Those Lazy Sundays: A Novel of the Undead

by Thomas North

  Shouldn't he be dead?

  That's what she'd said when she first saw the man lying in the middle of the street.

  Shouldn't he be dead.

  Her mind went back to the scene in front of the police station. It had happened so fast she hadn't had time ˗ hadn't wanted to ˗ replay it in her mind. But she remembered now. Brent had fired two shots into the skinny, bearded man in the black-t-shirt, and the man had kept coming.

  Then there was what Mike had said earlier. And then Brent.

  You can't kill someone who's already dead.

  Dead, or dead, dead?

  She started feeling angry. They knew. Those bastards knew all along.

  "Take the gun!" Brent said through the fence, grabbing her attention again. The butt of the shotgun came over the top of the fence, and she grabbed it and brought it down. A few seconds later, Brent came over the top of the fence as well, and she grabbed his feet and helped him over.

  He took one look at her and laughed.

  "Decide to put on a one-woman mud wrestling show?" he asked.

  Sarah glared at him. "Asshole."

  "Guilty as charged," he replied, taking his gun from her. "I ran a little experiment there."

  "Oh, is that what that was?" Sarah asked. "I had the pleasure of watching through the fence. Don't quit your day job and try to become a professor, huh?"

  "Don't think that'll be happening any time soon. Besides, I can't take credit for this one. Mike came up with it, I just wanted to test it."

  "You mean by blowing a hole through that guy's chest?"

  "Exactly," Brent said. "And, young grasshopper, what did you learn from that lesson?"

  Sarah felt like punching him. But didn't. She also didn't feel like saying what she was thinking. Even as angry as she had just felt, she suddenly felt even more stupid having to say it. It sounded stupid. She could only imagine Brent's response if she was wrong.

  But she wasn't wrong.

  "That guy..." she began.

  "Yes," Brent said, doing his best to sound snooty. "That guy..."

  She shrugged.

  "Can we just get going? We're still standing in the middle of someone's yard with a bunch of dead pe-" she stopped.

  "What was that?" Brent asked.

  This time she did punch him, in the chest, though only hard enough to leave a bruise, then she shoved him backwards, against the fence.

  "Asshole. Fucking dickhead! You knew about this all along, didn't you? And you didn't bother to tell us?"

  "I didn't know," he replied. For such a slender girl, her punch hurt like hell, and he rubbed the area where she'd hit him, trying to get the soreness to go away. "Mike told me, and I thought he was off his fucking rocker. But..."

  "But you believed it enough to test it on a possibly living person."

  "He's not a living person," Brent replied.

  "If he had been, then you'd have just experimented by murdering someone."

  "And if my aunt had balls, she'd be my uncle. They weren't living, and I didn't murder anyone. They're fucking dead. I wanted to make sure, now I know. Now let's get back. I'm hungry."

  He turned around, facing another small house, this one an ugly blue-green, and started walking across that yard. Sarah was still trying to come to terms with that simple fact. It had felt stupid when she was going to say it. Now it just felt wrong, like the entire world and everything she knew about reality had had been ripped inside out. Sick people she could deal with. People got sick. But dead people didn't walk. It didn't happen. It just didn't.

  "We'll go down the street up here and go around that group that followed us," Brent said. "There's an intersection just down the road that'll take us right back to the road we just came off of."

  He snapped his finger. "You listening?"

  "And what if more of them follow us?" Sarah asked, still trying to get her thoughts straight. "What if they follow us back to the police station?"

  Brent patted the shotgun affectionately. "I'll blow their fucking heads off."

  11

  "HE’S STILL NOT picking up," Sarah said, holding the phone to her ear until the dentist office message kicked in. "Not picking up on the office phone or his cell."

  She was worried. Andy could be irresponsible at times, but he called, even when he was in the locker room after a hockey game, or flying (or, more likely, tumbling) down the slopes at Smuggler's Notch. He called. He always called.

  "The phones could be down there," Mary suggested. "There's so much stuff going on, maybe those people damaged the phone lines or something."

  "It's just down the road," Sarah replied. "And the dentist office went to the answering machine."

  "Could've been voicemail," said Kyle. "That's at the phone company. It would still drop to voicemail even if the phone lines were down here, I think."

  Sarah leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes, trying to clear her head. She wanted to be optimistic, to think that there was some good explanation for what happened, but she couldn't come up with any.

  Maybe she just wasn't creative enough.

  Her stomach growled and she opened her eyes.

  "Can you hand me something to eat?" She asked.

  Kyle got up and walked across the room to the bag of food, but Brent was already there, and tossed him something. Surprised, he fumbled with the can and then dropped it on the floor.

  "Thanks," he said to Brent, who was scooping potatoes and chunks of beef out of a can with a metal spoon.

  "No problem," Brent replied through a mouthful of stew.

  Kyle grabbed the can and brought it to Sarah who wrinkled her nose when she saw it.

  "Spam? Gross."

  "You got a can opener?" Brent asked.

  "Yeah," Sarah replied. "It's in the bag. You put it in there."

  Brent thought about it. "Right," he said. "Why the hell didn't you remind me of that when I was cutting all your dinners open with a shitty Swiss Army knife?"

  Kyle and Mary both looked at Sarah, who was now laughing, and then at Brent, who didn't look like he found it quite as funny.

  "It was funny watching Mr. Big Tough Man cursing and fighting with a tin can."

  Kyle and Mary laughed.

  "Oh, fucking hilarious," Brent said.

  Sarah laughed this time as well, and felt a little bit better. For now.

  "So you going to eat that or what?" Brent asked.

  "I'll get you something else," Kyle said.

  Brent grabbed the black garbage bag and slid it under his chair.

  "Eat the Spam," he ordered, provoking more laughter from Mary and Kyle.

  "No way," Sarah said.

  "Eat it, or I'm not giving you anything else!"

  Sarah studied the little blue can in her hands.

  "Fine. One bite."

  "Three bites."

  "Two bites," Sarah said.

  "Fine," Brent said. "Two bites. Normal-sized bites, too."

  Sarah pulled on the tab and opened the can, revealing the pink meat inside. She picked up a spoon from the empty can of Chef Boyardee Ravioli next to her, her meal from two hours earlier, stabbed it into the soft mass and brought the spoon to her mouth.

  "Ugh," she gagged, hesitating, before finally taking a bite. She chewed a few times and swallowed it down, then looked into the can again.

  "Hey," she said. "It's actually pretty good."

  Brent laughed and threw his hands up. "All right, you win."

  Sarah laughed again, and took another bite.

  "Hey Kyle, how's your friend doing?" Sarah asked.

  "Was okay last time I checked," Kyle replied. "But let me see."

  He sat down and put the computer on his lap, Mary taking a seat beside him. They'd all checked in with their families throughout the day, reassuring them that they were safe and okay. Sarah left out her trip across the street with Brent. Her father would have been pissed if she'd told him, though she probably could have told her stepmother without getting any reaction. Her stepmoth
er probably thought the whole thing was just a distraction from buying more of her tacky, out-dated clothes. She never understood why her dad married the woman, and she'd quit trying to figure it out. She just knew that she was thankful the day she stepped out of the house on her way to college. Anywhere but near that woman.

  Even here.

  Kyle logged back into Twitter and checked his account. The site was slow, chugging along under the weight of a world suddenly fascinated by what was happening in a few tiny New England states. The story had grown since the day before, and was now the top story on just about every website, blog and discussion forum on the planet, though nobody had any answers beyond their own speculation ˗ at least, not that they were publishing.

  "Here he is," Kyle said. "He hasn't posted since this morning."

  @andersonp22: Still sick. Can't wake up.

  @andersonp22: Want 2 knock myself out.

  @andersonp22: See u all on the flip side.

  "He's lucky," Mary said. "I wish I could sleep through all this."

  "I don't know Mare. Sounds like he's not doing so good."

  "You mean like... you think he's sick? Sick sick. Like the people outside?"

  "Who knows," Kyle said. "I hope not. Just doesn't sound good. But I don't know."

  "I guess we're lucky compared to him," Mary said. "He's sick and alone. We're at least together."

  "Yeah," Kyle nodded. He patted her hand affectionately and smiled. "It could be a lot worse."

  She smiled and kissed him on the cheek.

  That was when the power went out.

  "GOD DAMN, IT’S like the Los Angeles riots out there," Bob Bartolo said, looking out the third story window at downtown Burlington, the darkness of evening just beginning to set in. The street lights were still on across the city, and the rain drops cut through light like static on an old television.

  "Yeah, if the Los Angeles riots were caused by a bunch of mellowed out pot smokers," Eric Schneider replied. He took a drag from his cigarette and flicked an ash onto the floor.

  Church Street almost looked normal, with a large crowd of people wandering at random around the open-air marketplace. On a normal night, he might have just thought that there was a concert or street show going on, or maybe just a lot of people with the same idea of enjoying one of the last few good days until the cold breath of winter blew across the state.

  But of course, it wasn't a good day. It was pouring rain. It was chilly. And even from three stories up and a block away, he could see that something wasn't right about the about the people wandering around the usually picturesque market. It was almost like watching a game of human bumper cars. The people would stagger around, bump into each other, then recoil as if they were made of rubber, then turn and do it again.

  It might have been comical, if not for the fact that there was another crowd thirty feet below the window that Bob Bartolo and Eric Schneider were looking out of. There was nothing funny about the people trying to tear through their barricaded door and break through the boards and furniture that both of them had helped nail to the windows. Looking down at the crowd, Bob started to feel uneasy. The TV station building was big, and though they'd secured it as well as they could have hoped, it wasn't exactly an impregnable fortress. If more of those people showed up, he had no doubt they could find a weak spot ˗ a piece of furniture that was just too light, or a board not quite nailed down.

  On the other hand, he thought as he watched a lady with nose and eyebrow piercings struggling to pull her dreadlocks out of the clutches of a man in a sports jacket and slacks who was trying to eat them, they didn't appear to be doing much strategizing.

  So there was something funny about them.

  Still, he was worried, and not just because they were there, trying to get in. It made him uneasy because he didn't know how thin the line was between him, or Eric, or Elizabeth, and those people. Was it a breath? A drop of saliva? A few skin cells? He shuddered at the thought of walking around like that. Mindless. Insane. Would he know what he was doing? Would it be like being a prisoner in your own body, conscious that something was wrong but unable to control it? Or was it like being drunk or high (he'd done his share of coke in the late 70's)? Or maybe it was just nothing. Maybe when ˗ if ˗ those people were cured, to them it would be like waking up from a coma, blessedly spared any memory of what had happened.

  "You got another one of those?" Bob asked.

  "Sure." Eric pulled a pack of Marlboros out of his shirt pocket and offered it to his co-worker. Bob took one of the cigarettes and put it in his mouth, and Eric lit it for him with his Zippo.

  "Thanks," Bob replied, taking a deep drag. He took a second one, then tossed it on the floor and crushed it under the toe of his wing-tip shoes.

  "Hey!" Eric said. "If I'd known you were going to do that I would've smoked the rest of it myself."

  Bob shrugged. "Sorry. I just wanted a puff. Don't want to stain the teeth." He displayed his bright white, nearly perfect teeth ˗ the product of some cosmetic dentistry ˗ for a second.

  "That's why I stay behind the camera," Eric replied. Bob looked at his watch.

  "About time to get back downstairs," Bob said. They all agreed to a thirty-minute break for dinner for everyone, though they had to rotate through to make sure there were enough people to support the broadcast. Right now Elizabeth was manning the desk by herself. Bob would do the same for the next thirty minutes while she got time to eat and take a break.

  They both went back downstairs and into the news room, where Elizabeth was still at the desk, reading from a viewer e-mail from a family that had been trapped in their basement since the day prior.

  Isaac Harman, who was normally their Director of Programming but was now, like everyone else at the station, fulfilling a variety of duties, came over to him.

  "Bob, looks like you'll have a few more minutes to relax," Isaac told him. "The President's making an announcement at seven."

  "About time they got off their butts," Bob said. "Any idea what he's going to say?"

  "Yeah," Isaac replied. "We got a copy of his advance remarks. Take a look." He handed Bob a piece of paper.

  "Wow," Bob said, reading through the speech. "That's... provocative."

  "Provocative?" Isaac asked. "A different word came to mind when I read it."

  "And what word was that?"

  "Screwed," Isaac replied. "As in, 'we're screwed.'"

  "They are sending some troops," Bob said.

  "Yeah, but that's not what everyone's going to remember about this," Isaac replied. "The administration can sugar-coat it all they want, but there's only one word everyone will remember once this hits the news, and it has nothing to do with them sending troops to help us."

  "Screwed?" Bob asked.

  "That," Isaac said. "But also the one word our esteemed politicians won't utter outright."

  Bob nodded and handed the paper back to Isaac.

  "Quarantine," he said.

  "Quarantine," Isaac repeated.

  AFTER EXTENSIVE AND difficult conversations with key scientists and experts from across the country, I have come to a difficult decision: I have ordered all civilian road, rail and air traffic in and out of the afflicted areas closed until we are able to contain this crisis. A combination of law enforcement and military will enforce this order. I regret having to take this measure, but it is necessary to contain this dangerous and unprecedented epidemic and to prevent it from spreading any further. To the people watching from the impacted areas: Rest assured that we have not abandoned you, and we will not abandon you. Your country stands united in support. We will work tirelessly until order is restored and this crisis is contained. We will support and fight for you with every resource, with every man, with every dollar we have at our disposal. This is what Americans have done when faced with great crises for over two-hundred and thirty years, and it is what our spirit compels us to do today. Together, as one nation under God, we will persevere, we will stand beside our countrymen in their
time of need, and we will see this crisis to its end. God bless you all, and God bless America.

  The camera cut away from the oval office and back to the national news anchor on duty. "In a few minutes we'll here from Dick Craig, the House Minority leader, who will present a rebuttal of sorts to the President's speech˗"

  "God," Kate said, turning to Jack, and draining the volume on the television. "This really isn't going to end, is it?"

  "Maybe... not soon," Jack replied. "Maybe not anytime soon at all."

  "So what should we do?" Kate asked. "What if we run out of food? What if Phil does need to get to a doctor?"

  Jack went silent for a minute, thinking.

  "I still think for now we don't need to do anything but stay here," he said. "We should keep thinking about how we might get out of here, but I think they're still saying that people should stay where they are if they're safe, right?"

  "I think so. They put up those rescue stations earlier, but they were just telling people to go there if they had no choice."

  "Right," Jack said. "We're safe here right now, so I think we stay here. Even if this all isn't completely gone anytime soon, I'm sure they'll at least be able to get it under control, so people aren't completely trapped forever. There's no way the government will just let this keep happening like it is."

  12

  THE MAN IN the baseball cap looked up the flight of metal stairs curiously. His brain registered little more than a flash of understanding, an echo of a memory from what had been a conscious, thinking brain, but was now little more than the engine that ran a body devoid of feeling. The split second image was enough, however, to spur him to action, and he lifted one leg and brought one sneakered foot on top of the first stair. Slowly and clumsily he began to climb the staircase.

  When he got to the first landing, he stood in place for a few moments, then looked back down from where he came. His mind used what little logic it had left to consider the possibilities. It was really just a fifty-fifty shot that he would choose the right one, but he did, and continued up the next flight of stairs. On the second landing he didn't hesitate. Whether by some rudimentary form of learning or just the simple product of which chemicals mixed in his brain at that specific time, he simply kept going up the next flight of stairs.