Chicago Fell First: A Zombie Novel

by Smith, Aaron

  Doug smiled at his work. His body, seemingly stronger in its dark mode, struggled but capably lifted the thing and shoved it into the back of the van. He slammed the doors closed.

  He took in a deep, deep breath and felt the adrenaline surge begin to wane. He felt exhaustion arrive and his Doug-mind begin to rise to the surface again. Tired but relieved, he took the first step to walk around the van and get back in and drive them out of Heavenport.

  But he heard the scream. It began with the D sound of his name but lost its coherence and fell into a panicked cry. He moved fast then, swung around to the passenger side, and saw an Empty One, just a little girl in a torn dress, standing on tiptoes with its teeth digging deep into Kacey’s forearm. Kacey struggled and pulled but those damned teeth were in too far. Doug moved, half shadow and half lost in terror and concern, and beheaded the mindless child in one swift, sure swirl of blade. The body fell first and then the dying head, mouth finally loosening, dropping to the dusty ground and rolling a foot before it stopped. Doug kicked it away like a soccer ball.

  Kacey kicked the door open, her legs hanging out as she sat sideways on the car seat, arm held out in front of her, tears streaming down her face, silent and afraid.

  Doug looked at her and the argument began.

  She’s going to be one of them, his shadow-self insisted.

  No! Doug told his other part. He tore open his shirt, letting the buttons pop, stripped it off. He reached out, wrapped the shirt around Kacey’s arm, covering the ugly bite.

  Maybe you can stop it from catching her, his shadow suggested. Cut it off, below the elbow or maybe above. You have to! It might save her. You can have both! You might save her… and then you’ll be able to watch it heal, watch the adaptation take place, see the machine rearrange its nerves. She’ll be like Danielle, a new form of machine. The unit will repair itself, and what a show that will be!

  “Shut the fuck up!” Doug said, loud and forceful. He said it with his voice and not his mind, overpowering the shadow urges. “I will not.”

  “Doug,” Kacey implored, going into shock, “help me.”

  Her voice snapped him out if it and drove his shadow-self underground, at least for now. He reached into the car, found the medical supplies, took out the big bottle of peroxide, pulled the shirt off Kacey’s arm again and poured the whole bottle over the jagged wound. The bubbles rose furiously. He covered the wound again and took hold of Kacey’s legs, guided her back onto the seat and closed the door. He ran around to his side and took them out of Heavenport as fast as the wheels would turn in their screeching and roaring.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck …” Kacey repeated over and over as they rode. Her eyes were blank and her entire body shook. She was terrified, but not changing yet. Doug drove faster than he had ever driven in his life. He could hear the Empty Sheriff rolling around in the back of the van.

  Chapter 16

  Kacey was unconscious by the time the van had reached the wooden gate that barred the narrow road to the village. Doug stopped driving just long enough to get out and push the log door out of the way. He started moving again, the tires of the van kicking up billows of dust as he sped down the winding path. He was desperate. No woman had ever acted toward him as Kacey had. The thought of her becoming one of those creatures, and the idea of having to kill her if that happened, was almost more than he could bear. He wondered if perhaps his shadow-self’s advice had been valid. Maybe he should have taken her arm off to possibly save her. It didn’t matter now. It was surely too late for that. He put his doubts aside and drove, the steering wheel growing slick as his palms began to sweat.

  Brandon, who did not quite understand what his three adult friends were up to, played happily with his new friends Edgar, Russell and Hedwig, in a small circle of dirt under a big willow tree behind the village. It was good to spend some time with other kids, but they had to be careful since Irena had been appointed babysitter and looked like she could be a mean one if disobeyed.

  Inside Professor Harrison’s cabin, Danielle lay on the bed feeling dizzy and weak. Harrison stood off in the corner fiddling with his unlit pipe. Dr. Bosc sat in a chair beside the bed. On the small table sat some of the equipment he had brought with him: a microscope, a number of syringes and bottles of various drugs and seven glass vials which all now contained samples of Danielle’s blood.

  “Got enough now, Doc?” Danielle asked with slurred, tired words.

  “It’ll be enough,” Bosc said. “Any more and I’ll dry you out, young lady. Rest now; sleep if you can and we’ll wake you when your friends return. Donald, shall we step outside and give our patient some peace?”

  Harrison nodded and opened the door, taking his pipe with him. Raymond Bosc followed, pulling a pack of Camels from his shirt pocket.

  “Do you think she’s really onto something?” the physician asked as he lit his cigarette. He was a thin man with a deep tan, ten years younger than Harrison.

  “It’s a stretch,” Harrison replied as the first puff of pipe smoke floated up toward the clear, bright sky, “but any chance, however slim, to get to the bottom of all this … shit … is worth the effort, don’t you think?”

  “Surely, Donald, the government has better men than us working on the problem.”

  “And what have they come up with besides a political firestorm, a sealed off city, and panic and death? What harm can any of our attempts do? Danielle has lost a little blood, but that’s no great ordeal; she’s a tough girl, been through a lot.”

  “Yes, I can see that.” Bosc took another drag.

  Before either man could put his next thought into words, the sound of a laboring, overworked engine roared into their ears and the van came flying into sight, charging up the road that led into the village and coming to a screaming, skidding stop before the cabins and huts. The driver’s door flew open and Douglas Clancy leaped out, waving his arms furiously.

  “Professor Harrison! Is your doctor here? We need a doctor!”

  Harrison and Bosc rushed over as Doug ran around to the passenger side, tore open the door and reached in, scooping Kacey up and out of the vehicle. The physician and the anthropologist could see she was unconscious, her arm wrapped in a torn and bloody shirt.

  “I’m Dr. Bosc. What happened?”

  “She was bitten! Help her!” Doug barked in desperation.

  “And what about the zombie?” Harrison asked.

  “It’s in the back,” Doug spat, “but Kacey first, please!”

  “Get her inside,” Harrison said, hurrying in front of Doug to open the door of the cabin. Doug followed him in with Kacey in his arms. Bosc entered last.

  “Oh my God,” Danielle said as she saw Kacey. She rolled over to the side of the bed, making room, and stood up, grabbing her crutch from where it leaned against the cabin wall. She was still weak, but would manage. “Was she bitten?”

  “Yes,” Doug said, and Danielle could hear the fear in his voice.

  Once Kacey was on the bed, Dr. Bosc shooed Doug aside and bent over the injured young woman. He took the shirt from her arm and examined the wound. The bleeding had slowed to almost nothing. Her pulse was there, slow but steady.

  “Don’t worry about that,” Danielle told him. “We don’t have much time. My blood! Give her my blood!”

  “But we don’t know what that might do,” Bosc protested. “We don’t know her type or anything else about any of this yet.”

  “Just do it!” Doug said with intimidating force behind his words. “Do something … before she becomes …”

  “Just inject her or I will!” Danielle screamed as she began to move to the side of the bed where the table held the vials of her blood.

  Before she could get there, Bosc did as he was begged. He took one of the vials of blood, attached it to a syringe, and stuck the needle into a vein in Kacey’s elbow on the arm that had been bitten. He placed the emptied vial back on the table. He watched, along with Doug, Harrison, and Danielle, to see if any effect
became apparent as the blood drawn from Danielle mingled with what already flowed in Kacey’s veins. He hoped he hadn’t done more harm than good by taking such a gamble.

  While Danielle and Bosc stayed with the patient, Doug and Harrison went outside. Constable Fess was called over, along with two other men from the village; both were big, strong and young. Harrison opened the back doors of his van and Doug and his three helpers grabbed the prisoner by the ropes and wires that restrained it and carried it into a small cabin that had been stripped of most of its furnishings.

  Inside was a sturdy oak table. There were three chairs and a second, smaller table. That was all. Thick boards had been nailed over the hut’s two windows and an oil lamp had been hung from the ceiling.

  The Empty Sheriff was carried inside and his bondage rearranged so that he lay on the oaken table, immobilized like the victim of a mad scientist’s experiments, tightly strapped and still gagged. The rope and wire was tight, probably even tighter than necessary but no chances would be taken now. Doug was tempted to damage the thing further, prevent any possibility of its moving, maybe by removing its limbs or severing the spine, but he held back, unwilling to demonstrate such cruelty in front of Harrison or the others. The bonds would have to do.

  Terence Trumbull had taken refuge on yet another rooftop. He watched the troops, those whose units were still mostly whole and who still had reliable vehicles, streaming by and heading out of the city. It was happening, though Trumbull could scarcely believe it: Uncle Sam was giving up on Chicago.

  Where did that leave Trumbull? He felt broken after the past few days. As a chaplain, a supposed man of God, it had been his work to instill hope in people even if he himself had no faith in their beliefs. But now that idea made him laugh out loud. How could he dole out hope after seeing such things? But he had never been meant to be a minister. He had been fooling himself. He was far, far better at killing.

  At that moment though, he felt more alone than he ever had, more alone than when he’d first left his family to enlist, more alone even than when he had become the sole survivor of his unit in Africa. He needed someone, anyone to talk with, to hear him.

  The closest things to friends he had in recent months had been Colonel Peterson, now dead with one of Trumbull’s own bullets in his head, and Danielle Hayes.

  Trumbull wondered how Danielle had fared. Was she safe and free and clear of the madness? He feared he would never know. Then he had a thought.

  In this modern world, plague of zombies or not, was it ever truly impossible to find a particular person? Perhaps he could find her; perhaps he should try.

  He’d carried a cell phone with him through his entire adventure in Chicago. It had been turned off since he’d left Rock Island, which meant the battery probably still had most of its charge left. He knew Danielle had a phone too, but he had no number for her; it had not been something they had thought of when parting at the edge of the city.

  He thought for a moment before it hit him. What about Facebook? Trumbull had never had any interest in social networking, but Danielle was a different story. Young, attractive, active with her education, she probably did, he decided. The problem then became the fact that his phone, a basic model, had no Internet capability. He would need a computer, or at the very least, a better phone, to get a message to her. Most of the city was without power, but Trumbull had been in places with no electricity before. What he needed to find, he realized, was a discarded smart phone that still had some juice, and hope he could still get a signal from a cell tower somewhere. There had to be many such machines abandoned in offices or apartments scattered around the ruined city.

  Trumbull made that his new mission. He would find a way to get in touch with the only friend he had left.

  The Empty Sheriff lay secured within the cabin with the door shut tight and Constable Fess and the two others standing guard; Fess had the shotgun, just in case. Doug and Professor Harrison walked back to the cabin that had become the makeshift infirmary. As they headed back, it dawned on Doug that he had left Danielle and Dr. Bosc unarmed to watch over Kacey, with no assurance that she would not become transformed and enraged. Cannibalistic. He picked up the pace.

  He built up an image in his mind as he hurried, a scene wherein Kacey sat up with that empty, soulless look on her face and reached out and tore the throat from Bosc and then pounced on poor Danielle, ripping and clawing until there was nothing recognizable left. Doug was sure he would enter the cabin to see Kacey, empty and lusting for blood, smeared with gore and no more than an animal he would have to put down like a rabid rat. He steeled himself for the event, pushed mercy down deep in his mind and put his shadow-self on standby.

  He reached the cabin door. He took in a deep breath, ready for the horror. He could hear Harrison’s footsteps behind him, catching up now. He opened the door and stepped in.

  They were laughing!

  Kacey was sitting up in bed, leaning against the pillows stacked behind her. Her expression was a weak smile, drowsy but unmistakably her own and certainly no bloodthirsty grimace. Danielle sat on the edge of the bed. She was cleaning the wound on Kacey’s arm and smiling too. Bosc sat in a chair, leaning back and looking stunned, shocked by the turn of events.

  “Hi,” Kacey said softly as she saw Doug walk in. “I’m not a zombie.”

  Harrison joined them a moment later.

  “As you can see, Donald,” Bosc said, “Miss Hayes seems to have been right! Injecting Kacey here with her blood seems to have stopped the metamorphosis from taking place. All vital signs are quite normal now and this wound seems to be nothing more ominous than an ugly but treatable bite.”

  Danielle wrapped gauze around Kacey’s forearm and got up from the bed to make room for Doug. He sat beside Kacey and she rested her head upon his shoulder. Danielle took to one of the room’s chairs and went through the process of putting on her prosthetic while Harrison and Bosc stood nearby.

  “Of course, we haven’t really proven much yet,” Danielle said. “Now we have to take a look at our captured zombie and run a few tests on him.”

  “Do you mean to inject him with your blood as well, and see what effect it has?” Harrison asked.

  Bosc answered now, “That will be our last test, Donald. We have several other steps in mind first, beginning with a comparison of the zombie’s blood and Danielle’s blood and the blood of someone who has neither been turned into one of those things or survived cancer. Once we’ve done that, we can move on to other things.”

  “What a hideous thing for a human to become,” Raymond Bosc said as he exited the cabin where the Empty Sheriff was held. One hand held a plastic case designed to hold vials of blood for travel. With the other hand, he wiped sweat from his brow. He went back to Harrison’s cabin, accompanied by Doug.

  “The thing’s breathing was rapid, its heartbeat erratic and nearly every muscle in its body was tensed and straining against the ropes and wires that held it. Its only goal seemed to be freedom and it seemed not to notice the needles being inserted into its veins, as if pain was a foreign concept.”

  “Yes,” Doug agreed. “They’re single-minded monstrosities.”

  They reentered the other cabin. Danielle and Harrison waited in chairs and Kacey rested on the bed. While Doug and Bosc had been gone, Harrison had politely turned his back as Danielle helped the wounded young woman undress and covered her with a blanket. The table on which Bosc would perform his tests had been moved away from the bed to make more space.

  “I’ll need the other samples now, please,” Bosc said. He drew blood from Kacey, who seemed too tired to realize what was happening, and from Harrison. He still had several samples of Danielle’s blood.

  In the seventh apartment he searched, Terence Trumbull struck gold. There it was, just what he wanted, a fairly new smart phone left behind by the occupants as they fled. Trumbull turned it on as he sat by the window, the room lit only by the incoming sunlight. The phone came alive, its power-level indicator showing p
lenty of life stored in the battery. And there was a signal, Trumbull saw as he sighed in relief. He had Internet access. He found Facebook and registered, following the steps that took him from the Facebook page to his personal email account and back again. He was in. That was the easy part. Finding the right friend was a bit harder.

  “Shit,” he muttered. There were 753 people named Danielle Hayes on Facebook.

  He added “Chicago” to the search phrase and narrowed it down considerably to seventeen people. He rolled down the page, squinting at the tiny photographs beside the names. Bingo! There she was! She was standing there dressed in the white outfit she probably wore on student rounds at the hospital, smiling brightly in happier times.

  He opened up the private message feature and typed.

  “Danielle, I hope you’re alive and well, and Brandon, too. Please call me. Terence.”

  He added his phone number and sent the message on its way. He disconnected from the Facebook page and put the abandoned phone aside. He hoped Danielle’s phone alerted her of Facebook activity. And he hoped she would call him sooner rather than later, before his battery died. He could have carried the other phone with him for he doubted its owner would return for it, but he wanted to minimize his baggage. The city was still a danger zone and fighting or running would most likely be necessary for the foreseeable future until he got out—if such escape was still possible.

  Dr. Bosc had brought a microscope with him. It was the best one he could get that could run on battery power out in the forest where there was no source of regular electricity. It would have to do. Bosc sat at the table while Danielle stood beside him to assist. The audience of Harrison and Doug sat off to the side.

  “The idea here,” Bosc explained, “is to mix these various samples of blood and observe their interactions.”