Chicago Fell First: A Zombie Novel

by Smith, Aaron

  “She won’t be coming today,” Danielle explained. “She was hurt, she’s recovering someplace safe, but don’t worry, she’ll be fine. Thanks for agreeing to let us use this place.”

  Brunt shrugged. “It’s all right, really it is. If what Kacey told me on the phone is true, and you kids really have a way to kill those things … then I want to help. I’ve got a brother in the big city, his wife and my three nephews, and I haven’t heard a word from them since the shit hit the big fan. I hope I haven’t lost them. You want some coffee maybe?”

  Danielle and Doug nodded. They sat down to wait for the others.

  Twenty minutes later, the roar of a struggling, coughing car engine cut through the air. Danielle looked out the window to see what sort of horrifically mistreated vehicle could be laboring in such a way. She found a rusted, dented little sedan that must have been nearing its twentieth birthday crawling into the Mirage lot and barely making it into a parking space. She almost laughed but seeing Terence Trumbull climbing out of the wreck suppressed the giggle. He looked the exact opposite of his transportation, dressed in a high-end suit, more like a Wall Street executive than a soldier.

  Trumbull entered the diner, hugged Danielle, shook hands with Doug and immediately said, “I don’t want to hear any cracks about my car! The rental places were tapped out with all the people fleeing the area. That was the best I could do. It did its job, got me from Point A to Point Crappy Little Diner.”

  “Hey! I heard that!” Henry Brunt shouted from behind the counter. “You want a coffee, too?”

  “Absolutely,” Trumbull said as he sat. “So, Danielle, tell me about this discovery you’ve made and how I can help.”

  For nearly half an hour, Danielle related the whole play-by-play of her experiments with Dr. Bosc and the others and the zombie blood and her blood and the final victorious stroke of the aerosol in the Empty Sheriff’s face. “The problem is,” she finished, “that we don’t know how to get this information to the right people or, since I don’t think anyone will listen to us anyway, use it ourselves to fix things.”

  “Danielle,” Trumbull said, his face dropping, “I’m kind of cut off from the army right now. My commanding officer, the one man who might have believed me, is dead, and I’m probably assumed dead or AWOL myself. That city’s in lockdown. They won’t let you or your friends anywhere near it. On top of that, your blood might have taken out that one Empty One, but what are we supposed to do, bleed you dry?”

  “Terence,” Danielle said, using his first name for emphasis, “we really need your help now. And think of what happened in Africa and what you’ve been through since it started in Chicago. Think of it as revenge, as maybe ending this thing before it gets any worse. It’s not just in Chicago now. Yeah, the government sealed off the city, but there are towns out here that are infected, like the one we got that sheriff from. Maybe this town will be next.”

  “Look,” Trumbull nodded, “I’ll help if I can. You know that, but what about the blood?”

  “There will be others,” Danielle said. “I’m sure of it.”

  Doug, who had been listening but not speaking, piped up.

  “I think they’re here.”

  All eyes shot to the window. They had been expecting Raymond Bosc’s little car, perhaps followed by a few others. What they got was a bus.

  Professor Harrison got out first. Bosc followed, carrying a larger version of the medical bag he had brought to the village with him. Behind him came a parade. People of various ages, of both genders, of all different colors and sizes and backgrounds streamed off the bus, several dozen. Most of them looked healthy. A few moved more slowly. One woman came on crutches, one-legged. There were several with bandanas over chemo-bald heads. With Harrison leading, they marched across the parking lot and up the steps to the diner’s doors.

  Doug got up to let them in.

  “I think I’m gonna need another pot of coffee,” muttered Henry Brunt.

  Terence Trumbull began to laugh. “Shit, Danielle, you weren’t kidding about the cavalry!”

  The little diner was soon filled almost to capacity. The assembled talked amongst themselves for a while as Henry Brunt passed out coffee, tea and water. Introductions were made between those who had been there waiting and those who had just arrived. When all was ready and everyone seated and comfortable, Danielle stood in the center and began to speak.

  “Thank you all for coming on such short notice. I’m sure Dr. Bosc and Professor Harrison explained as much of the situation as they could. My name is Danielle Hayes. I’m a friend of the doctor and the professor, I’m a medical student, and, like all of you, I faced cancer and survived it.

  “I’m sure a lot of you have been told, by friends and family and maybe even by strangers, the same things I’ve been told—like how brave you are and how great it is that you beat the odds and lived. I’m happy to be alive, of course, but I’ve never felt particularly heroic about it; I just wanted to live and I’m glad I’m still here. But I guess we are brave people, all of us. We’ve been through pain and changes and emerged with our scars but with our lives, too.

  “But now something has happened and we, just we among the many thousands of people in the area and the many millions of people in and around Chicago, have a chance to help with this strange situation that’s already cost the lives of so many innocent men and women … and even children, people who didn’t ask to be attacked or infected or turned into grotesque versions of what they once had been.

  “We have found the means to stop those terrible things from happening any more. The means are within me … and within all of us. The thing that almost killed us all, in so many of its different forms, just might hold the key to saving Chicago and those still alive inside it and those in the other towns that have already been hit by this monstrous contagion. Do we all have this solution inside us, running through our veins even as we sit here in this little diner? I don’t know, but we can find out and maybe we can make a huge difference in a lot of lives, save a lot of lives, end a lot of suffering, and prevent a lot of pain.

  “I am asking for, literally, your blood. Please … will you help us?”

  Danielle grinned, wide and sincere, at the response to her pleas. The room erupted in sound. People talked, laughed, yelled and not a single person refused to help.

  “I hope we’re doing the right thing,” Bosc said quietly to Harrison. “Let’s pray our experiments were accurate and it isn’t just, for some unfathomable reason, Danielle’s blood that caused the things we observed.”

  The doctor and professor turned to the counter to speak to Henry Brunt, who had grown misty eyed at Danielle’s speech and the unanimous response to her request for help.

  “You’ve been very generous,” Harrison said. “I hope you don’t mind us taking it a step further and turning your establishment into a makeshift blood bank!”

  “Well,” Brunt said, “I can only think of one group of people who might object to such a thing … and right now I say the Board of Health can go to Hell!”

  “Thank you,” Harrison told him, and turned to Bosc. “Ray, you might as well bring in the rest of your equipment.”

  Three young men from the group of cancer survivors volunteered to assist Bosc with his apparatus. While they worked on carrying it in, Danielle mingled with the crowd, thanking people, encouraging people, hoping she was not leading everyone down a path of false promises and empty ideas.

  Trumbull, Doug and Harrison had stepped outside. While Bosc and Danielle concerned themselves with the blood part of the plan, those three men wanted to consider their other needs.

  “What do we do with the blood?” Harrison asked. “We already know it works when mixed in water and used as an aerosol, but using it to hit a large area containing a large number of those zombie things is different than squirting one captured monster in the nostrils. I understand you’re a military man, Captain Trumbull. What do you say?”

  “Well,” Trumbull responded, “fro
m what we know so far, we have the big city that’s been overrun by Empty Ones, and we have smaller towns too. My vote would be that we run a test on one of those little towns; it shouldn’t be too hard to manage that.”

  “How do we do that?” Doug asked.

  “Crop-dusting,” Trumbull said. “With one of those little dusting planes, we can disperse the blood-water mixture over most of a small town. At least then we’ll be able to tell if it really, truly works. And if it does we can save some lives in the process.”

  “A fine start,” Harrison approved the idea.

  “Yeah,” Trumbull said, “but Chicago’s a bigger can of worms. First, it’s so big that a duster like that won’t even come close to doing the job. We’d need a fleet of them and a whole flock of pilots, or a really powerful means of scattering the poison. Second, it’s closed off and quarantined and there’s no way Uncle Sam will let us in there.”

  “Chicago comes second then,” Doug said. “Let’s see about that plane and maybe we can save what’s left of that little town we got our sheriff from.”

  “I think we need the Yellow Pages,” Harrison said.

  Danielle’s medical classes had given her plenty of experience at poking into veins and letting the blood run through the tubes and into vials. The drawing of the juice of life went twice as fast as it would have if Bosc had been doing the work himself. They drew only from the first handful of volunteers. This would be the experimental batch, the blood that would be dispersed over Heavenport. The only possible glitch Danielle and Bosc had seen would be if the mixing of the blood of many different people, including many different blood types, somehow negated the poisonous effect that it had on Empty Ones. There was, they realized, but one way to find out.

  The plane arrived on a truck several miles outside Heavenport on a little used county road with no traffic to get in the way. Donald Harrison had paid for the rental with his credit card over the phone, tossing in a little extra money to make up for the owner’s concerns about Harrison not having a valid pilot’s license. Doug and Trumbull had then gone to pick it up and left Trumbull’s rented car there as very lousy collateral, driving the plane to the rendezvous point on a flatbed truck.

  They were all there now: Trumbull, Doug, Danielle and Harrison. Bosc had remained at the Mirage with his flock of blood donors.

  The plane was small, single-engine, with one seat for the pilot, an internal tank and spraying apparatus contained within the wings. It came with an instruction manual, which Terence Trumbull devoured in one quick reading, something he had learned to do in his army life when learning new weapons and technologies as quickly as possible could often mean the difference between life and death.

  They had it off the truck by way of the mechanized chains that rolled it gently down the ramped back of the vehicle. It sat on the road that would become their runway. Danielle had brought the first dose of blood-water with her. The weight of many gallon jugs had made her car feel sluggish and heavy on the way there from Bellamy, but she had managed. Now she and Doug poured the liquid, which looked mostly clear with just a hint of pink, into the plane’s tank. The pumping mechanism, when activated by the pilot’s hand controls, would release a thin mist into the air above the ground, hopefully permeating the atmosphere well enough that any living creature below would have no choice but to breathe some of it in.

  Five minutes later, after a hearty “Good luck!” from Harrison, a “Kill those fuckers” from Doug, and a kiss on the cheek from Danielle, Trumbull was airborne and heading toward Heavenport, flying just high enough to avoid the tree line.

  Trumbull had never actually flown before. He’d learned on simulators, virtual versions of several types of planes and helicopters, one of those just-in-case exercises that had been part of his Special Forces training, but it was something he had never been called upon to do in any official capacity. He’d been through what had amounted to months of flight time, without ever really leaving the ground. Now he had his chance and it felt good, like driving without the friction of wheels on the ground. He smiled as he soared over the treetops and the narrow paths that wound in and out of the woods below, not too high and not too fast. Within minutes, Heavenport came into view. A little town too landlocked to be called a port, yet that was its name, the place looked quaint and deserted, worn around the edges. He saw a dozen or so moving beings below, and they roamed aimlessly, shambling. It was painfully obvious even from above that they were Empty Ones.

  Trumbull wondered if anyone in Heavenport still had a soul. He soared right over Center Street and pulled the spray trigger, releasing the pinkish mist over the heads of the wandering dead.

  The machinery worked perfectly. The spray shot out, hanging in the air above the street for an instant before raining down, fine and thin and damp. Trumbull’s plane roared past, turned in midair, and shot back over the scene thirty seconds later. As he passed again, Trumbull could see the Empty Ones falling like fragile mushrooms blown over by a strong wind.

  “Hell yeah!” he cried out.

  He kept going, spraying over the streets that intersected or ran parallel to Center. He crisscrossed the air above Heavenport until the solution in the holding tank had run out and the little volume indicator on his dashboard flashed red for nothing left. Trumbull smiled, turned back the way he had come, and landed with a grating, clumsy stumble as the wheels made contact with the ground, but eventually coasted to a safe stop on the road from which he had taken off. Doug, Danielle and Harrison were waiting for him.

  “I saw them fall!” Trumbull shouted as he stepped down from the plane. Danielle hugged him.

  “I hope it worked as well as you seem to think,” Harrison said.

  “Let’s ride in and find out,” Doug suggested.

  The Empty Ones on Center Street were indeed dead. Danielle parked the car and the four got out. Doug kicked one of the lifeless zombies to make sure. No movement, no grunt, nothing.

  They had not come unarmed and Trumbull produced a pistol and Doug took out the machete he had strapped to his belt as noises from behind crossed the air. They all spun about. Doors were opening on one side of the street. Trumbull raised the gun and Doug stood ready with his blade.

  “Easy guys,” Danielle warned. “Wait.”

  The weapons would not be needed. People came out. Real people with faces that held real expressions and eyes that were windows to souls and not to emptiness. They looked pale and afraid, squinted as the sunlight struck their faces. It was a middle-aged man with gray hair and glasses with one lens broken, a woman perhaps ten years younger, and two children, a boy and a girl. They slowly approached the strangers.

  Danielle, watching them come closer, thought she recognized the children.

  “Those things,” the gray-haired man said, “are dead? Did you send that plane? Did it do something to them?”

  “Indeed it did,” said Trumbull.

  “Thank you!” the man continued as relief washed over his face. “I’m Gary Donner, mayor of … of what’s left of Heavenport. Have you seen others? I … I don’t know how many are still alive and … and normal.”

  “Are you all okay?” Danielle asked. “Are the children hurt? My name is Danielle. I’m not a doctor, but I have some medical training. Is there anything you need?”

  “We’re all right,” the woman answered. “These are my kids. We’re not hurt.” She extended her hand to Danielle. “I’m …”

  “Mrs. Lassiter,” Danielle finished her statement for her. “I recognize the children. I think you should have this.”

  She took out Harmon Lassiter’s wallet and handed it to his widow.

  Mrs. Lassiter saw what it was and began to sob. Danielle led her and the children off to the sidewalk where they could sit. There was a wooden bench for waiting for a bus. Danielle intended to tell her that her husband had, in a way, died a hero.

  Mayor Donner stayed with Doug, Harrison and Trumbull. “How can I thank you?”

  “Worry about rebuilding your to
wn and taking care of whatever survivors there are,” Harrison said, but Trumbull interrupted him.

  “Is there a hardware store in town?”

  “A small one, yes, two blocks that way,” the mayor told them, pointing west.

  “Can we have some materials?” Trumbull asked. “There are certain things we’ll need in order to help others in your situation.”

  “Take what you will,” Donner answered. “The man who owned it is dead anyway.”

  “Come on Doug,” Trumbull said.

  By the time their day was done, there were three vehicles leaving Heavenport. Danielle and Harrison headed back to Bellamy. Terence Trumbull would return the airplane to its owner and reclaim his rental lemon. The mayor had given Doug a pickup truck to transport the things he and Trumbull had taken from the hardware store. The plan was for Doug and Trumbull to rendezvous back at Harrison’s village. Danielle and Harrison would meet Dr. Bosc in Bellamy and collect a lot more blood from the cancer survivors, enough blood to move forward with the next phase of the plan. They would all be back in the forest settlement by mid-morning the next day: the five of them, the equipment, the blood and perhaps all the hope that was left for the survivors trapped in Chicago.

  Chapter 18

  Doug had arrived in the village the night before, parked the truck behind the rows of cabins and huts, the back of it covered with a large tarp to protect and conceal the mountain of stuff Trumbull had selected from the hardware store in Heavenport: wires and electrical supplies, tools, and a number of canisters of chemicals. Doug didn’t know what they were—Trumbull had only advised him to keep them from mixing or being exposed to fire or extreme heat—so he knew they must be dangerous.

  Kacey was feeling stronger, better. She had greeted Doug with a passionate kiss. Brandon was fine too, having spent most of the day playing with the local kids and even helping them with their reading lessons.