by Guy James
It was as if the mud was doing something far more vital for his body than Snickers or Coca-Cola ever did, or ever could. Milt had never imagined that a base substance such as mud could be filled with such incredible powers of revitalization.
As the mud replenished Milt’s system, the stuff in his head began to flow, began to stir, and he understood.
He understood everything about the evolution he had gone through—much more than he ever thought there was to understand. So much more, in fact, that even he was humbled by the knowledge he had gained through his experience with the zombies.
Not only had they taken him in and made him one of their own, they had selected him as their leader, placing him at the top of their hierarchy.
Milt had been right at the very outset of the contagion—it had brought his destiny with it. He was the one human with the constitution worthy enough to lead the zombies.
Only...he wasn’t human anymore, no. He knew he had become something else—something better, superior to any human, and, superior even to his quite wondrous former self. As hard a feat as that was to accomplish, he had done it. He had become an even greater, enhanced version of himself.
He was still thirsty, and now he had the strength to crawl the rest of the way to the stream, so he did, and he drank until he was contented.
It was Milt’s first drink of pure water since a mysterious bottle of Evian had snuck into one of his Coca-Cola cases, and that was years ago. The cold flowing water was even better than the mud.
Then he lay down sideways with his body half in and half out of the stream, so that he could continue to soak in the cool water. That was what his body needed—to sop up the stream, all of the stream. Of course that was impossible, but Milt felt like if anyone could do it, he could.
After some moments, Milt raised his head and looked down at his soaking body. He saw that his portliness was much reduced, and that in his prostrate position, his belly did not completely obscure his feet. The tips of his pallid, shriveled toes were visible, poking out of scraggly, torn socks. He wiggled them. Notwithstanding their appearance, they seemed to work just fine, and maybe even better than before.
Milt lowered his head back onto the damp earth and took a long, deep breath. He was startled to note that all traces of his asthma were gone. He took a few more deep breaths, and was astounded that he could breathe in and out fully, with no wheezing. His lungs felt better than they had in years.
There was water in his body and fresh air in the far reaches of his lungs: Milt could not deny that his body had changed.
As he lay there, wiggling his toes and taking the moist air into his apparently rejuvenated lungs, the rest of the previous days’ adventures came back to him.
Once the zombies had taken him in and made him their leader, he had become privy to a sort of collective consciousness, a shared mind—a shared mind that he controlled.
That was the best part. It was like playing Warcraft—not World of Warcraft—and directing his underlings in battle. The zombies were his chess pieces to move about the world...only now...now he wasn’t sure if there were any left. That insolent, muscle-bound ruffian, Sven, had no doubt destroyed them. That was just like Sven, a hater of zombies if there ever was one.
So, the winds of destiny had come for Milt...to make him great. But, he had originally thought that he would lead the humans against the zombies. Now, knowing that he was to lead the zombies against the humans, he had to confess that he had been short-sighted not to see this prospect earlier. Milt as the zombie commander was an elegant, even brilliant turn of events. He understood that this new station was allotted for him, prearranged somehow.
We all have a role to play, he told himself, and I will play mine to perfection.
Then, Milt’s hearing abruptly returned to its full capacity, and the infernal birdsong that came from all around him made him lose his train of thought.
After a few moments of painful chirruping, Milt remembered the new task that fate had allotted to him. He was to gather and assemble the zombies, and lead a zombie army against the darkness that was humankind.
But what if the zombies were gone? Milt wasn’t sure there were any zombies left now that he was out in the forest by himself.
The thought frightened him, but he knew that they couldn’t be gone. They were a part of him now, waiting to be reborn. He’d been bitten, after all, and here he was.
I am a zombie, Milt thought, I am…the greatest zombie of all.
The zombies remained. Milt the zombie was proof.
Deep inside, he knew the other zombies would come back, there was a way to get them from out of his own being. He felt this, and knew it to be true. If it was a disease, he was no doubt a carrier of sorts, waiting, lurking in the shadows for the perfect moment to unleash his biological, world-ending agenda once more.
The zombie apocalypse wasn’t over.
It was just about to begin.
Milt smiled, and searched for a bloated pimple to pop. Disappointed on not finding one, he began to plot his revenge against Sven, and against all of humankind.
***
In a similar wooded area not too far away, another pair of eyes opened to take in the sunlight.
Squinting uncomfortably, his body racked with a sickening thirst, the vegan raised a dry, crackling arm, and brought it up to his face. He scratched at the coarse hairs of his handlebar moustache, and began to remember.
PART II
1
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 12, EIGHT MONTHS AFTER THE VIRGINIA OUTBREAK
CITY HALL, NEW YORK, NEW YORK
Mallory Lex uncrossed her legs and crossed them the other way. She smiled at Sven and the movement of her lips drew thin creases in her flawless, pale skin. Her wine-red lipstick was a stark relief against her skin and her perfect, milk-white teeth.
“Are you ready?” Mallory asked. She flashed another smile at him, one that would have turned any orthodontist green with envy.
Sven gave her a wan smile and shifted in his seat. “Sure.”
“Remember,” Mallory said, “if there’s anything you don’t want me to print, I won’t print it. You don’t have to worry about me going behind your back. I want to build a lasting relationship with you, and I want that relationship to be built on trust. You can trust me.”
“Alright.”
“Good, there’s just one more thing before we begin.”
“What’s that?” Sven asked.
“May I call you ‘Sven’?”
“Uh, of course. Sure. What else would you call me?”
“Well, you’d be surprised by how many people I interview who strongly prefer that I address them formally.”
“Really?”
“It’s true.” She nodded. The motion was exaggerated. “A lot of the people I interview are sensitive about being called by their first names.”
Sven shrugged. He turned around, looked out the window, and shuddered.
“Are you alright?” Mallory asked.
Sven turned back around to face her and nodded. “Yeah, I’m fine. I’m just not used to this weather.”
“You’ll get used to the winters here, Sven. I did. They can be beautiful, too. Central Park, north of the reservoir, with snow on the ground...it’s beautiful. You know, they say we’re going to get a good bit of snow next week.”
Sven nodded again.
“Okay,” Mallory said. “Let’s do it.” She pressed a button on her digital audio recorder and placed it on the desk so that the recorder was at an equal distance between Sven and her.
They were sitting in a large, sparsely furnished office that looked out over City Hall Park. A neat row of boxes lined the wall on either side of the closed door of the office. Ivan lay on top of the highest stack of boxes, his head resting on his paws.
The Russian Blue had watched the lead-up to the interview reproachfully from across the room, and now, if his unceasing blinks and yawns were any indication, had resolved to sleep through the entire thing.
Sven was sitting behind a large desk. His right elbow was on the desk, and his eyes moved among Mallory, who was to his left, and Ivan, who was across the room and to the right, and the recorder, which was inches from Sven’s hand. His body was facing Mallory, who had moved one of the chairs in the office and set it at the side of the desk to “reduce the distance between us and the recorder,” as she had put it. Sven fidgeted in his suit and tugged on his tie, a gift from Jane.
“We’ve all heard a lot about the outbreak that began in Charlottesville, Virginia,” Mallory said. “That is, after all, where America first met you, Jane, Lorie, and of course, your adorable and courageous cat, Ivan.” Mallory smiled.
Sven looked away from the severe contrast of Mallory’s bleached white teeth against her dark red lipstick, made eye contact with Ivan, then looked down at the desk—his desk. He picked up a paperweight—one of many gifts he had received upon his arrival to New York City. It was one of the oddest he had been given, and Sven had decided to feature it on his desk.
The paperweight was a wooden carving of a man who was straining to keep a set of double doors closed. His back was pressed against the doors, the muscles of his legs flexed so hard that they were visibly defined in the fabric of his pants. A gnarled hand was reaching through the broken wood of one of the doors, reaching for the wooden man’s face. The wooden man was turned toward the hand, his eyes focused on it. On the side of the carving from which the hand was reaching, there was nothing but smooth, polished wood. No monster was visible.
Something about the paperweight reassured Sven, as it always had since he had gotten it, and he felt his body relax. Then he remembered the interview, looked up, and saw that Mallory’s eyes were fixed on him. She had the look of a woman who was calculating something.
“As you know,” Mallory said, “some footage made it out of the quarantine zone and reached us here. So we met you via YouTube. And, of course, your experience during the outbreak has been the subject of a number of interviews, and, more recently, special reports and books.”
Sven swallowed and nodded. He set the paperweight down next to the recorder, so that the recorder was on the side of the door opposite the wooden man, from which the invisible monster’s hand was emerging.
Mallory watched Sven do this with pursed lips and waited for him to finish before she went on.
“What we didn’t see,” Mallory said, “and what remains more or less in the dark, is what you did after the outbreak, but before you came here…how you and Jane and Lorie dealt with the events of the tragedy after they were over. Can you tell me something about that?”
Sven picked up the paperweight again. He looked across the room at Ivan, then back at Mallory. “About what happened after…after the outbreak was over?”
“Yes,” Mallory said.
“Okay. Well, at first, we weren’t sure that the outbreak was over, because we didn’t know if any of the infected were left. So Jane and Lorie and Ivan and I, we were careful. We holed up in my house. We stocked up on food and reinforced the windows and doors, and waited…waited for confirmation that there were no more infected.”
2
Mallory jotted down some notes. “Did you or Jane or Lorie have any experience in survival situations like these? Of course, I don’t mean in an outbreak scenario, but, for example, how did you pick out what to stock, and how did you know how to best reinforce your house, or that it was even best to stay there at all?”
“No, none of us had experience in something like that. I think we’d all been camping, you know, we’d all roughed it, as people like to say when they’re not really roughing it, but this was a whole different kind of roughing it. This was life-threatening and completely real, with no safety net. There was no car to get into and drive away from it—because we had already tried that—there was no getting away.” Sven shrugged and shook his head, a rueful expression on his face. “We stocked what we thought was practical and what would last longer. We got lots of bottled water, canned food, jerky, dried fruit, nuts, oils. We were just trying to be logical about it. As far as reinforcing the house, we improvised and used what we had. I had some tools and pulled boards from surrounding houses.”
“Do you think your house was the best place to stay?”
“I don’t know. It worked, but we were also lucky that there were no more infected, so our reinforcements and food rations were never tested. If there had been more infected...I don’t know.”
Mallory nodded. “What happened next?”
“The military arrived soon after...on the fourth day after the last of the infected we saw had disintegrated. Military doctors and scientists went around knocking on doors, looking for survivors. When they got to us, they told us that we would be quarantined temporarily. They examined us and made sure we had enough food to eat, but otherwise they left us alone and didn’t seem too interested in hearing about what had happened.” Sven paused. “They were focusing on damage control and making sure the spread of the virus had stopped, although at that point no one knew that it was a virus yet. Anyway, for the most part, the military left us alone.”
“How did you feel then, during the quarantine?”
“The same way I felt right after the end of the outbreak, but more confused.”
“Can you tell me more about what you mean?”
Sven sighed and looked at Ivan, whose eyes were closed. “It’s hard to describe. It was like being in a state of disbelief the whole time. I knew that what had happened really had happened, but I couldn’t make sense of it. I guess...I guess I was haunted by it. I still am…not as much as before, but I still am.”
“Do you mean that you were replaying the events of the outbreak?”
“Yeah, I was. I’m sure Jane and Lorie were too, but they seemed to do a better job handling it, or at least I saw it less in their behavior. As for me, I spiraled into some kind of depression. I sat in my basement all day, staring at the wall, and I kept on like that, even after the military was telling us it was okay to go about Charlottesville freely.”
“How did you recover?”
Sven instinctively reached for a machete, then stopped himself. Mallory flinched.
The machetes Sven had used in Charlottesville were still with him. They were sheathed and bound, one over the other, and attached to the left side of his belt.
“Sorry,” Sven said.
“That’s alright,” Mallory said, looking apprehensive. She opened her mouth, then closed it.
“You asked me how I recovered,” Sven said. “Well, it was really Jane and Lorie and Ivan that got me back on my feet. They tried hard to get me out of the house...and eating. There’s been a lot of comment about how much weight I’ve lost, and—” Sven smiled for the first time during the interview, “—I’m happy to report that I’m putting on weight again.” Sven’s face hardened again. “But it took me some time to recover. There were days when I went without eating a thing.”
“From the stress?”
“Yeah, I guess so. Eating used to be such a big part of my routine when I was a personal trainer. So much of my time was focused on planning my meals…and eating them—protein this and protein that, you know. But after the outbreak, I couldn’t stand to look at food anymore. The idea of eating made me sick.”
“After you felt a little better, what did you, Jane, and Lorie do to…to pass the time while you waited for the quarantine to be lifted?”
“I don’t know that we were actually waiting for the quarantine to be lifted. I didn’t have plans to leave Virginia at the time, and I’m not sure if Jane or Lorie were thinking about that then either. Looking back, it makes sense that we should have wanted to leave, but, at least in my mind, I hadn’t gotten to that point in my thinking yet. I was still fixating on what happened. Now, of course, I’m glad to be out of there, and it’s hard to imagine having stayed any longer, and hard to believe that we stayed as long as we did. New York is a big change for all of us, and I think that’s been helping too—no
t just to move, but to move somewhere that’s so different from where the outbreak happened.”
Mallory nodded. “I understand.”
“To pass the time in Virginia, well, we did a lot of the usual things, actually—went on walks, read books, watched movies, played board games. Jane and Lorie played tennis while I watched with Ivan. We did anything we could to take our minds off what happened. I found that staying busy helped. It distracted me from a lot of the violence I kept seeing in my head. I really owe it all to Jane and Lorie…and Ivan of course. If it hadn’t been for them, I don’t think I ever would’ve recovered. They were always by my side, through the worst of it. And, eventually, I got better. We were still cut off from the rest of the country then, and I think that was for the best at the time.”
Mallory nodded with eagerness and made hand gestures that suggested she wanted to hear more. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that if we had been reconnected right away after the outbreak, I think it would have been hard to deal with the media attention, both the attention we would have received ourselves and seeing the reporting that had taken place during the outbreak. A lot of the early outbreak footage that we didn’t see because we were inside Virginia would have been a lot to deal with back then. Even now, I find a lot of the early reports disturbing.”
“Why is that?”
Sven thought for a moment. “Because they were so raw. The confusion and lack of understanding of what was happening came through in a way that…that was chilling. I’ve seen it many times now, and I still think it’s terrifying. Now that we know that it was a virus, the events are a little easier to understand.”
“And to categorize as something that wasn’t paranormal?”
“Yes…and the early reports make it seem as if it were something like that, something paranormal.”
“What happened next, after you and Jane and Lorie...and of course Ivan—” she smiled, “—settled into some sort of routine?”
