, that’s one way to do it.
John tried to get up, but Cowboy pointed the shotgun and said, “Now, just stay seated for a minute, if you don’t mind.”
From behind John, Falconer barked, “I’m a cop, asshole! See that on my belt? That’s a badge.”
Falconer was marched over and forced to sit next to John. Holy shit, did he look pissed.
Cowboy pulled down his earmuffs and said, “Just to be clear, I got nothin’ but respect for law enforcement, officer—”
“Detective.”
“Detective, but at this point in time I’m pretty sure that what you see here is all the law that exists in this town at this here moment. When the feds huddled up behind their barricades on the other side of town, it came down to us to walk these here st
reets. And now that they left town altogether, well, we’re pretty sure that makes this our town. ’Til we hear different.”
Falconer said, “I understand. Now you tell me specifically what needs to occur before you let me continue what I was doing.”
“You need to convince us that you’re not a zombie.”
John said, “Do we look like zombies?”
“Ain’t you heard? The zombies look just like everybody else.”
Falconer said, “This is all some huge prank, isn’t it? Is somebody filming my reaction, to put it up on the Internet?”
“Now,” Cowboy said, “the infection takes root in the mouth, that much we know. Then it spreads to the brain and then the rest of the body. So there’s a real simple test: we have to take somethin’ out of the mouth. If you’re infected, you won’t feel it, because it’s not really part of your body. If you’re clean, it’ll hurt like hell. So I’ll let you pick.”
From his back pocket, Cowboy pulled out a pair of vise-grip pliers.
“We can take a tooth…”
From his other back pocket, he produced a six-inch-long pair of pruning shears.
“… or a piece of tongue.”
11 Hours, 45 Minutes Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed
I was locked in a supply closet while the reds gathered to discuss execution methods. I didn’t care. It’d all gone wrong, the kind of wrong that not even Owen properly understood. Otherwise he’d realize he was about to give me a cleaner end than most people on earth were going to get over the coming weeks and months and years. Including him.
Amy was my only regret. I just wished I knew that she was safe, and if so, that I could get word to her not to come after me. Even if she had made it out of town, Amy wouldn’t just leave the situation alone. She and I had that in common. Can’t stand to be on the other side of a fence from where we want to be. Not a fence somebody else put there, anyway.
I wished there was a way to tell her all that in person. To hug her, feeling her warmth and smelling the fruity shampoo in her hair. If I had that, and if I could hear her laugh one last time, I could carry that with me into eternity and that would be okay.
I kept trying to think back to everything that had happened since I woke up with that spider thing biting me in bed, trying to figure out what I was supposed to have done differently. It was stupid, I knew. Questioning how my life would have gone if I hadn’t made bad choices was like a fish asking how his life would have turned out if he’d only followed through on his dream to play in the NBA. I don’t beat myself up over my choices. My shame circuits burned out from overuse years ago.
Wait. This started before the spider showed up in your bed.
See, that was the thing, right there. I’d been so busy running around since that night that I’d never really had a chance to stop and put it all together. There was a common thread through all of these events that stretched back even before that night.
Tennet.
Goddamned Dr. Bob Tennet. He shows up in my life as my supposed court-appointed paranoia therapist. Asking me about monsters and trying to get me to work through all of that shit. Then the spider shows up and starts spreading this infection. And who’s there the whole time, showing up at quarantine? Dr. Tennet. Monitoring the situation. Watching it unfold. Tapping away at his laptop and recording his observations.
Anyway. So there’s two things I wish I could take care of before my execution. People have died with longer to-do lists.
I leaned my head against the wall and tried to make myself smell shampooed red hair instead of hospital sadness chemicals. I dozed off.
11 Hours, 40 Minutes Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed
John was actually weighing the “tooth or tongue” options when Falconer said to Cowboy, “Let me say this as a red-blooded, not possessed by any kind of inhuman organism, all-American man. If you get near my mouth with either of those tools I’m going to shove your head into the ground so hard a Chinaman will see it fly out of a volcano.”
Before Cowboy could react, John said, “Hold on. Do you know who this is next to me? This is Detective Lance Falconer.”
Cowboy looked like he sort of recognized the name, but couldn’t place it. John said, “You can’t tell me you haven’t seen him on the news. He caught the Portland Strangler?”
From behind Cowboy, a lady said, “Oh my God, it is him!”
“Show them your ID, detective.”
Falconer did. The lady was duly impressed.
John said, “We were kind of in the middle of getting to the bottom of this whole thing when you showed up.”
Tightpants Cowboy said, “Is that right?”
John said, “Yeah, that is right. It’s looking like the government is behind it all.”
Tightpants cursed and said, “Son of a bitch. I been saying that since day one. Day one.” To the guy next to him: “Haven’t I?”
Falconer said, “I’m standing up now.”
He did. No one objected. A kid in the crowd said, “What’s it like to fight somebody on top of a train?”
“Windy.” To Tightpants, “What do you mean the feds left town? When?”
“Breach at their headquarters. Somethin’ blew up. You didn’t hear it?”
“Oh,” said John. “We, uh, were wondering what that was.”
“Convoy headin’ out of town right now. So now we got to do what they couldn’t. Which is the way it always winds up. Which is why I been sayin’ it since day one. Me and my brother went door to door, within two hours of the feds roping off the town, gatherin’ up everybody with a gun and a set of balls. We’re the ones who got shit back under control, not the soldiers tripping around in their space suits. We’re the ones who put a stop to the looting, we’re the ones who have been patrolling the streets every minute of every day, in shifts, outside of the so-called Green Zone the feds set up. There’s almost two hundred of us now, working in three shifts, ’round the clock, pumpin’ buckshot into zombies and feedin’ ’em to Chip back there. Making sure everybody outside that hospital is clean, everybody who ain’t gets put down, and makin’ sure that hospital stays sealed off until the president grows the balls to drop a couple dozen cruise missiles on it.”
This got John’s attention. “Wait, what? They’re dropping cruise missiles? When?”
“When they grow the balls, like I said.”
“We don’t have a more specific timeline on the balls situation?”
“Are you askin’ because you want it to happen, or because you don’t want it to happen?”
“Well what about the people inside who aren’t infected? We got to get them out, right?”
“Buddy, anybody that’s spent a day inside that place is infected by now, five times over. If there’s anybody alive in there, they ain’t human no more. That’s the only thing we know about the infection. Once you get it, there ain’t no cure. You’re walkin’ dead. If you got people you care about in there, you need to treat ’em just like you saw them go into the ground yourself. Picture the dirt goin’ in over the casket. Take time to mourn, do what you got to do. But you got to get past that. Feelin’ sorry for them, it’s like feelin’ sorry for the fire that’s burning down your house. These infected, they’ll say anything, anything at all, to make you let down your guard. They can look just like you and me, can talk just like you and me. Or your neighbor, or your best friend, or your momma. But you cannot hesitate. Think of ’em just like a parrot imitatin’ human speech—the words sound the same, but they ain’t got no soul inside. You come face-to-face with ’em? You. Cannot. Hesitate.”
Nearby, somebody said, “Fuckin’ A.”
Falconer said, “See, that just makes me more pissed off at the bastards who are gonna get away with this. They’re going to turn all the victims to ashes and sweep it all under the rug. Somebody needs to answer for this shit.”
About ten different people muttered, “Damn right” or something to that effect.
Tightpants said, “Tell m
e what you need, detective.”
“As you see, I’m gonna need a ride. Unless you know a tire shop that’s open.”
“What the hell are we waitin’ for? Hop in the truck.” To another guy Tightpants said, “Tell Bobby to follow me. Everybody else should finish their sweep. We’re behind enough as it is. Don’t forget to check in on Eve Bartlett, make sure she got her insulin okay.”
The crowd started to disperse. John didn’t move from the spot where he was sitting in the yard.
Falconer said, “You comin’?”
“Dave is alive. I saw him, when I was on the Sauce earlier. Gonna go find my car and see what I can do.”
The look on Falconer’s face told John that he thought he was looking at a dead man, but knew that there was also no point in trying to talk John out of it. Instead, Falconer shook John’s hand and said, “Don’t fuck everything up, okay?”
3 Hours, 10 Minutes Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed
The supply closet door was yanked open and I awoke to see Owen there with his co-chair, Mr. Gun. They led me to the yard and I found that it was morning—I had managed to sleep several hours among the mops and buckets, exhaustion catching up with me. The group of reds had swelled, huddled around the bonfire to hear my sentence.
Owen said to me, “We figure we’ll give you the choice, bro. You can either crawl through that steam tunnel and whatever happens, happens. Or I can shoot you right here and let your fat ass fuel the fire. It’s all the same to me, aside from the second option settin’ me back one bullet.”
I shook my head and said, “Nah, that tunnel smelled like a graveyard for dogshit. Am I allowed a piece of paper and a pen to write a note to my girlfriend, if she’s even still alive? No idea how she’s ever going to see it but I’d feel bad if I didn’t make the effort. You know like when you forget to call home on Mother’s Day.”
