The Lazarus Impact

by Todarello, Vincent

  CHAPTER 30

  “Thank you,” Sheryl says to Brandon as he struts over to them.

  “No problem,” he says. “I came looking for gas.”

  “Us too,” says Willy, who kneels beside a small manhole cover on the ground. He pries at it with his fingers but it’s stuck. He wanders off in search of a crowbar.

  “The pumps aren’t working, so we’re going to have to fish it out of the tanks underground,” Sheryl explains. “I’m Sheryl and that’s Willy. What’s your name? And aren’t you a little young to have a gun and be out here on your own?”

  “Brandon Jessup. Lost my parents, so I’m on my own whether I like it or not.” He was starting to like it. No rules, no bed time, no homework. Only jerking off, playing video games, and killing zombies.

  Sheryl hears his name and immediately puts the initials together in her head. “Do friends call you BJ? I have... had a son named BJ. Bobby Junior. He was ten.”

  “You should be glad he didn’t make it to high school then,” Brandon coldly responds. “Only the bullies call me BJ. Blow job, cock sucker, pasty fag, and whatever else.”

  Willy returns with a crowbar and some other items that he plans to take with him in the car. He opens the trunk and tosses them inside. Rocky greets him with a paw to the back windshield.

  “You got a dog?” Brandon lights up with a smile behind his mask, showing a flicker of his dwindling untainted, innocent youth. There isn’t much left remaining.

  Sheryl instantly responds like a mom would. “Come on let’s take him out. He can use a little exercise. He’s been stuck in the car all day. His name’s Rocky.”

  “Leave your gas cans, son. I’ll fill ‘em for ya,” Willy offers.

  “How come he didn’t turn?” Brandon asks as he pets Rocky.

  “I’m not sure. I haven’t seen any animals turn yet. Maybe they’re immune,” Sheryl answers. "Just saw some birds drop from the sky after eating a body, that's all."

  Sheryl and Brandon take turns tossing a stick back and forth between them, playing fetch with Rocky. Willy pries up the manhole cover to reveal a five inch wide pipe leading down into the storage tank beneath the gas pumps. He rigs up an empty plastic bottle to a length of string and lowers it into the abyss. Once he feels it fill up with liquid, he slowly pulls it back up from the pipe. He smells it just to be sure. It’s gasoline. He begins to fill the gas cans with fuel, one 20 ounce bottle at a time. Once they’re filled, he cuts down a hose from the pump. He inserts the nozzle into the police car gas tank, and pours the gas into the back end of the cut hose, using it like a funnel to get the gas into the car.

  Sheryl and Brandon see how painstaking the process is, and they decide to help, each making their own gas fishing rig with string and bottles. Eventually the car and Brandon’s two gas cans are topped off.

  “Think you guys can give me a lift back home? I’m just past town, about five minutes from here by car,” Brandon asks.

  “Sure, hop in,” Sheryl answers before Willy can even think it over. Her eyes were lit up like a Christmas tree. She saw both her sons in Brandon. She tried to. BJ, older, more self reliant, and Stephen, meek and sweet. She wanted to take care of Brandon, to be his mother. But Brandon seemed a bit disconnected, detached from reality. In the little time Sheryl spent with him, she could tell something was off. Too many video games and not enough real socializing, she thought. It’s all too common these days... Well, maybe that will change now that there’s no electricity. But there are all sorts of new problems involved with social interactions now.

  “I’ve got a bunker with video games and food and stuff, but I guess you guys are all stocked up,” Brandon says as he eyes the car full of supplies.

  So much for my theory about video games becoming a thing of the past, Sheryl thinks.

  “What’s your plan? Everyone has to have a plan otherwise they’re doomed,” Brandon asks.

  “West,” Willy replies. “Past the impact, where it’s safe to breathe.”

  “That’s what I want to do too. Just trying to figure out how to do it. I have a lot of stuff, food, supplies... not sure how I can bring it all with me. But there’s a place I know where people have been surviving for a long time all on their own. They don’t rely on anyone or anything. Totally self contained, remote.”

  Brandon goes on about the compound and Willy eyeballs him in the rearview mirror as he speaks. That’s just the kind of place I’d like to set up. Someplace safe. It’d be good for Sheryl. Somewhere she can rebuild her life. Maybe runnin’ into this Brandon kid is a blessing. Sheryl can fill the holes missing in Brandon’s life, and Brandon can replace BJ and Stephen in Sheryl’s life. He hopes, but he knows no one can ever really replace someone that was lost. He knows that first hand from losing his daughter to drugs, and losing his wife to... well, to the war. She left him soon after he came back from Vietnam. They had a daughter and things were going well at first, but soon the nightmares were creeping into reality. The horrors of war were always with him. Some nights he would wake up in the middle of strangling his wife or hitting her, without any clue as to why or how. He came back from war, but so did all the death, all the evil. He came back from the war, but the war came back with him, as they say. Like a plague it stayed with him, infected him. The veterans’ mental health programs helped a little bit, more so recently, but by then it was way too late. His wife left him, and his daughter went with her. Some years back he learned that his daughter had gone off to Hollywood to be a star. She got hooked on drugs and overdosed in a swimming pool at some big shot director’s house in the hills during a party. Since then Willy has been numb, other than the occasional flashbacks. But now things are changing again. Killing a zombie, to him, is becoming just like fixing a pipe at the hospital, or mopping up blood in the ER. Routine. Normal.

  “She said I can bring whoever I want. Maybe you guys can drive and we can go together, you know? I don’t know how to drive.” Brandon finishes rambling about his apocalyptic paradise.

  Sheryl looks over at Willy with questioning eyes, as if asking “Can we keep him, Daddy? Please?” Willy nods his head yes. He already sees they’re a good match. They’re each what is needed for the other to cope. What do I need? Maybe just to be needed again.

  “We’ll take you,” Sheryl says.

  “I’ll teach you to drive. It ain’t so hard. They let old people like me do it, so a youngin’ like you’d have no problem,” Willy says, receiving a laugh from Brandon and a smile from Sheryl afterward. One big, happy, fucked up, post-apocalyptic family.

  They pull into Brandon’s driveway. Willy can smell the gasoline that leaked out from the crushed cars in his driveway. He looks around to see the damage the house and surrounding area sustained from the impact. “You’re lucky you survived,” Willy says.

  “Not lucky. Ready,” Brandon responds. “Back there is the bunker.” Brandon leads them to his hole. They walk past his mother’s rotting, stinking corpse along the way.

  “What happened here?” Willy asks.

  “Oh that’s just my mom. Don’t worry. She’s really dead now,” he says nonchalantly.

  A queer look fills Sheryl’s face as her eyes meet Willy’s. She’s sure of it. There has to be some mental break with this kid. I can fix that.

  Brandon clears the brush covering the shelter, pops the hatch, and takes them down. He quickly covers his porn mags with a blanket, but the pungent scent of puke still permeates the air. “I was gonna make several trips for gas for the generator, but seeing how difficult it is just for one can to get filled, I think I need a new way to power my bunker.”

  “Well if you mean to leave for your friend’s compound, then save your gas for the car,” Willy says.

  “Or for their generators,” Brandon adds.

  “Well I can help the people there build a wood-fired generator, or convert it from gas power to wood if they haven’t already.”

  “And I used to be a school teacher once upon a time, before I had kids. If there�
�s need for that kind of thing, I can help,” Sheryl adds.

  “Last thing I want to do is go back to school,” Brandon jokes.

  “Education’ll help with survival,” Willy says. “You sure they’ll have us? Let us live there?”

  “Yeah. She gave me the address and I have directions to get there.”

  “Alright then. We’ll leave first thing tomorrow morning,” Willy says. “How far is it?”

  CHAPTER 31

  Dr. Vogel hears more accidents on the road, followed by grotesque sounds of the dead eating the living. He wriggles himself loose from his seatbelt. He deflates the air bag to get a better look out the windshield, but there’s no windshield, and the engine hood is completely flipped up in its place. One of the glass eye pieces in his gas mask is cracked, but not broken through. The window beside him, however, is completely shattered, and the roof of the car is nearly sandwiched down onto his head. The driver’s side door is stuck shut from the point of impact, and there’s no way he can fit out the window there. He’s not sure he wants to either. The sounds grow louder; grunts, groans, gnawing, slobbering, heavy breathing.

  One of the beasts eyes him and gets close to the car, reaching out for his flesh. Dr. Vogel quickly squirms his way over the console and into the passenger’s seat, where there’s more room and the window is still intact. The mindless zombie reaches for him through the driver’s side window, but he’s too far. Just out of reach, you bastard. After several moments there’s finally a distraction, pulling the undead cannibal’s attention away from the car.

  Dr. Vogel examines himself for injuries. He’s shocked. He barely has anything worse than minor cuts and bruises, though his left ribs feel extremely tender. A fracture at most. Nothing life threatening. His biological samples are still in their case, also undamaged. I was lucky.

  Out the window he sees the insanity that has taken over the road. He thought he was clear of it, but more and more accidents jammed the entire highway as far as he can see to the east. The sick were driving, then seizing, and then dying, causing accidents. The dead can’t drive. Anyone still alive outside on foot is getting mauled by the infected and crazed monsters. He waits. Several zombies press their face to the passenger side window, but Dr. Vogel sits still and quiet, out of reach and safe in his destroyed car. He waits, and waits, and waits.

  Eventually things grow quiet, as the infected follow runners from accidents further down the road where he came from. He slowly and quietly steps out of the car with his samples, making his way to the woods line along the side of the road. He stays low to the ground, ducking down between cars to avoid being seen by any stragglers. He grabs a broken metal mile marker post for protection as he walks east. It’s like a light weight axe or spade, with a particularly unlucky mile number acting as the blade. I’m 13 miles from the Pennsylvania border.

  The runaway car that took out the sign hisses steam up a thick tree trunk. It finally stopped just a few feet into the woods line. Torn between his obligation to get the samples to a lab and his duty and oath as a medical doctor, Dr. Vogel stands in thought, staring at the crashed car. Should I see if anyone needs help? The driver is either dead or one of them. I better not get any closer. There are probably hundreds of cars just like this one behind me and ahead of me. Why check this one and not the others? They would be easy to ignore. But what then? What kind of doctor, no, what kind of man would I be if I ignored them all? What if there’s someone in there who could still survive? Or better yet, what if it’s someone I know or someone that could help me in my quest to get samples to the government?

  He walks toward the car. Surprisingly the windows are still intact, and all four doors are shut. He sees the driver; a man slumped over the steering wheel. Beside him is a mess of gore, and what looks like the remains of a woman lying dead in the passenger seat. A car window ice scraper is lodged in her eye socket, handle-end in with the flat, angled scraper side sticking out. The driver’s body slowly inflates and deflates. He’s still breathing. The passenger must’ve changed while they were driving. She likely tried to attack him, but he somehow defended himself from the woman, only to crash into a tree and get knocked unconscious. He can’t see any injuries on the man; just the stains of blood on his clothing.

  After working up the courage, Dr. Vogel begins to knock on the glass. The driver stirs awake, holding his head in pain as he squints out to see Dr. Vogel. Tears fill his eyes upon seeing the dead woman next to him.

  “I’m a doctor. Are you injured?” Dr. Vogel asks.

  The man looks himself over, checking for wounds. “Leg,” he says.

  Dr. Vogel opens the door and examines his leg. There’s a break just below his right knee. He carefully helps the man out of the car and lays him down on the cold dead grass. He grabs a sturdy tree branch that had been cut back from the road and snaps it down to size.

  “There’s a break. I need to set it and get your leg in a splint,” Dr. Vogel explains. The man nods. His face is pale and clammy, as if sweating out in the cold. “Probably best to cover your mouth and nose. The debris cloud might be shifting.” Dr. Vogel tears a strip of the man’s pants from a small rip near his thigh to uncover the area near the break. He hands the fabric to the man to use as a makeshift mask.

  Upon closer examination Dr. Vogel sees that the break is compound, with a piece of bone jutting through the skin. He also sees some slight bruising and puncture marks on his thigh. A bite. I guess the passenger got to you after all. Setting your leg will probably prove a waste of time. Soon enough you’ll seize, die and return from the dead with a hunger for rare man-steak.

  “This is going to hurt, so just hang in there, okay?” Dr. Vogel warns him, receiving a nod in return.

  With a yank, a twist and a shove Dr. Vogel returns the bone into the man’s skin. He groans in agony and pain, writhing and gritting his teeth. Dr. Vogel dresses the wound, tying strips of pants around the tree branch to keep the splint in place. He turns his attention to the bite, which seems to grow darker and more ominous by the moment.

  “You know you were bitten?” he says.

  “Yeah. It’s alright. I’ll be okay. Please take me with you. Take me somewhere I can get help,” he pleads.

  “I’m going in the opposite direction. You’re welcome to come with me, but I’m kind of in a rush,” Dr. Vogel explains.

  “What the hell are you going that way for?” he asks through increasingly tense breaths. His leg begins to twitch.

  “Take it easy. Relax. Keep that leg still,” Dr. Vogel instructs. There’s no response. The man’s breathing becomes heavier. He sucks air in and out of his mouth furiously through tightly clenched teeth. Soon the leg twitch becomes a steady shake, spreading from his leg throughout the rest of his body. Dr. Vogel steps back and picks up his mile marker sign. He knows what’s about to happen. He waits for it. When the man’s eyes burst open revealing the yellow look of living death, Dr. Vogel jams the ragged end of the metal sign post handle into the man’s chest to kill him. To his medical astonishment, this does nothing. The man reaches up for Dr. Vogel with bloodlust, his mouth searching for man meat. What the hell? Dr. Vogel removes the handle from the man’s chest. He’s seen a few zombie films in his day, so he tries the head next. He shoves the pointed handle down into the man’s golden, bloodshot eye, piercing his brain. That does the trick.

  Once his head clears, Dr. Vogel begins to put the picture together. There are two distinct ways to change into the creatures. First is from breathing in the Lazarus meteor dust. The second is from a bite or bodily fluid transfer. The way the particles grew in the Petrie dish suggests that breathing them in causes a physical blockage in the lungs. Eventually the person dies. But that doesn’t explain the seizing, the foaming at the mouth, the reanimation, the change in eye color, and the blood thirst. Something must happen in the blood. This particle from space, this organism, this living crystalline structure, must somehow take over the blood, brain and body, and alter the human state. It’s not a virus, and
it’s not bacteria. It’s a parasite of some kind; perhaps even a living, thinking being. It’s certainly like nothing mankind has ever seen; an alien life form. Both the organism and its effects on mankind are beyond normal; they’re paranormal. And they are beyond what could be observed in nature; they’re supernatural. And it is extremely aggressive.

  As he gets closer to Pennsylvania he starts to see strange yellow signs along the highway; newly erected, bright yellow pentagon-shaped signs with a black gas mask image in the center. Do the officials know it spread beyond the quarantine? If not, the containment zone needs to be widened ASAP. All the more reason to get to the barricade and talk to someone in charge.

  He sees an exit sign for a county road that he knows runs east into Pennsylvania. Still worried about the outbreak on the highway, he turns off down the local road. It's a lonely road, dotted with farms and woods, but that means it's a safe road. Every road will be guarded, so the smart bet is to stay off the big highways, where more people are likely to jam up the roads and cause problems. He's getting close.

  He hears a rustling in the woods beside him. It freezes him in his tracks. He holds his mile marker sign with two hands, with the biological sample bag slung across his shoulder. The rustling grows louder as it draws closer. He sees shadows shifting among the trees. Then what looks like moving branches emerge into a small clearing. Antlers. It’s a deer. Dr. Vogel is apprehensive. If the animals can change, then people are in real danger. He steps toward it and the majestic animal fixes its eyes upon him. They’re normal, not glowing yellow with the bloodshot bloodlust of the people on the road. Dr. Vogel steps toward it again, but the animal bolts back into the woods in fear. If it had changed, it would’ve attacked me. But why didn’t it change? Perhaps there’s something in human blood that makes us more vulnerable, or perhaps the lungs of wild animals are strong enough to withstand the airborne onslaught of this microscopic being. That would explain Wolf’s delayed and slowed symptoms. He’s in incredible physical shape; one of the world’s most fit. But without further study I can’t know for sure.