by M. Van
Ash had managed to charge my phone; the network was slow, but it worked. It remained difficult to navigate. In some streets, the mob of zombies was so thick we had to turn around. In one case, we stopped because other routes were blocked by debris or had even worse zombie problems. We opened the windows a crack, because based on previous encounters, I figured the way we smelled might have kept them at bay, and we waited it out. I don’t think in my whole life I’d ever had to sit still for so long. Not even an eight-hour flight out of Amsterdam was this boring. At least they had in-flight movies. Ash was about ready to explode. She went hyper on me the moment the zombies had wandered off and we could leave.
“Over there,” Ash said, her voice thick with excitement as her finger pointed in the direction of a house in the suburban area.
The brick house had a tall staircase that led to a front door. The door to the garage stood open, and I rolled the Edge inside. In silence, we listened and kept an eye on the garage exit.
After a while, I handed Ash a gun and nodded. She gave me a determined look before she returned her gaze to the door behind us. Given a limited number of options, we’d agreed Ash would stay in the car while I checked the house. My sweaty hands made the gun slippery, not excited by the idea of entering an abandoned house with a potential zombie threat.
I eased out of the car and made my way to the door that connected to the house. I wasn’t that surprised to find it open, considering the mess inside the garage. It looked as if someone had left in a hurry without intending to return. Ash looked anxious when I gave her a final glance.
Creaking hinges set my nerves on edge as I widened the opening. I climbed the staircase up to the house. The second door led into a hallway that connected to a kitchen. Cupboards and drawers sat open. The red glow of dusk bathed the wide-open living room in a warm, inviting glow as if the owners could come home any minute. Relieved at the lack of rank smells, I started my search. Bathroom empty, washroom empty, and another room I had no name for turned out to be empty. My heart stopped at the sound of voices.
Shit, shit, shit, chimed inside my head. Careful not to step on any of the clutter littered across the floor, I made my way to the stairs. I gazed at the wooden steps that curved at the top. The voices came from upstairs. Hauling ass might be a good idea now. I turned to look around the room. The residents had clearly left, and I didn’t think a zombie would have been able to climb the stairs unless it had already been there, but talking?
Jitters ran up and down my limbs when I took the first step. It creaked underneath my boot. I halted, holding my breath so I could listen, but nothing stirred. I swallowed and started to climb. Pictures of a happy couple with two children lined the wall. Bare nails remained where other pictures should have been. I struggled to control my breathing. By the time I reached the top, my heart raced inside my chest.
A blue TV light came from one of the rooms at the end of the hall. I entered the first room on my left, checked the adjacent bathroom, closet, and under the bed, and then traced the hall into a children’s bedroom with twin beds, but I found nothing. On shaky legs, I snuck toward the blue light. I leaned against the wall next to the door to peer inside. Nothing stirred except for the blue screen of the television. Starting to doubt my sanity, I pushed the door open. At first glance, the room was empty, and I entered on the balls of my feet.
A big double bed sat in the middle of the room with a pile of sheets draped over it that obscured the space underneath. The sight of a closet door sent an eerie feeling down my spine. Bed or closet? I decided to go for the closet. I held my gun out in front of me. At that moment, I wished I had watched more cop shows than medical ones. My shaking hand clasped the handle of the closet. I drew in a breath and yanked the door open, empty.
Releasing the breath I was holding, I returned my gaze to the bed. I kneeled beside it, gun at the ready. I gripped the sheets and tugged them from the bed in one swift move when a voice screeched, “Busted.”
I flung around, stumbled backward, and fell flat on my back, gun raised in the air. My eyes darted around the room until they found a gray parrot staring at me with beady black eyes. Panting, I dropped my hands by my side as I fought unruly nerves and cursed the animal. When the rush of blood stopped to drown out my hearing, I remembered Ash waiting for me in the dark. I collected myself and headed for the garage.
Leaving some of the supplies in the car, I’d carried a bunch of them upstairs, including some of the stuff I’d gotten at the pawnshop. I’d barricaded the doors and garage and checked the windows, but I estimated all of them too high and zombie proof.
Ash had installed herself on the couch in the living room when I walked in with the remaining bags. I dropped them to the floor with a thud, and I crashed onto a brown leather reclining chair and moaned. “God, I’m dead.”
“Look like it too,” Ash smirked.
“Don’t start. I’m too tired,” I begged. I could have used a break, having spent too much time bickering with Ash in the car.
“Sorry. Didn’t know you’d be such a baby about it.”
I couldn’t help a smile but otherwise ignored her. I sank deeper into the chair, and then something bounced off my head. I jerked up. When again something wrapped in plastic hit me between the eyes, I scowled at Ash, grabbed the thing, and hurled it back at her. She ducked, making me miss by an inch.
“You don’t want a Twinkie?” she said. Her lower lip stuck out. I blinked and inspected the Twinkie by my feet.
“I’ve never had a Twinkie,” I said and grabbed it off the floor. Sitting back, I inspected the yellowish mushiness wrapped in plastic.
“You never had a Twinkie?” Ash exclaimed, “What the hell do they feed the kids in Amsterdam?”
I narrowed my eyes at her and glared.
“It’s not Amsterdam. That’s the capital. The country’s name is the Netherlands, and I’m from Rotterdam,” I said, “and I was raised on peanut butter without the jelly and on hagelslag.” The thought was petty, but growing up in Rotterdam, any association with Amsterdam was a big no-no. I figured they’d probably had the same tendencies around here between places like Brooklyn and maybe the Bronx, but I felt too tired to get into it. Instead, I ripped open the wrapping and shoved the Twinkie in my mouth. It took some chewing, and I thought the sweetness would break my teeth, but it was good.
“Do you have anoth—” I started to ask when it smacked me in the face. I ignored Ash’s giggles.
| 14
Numbness took over, his toll for sitting hunched behind the fence for hours. His eagerness to succeed wouldn’t let him move, the sight too astounding for his eyes to abandon, the prospect of what it meant beyond his own existence. Nonetheless, this would be his discovery, his greatest triumph, and not only would it wipe his slate clean, but also it would put his name on the map as the savior of his beloved country and get paid at the same time.
He couldn’t afford any screw-ups. That was why he had to come see this for himself. He lifted the night vision goggles to his face to get an even better view, fascinated by the simplicity of the solution. They should have given his suggestions a chance a long time ago. But what had they done? They’d shunned him, all of them. The government, the military, even his own people laughed at him to his face.
They never conjectured it would get out of control, believing the virus couldn’t get out, but they were wrong. It did get out. It’s not important that he had to give it a little push.
A virus as powerful as Mortem would have gotten out eventually. If they had listened to him, he would have met the project’s goals.
From the first day of discovering Mortem, he knew it would be the key, the first steps to tipping the scales of power, a virus so powerful it would be able to eradicate cities and even countries. All he had to do was to create a vaccine that would counteract the virus and he would be worshipped.
He already had significant success with neoplasma malignum carriers. It seemed Mortem did not resonate well with the acce
lerated growth of cells. He would have reached the life-testing phase already if the current administration hadn’t pulled the plug. When it witnessed the destructive power of Mortem, they ended the program. The fools had no idea of the significance of Mortem’s discovery. With aggressive testing, this outbreak would not have been necessary. If only they had allowed him the proper subjects for his research, then he wouldn’t have had to run around at night, evading the unwholesome, as he preferred to call the infected. Not that it mattered if it meant he would have his prize and the means to fix all this. Soon the so-called leadership of this country would come to see they had no choice. They’d turn to him, begging for a solution, and he would know just where to find it.
His breath caught as the curtains behind the window he had watched for what felt like an eternity moved to a side. His redemption stepped into his line of sight. This would bring his salvation. The description given to him by the medic was explicit and hard to miss—tall, thin, with barely a hair on her head.
| 15
I eased the curtain aside for another view of the neighborhood. If it weren’t for the tossed-over garbage bins or the occasional zombie roaming around, it could have been any Sunday morning. My hand held a tight grip on a warm cup of coffee, wishing it wasn’t instant. It made me grateful that the military had kept the power grid alive. Must have been the primary targets Decks had mentioned. I wondered how long it would last.
Uneasiness crept up on me. I didn’t know whether it was from sitting around doing nothing, the direness of our situation, or Mars’s warning that kept sneaking into my mind. Thinking about it kept me up at night.
In my job, I had to act on information; I made well-informed decisions. Now, information scared me. It scared me to know things, in addition to what I had seen with my own eyes, to know for a fact that our lives would never be the same.
This morning I had found another charger cable for my phone, one that didn’t need a car, in the room with the parrot, along with an old laptop. My own cable probably still sat in my suitcase at JFK, along with my clothes. The animal remained alive, and I had placed some water with chocolate chip cookies inside the cage, but I guessed it was a mere matter of time. I should put it out of its misery.
The phone sat plugged in on the kitchen counter next to the laptop, but I hadn’t had the guts to check if there was anything of the Internet left. The TV in the living room must have toppled over when the owners left in a hurry. The blue screen of the TV upstairs had attracted my attention for over an hour until I switched it off. My stomach lurched at the thought of changing the channel. I couldn’t decide if it was because I couldn’t face the fact that our own situation seemed desperate or that everyone in this world, including my family, was doomed. For what? Someone screwed up, Mars had said in a brief moment of unintentional candor. I couldn’t wrap my head around it.
Ash stirred on the couch. Discarding my thoughts, I glanced over my shoulder. She had been puking her guts out for two days. A bucket that I should probably empty out again sat next to the couch. I released the curtain and set the coffee down on the table next to the couch. She looked like shit, pale and too damn skinny. Her blue eyes opened and gazed at me with an emptiness that was hard to face.
“You’re looking better,” I said, a bit reserved. With a blink, her eyes cleared and honed in on me.
“Liar.” Her voice sounded rough from puking. I shook my head in apology.
“You’re right. I’m sorry. You look like shit,” I said and paused. “Bathroom?”
She grinned, which made some of that emptiness in her eyes disappear, and nodded. I let her climb on my back and dropped her off at the bathroom. With the chair I had placed in the middle, everything inside the small room came within her reach.
“I’ll make you some tea,” I said and closed the door behind me. “Yell when you’re done.”
I gazed at the bathroom door after filling the electric cooker. Helplessness settled in my gut. I knew she would start to feel better when the drugs were out of her system, but then what? Wait for who goes first? On the other hand, I felt stronger than I had in a long time.
When evening fell, I decided to face my fears and managed to get the laptop online, using an old-fashioned cable to connect it directly to the modem, instead of the local Wi-Fi that kept crashing. I forced myself to peek at a couple of the major news sites and noticed recent information updates, but without anything new to report. The outbreak was mostly situated in the New York area, but there had already been sightings of what they now called the Mortem virus in Philadelphia and Atlantic City. Countries in Europe and Asia had closed their borders and started quarantining their major cities because of the infection, but nothing neared the epidemic in the States. I felt stupid about my fear of information when I found that it actually eased my mind. My family should be okay, and they would prepare for the worst. Leave it to my dad to think of ways to survive times like these. The rest of the information out there seemed similar to what I’d heard Mars and Decks mention.
Evacuation areas, or safe zones, which is what the reporters tended to call them, spurted like mushrooms out of the ground, as the expression goes in Dutch. I couldn’t imagine the safe zones needed to support the population of a city the size of New York until I read one of the reports that mentioned that the northern part of Long Island had turned into one of the safe zones. I couldn’t imagine that either and moved on. Authorities urged the uninfected to report to those areas, and if they couldn’t get there on their own, they were advised to dig in.
Articles confirmed my suspicion that the people infected with the virus did not necessarily die. Their bodies remained viable, but their brains effectively shut down, capitulating control to the virus. It returned them to their basic survival functions with an intense craving for blood or fresh meat. This meant they weren’t the risen dead, which made the term zombie not entirely justified. Not that I cared. They acted like creatures who’d stepped out of a horror flick, and that was what I’d call them. Still, a dead person wouldn’t turn into a zombie, but the virus would slowly kill the body of a living host. This came in the form of decay. As long as the virus had access to the brain of a body, it would keep this body moving until every viable cell had turned to dust. Injuring a body would help speed up the decay, but only taking out the brain could stop a zombie.
While I clicked through the pages, Ash had gotten her hands on my phone. She kept scrutinizing my music library and, after about two minutes, declared it was shit. “You don’t have any rap,” she said, appalled.
“Black album should be on there and some Dr. Dre,” I replied absently as I scrolled through maps of the surrounding area. The Internet was up. It made me wonder if there were people holed up in big server rooms, determined to keep us online. For some reason, the image of Bill Gates swinging an axe at zombies popped up in my mind. It didn’t give me much comfort. The lack of a printer forced me to copy the maps to paper with an old-fashioned pencil, but it gave me something to do. I needed to know what types of stores there were in the neighborhood. I also wanted to know about other neighborhoods in case we needed to bug out.
An Eminem song blared out of the tiny speakers of the phone before it switched to Linkin Park and then landed on a Pearl Jam song. Ash grinned as the oh-so-familiar guitar riff made way to Eddy Vedder’s voice singing “Alive.” The laptop screen blinked off as I set it down on the table. I leaned back to listen to the song.
We were alive, and we had to figure out how to stay that way. Ash’s gaunt face told me that would have been a challenge even in a zombie-free world, but we had to try. It might be my headstrong way to spite my family, who surely had given up on me, but maybe there was a little hope in me yet.
“I’m heading out tonight,” I said and gave Ash a sideways glance. The thought of leaving her alone made me feel sick to my stomach, but I had to try something. She stopped the music and sat up. The grin on her face had disappeared.
“And I’m not coming,” she sai
d, sounding pissed off. I had wanted to build up to that, but I guessed I was an easy read.
“Yeah, I need to go alone.”
“Right, and I’m supposed to wait here.” She went for a somewhat offended sarcasm, but I could hear the tremble in her voice she tried to mask.
“What the hell am I supposed to do when you don’t come back? Sit here and wait until I die?”
“I plan to come back.”
I couldn’t ignore the frightened kid, whose fear started to push past her walls, across from me, but there were things we needed, and she was in no condition to go out. I got up from my chair and sat down on the coffee table next to the couch. Our eyes locked for a second, but I couldn’t hold the frustrated disappointment in her gaze, and I looked away to find the boots at my feet.
“We need supplies and food your stomach can handle. All that junk is no good for you,” I said in a low voice, “and you’re in no shape to—”
“Don’t go out there on my account,” she said cutting me off. “You don’t have to worry. I won’t be in your way for long.” She turned on the couch, showing me her back. My stomach made a gut-wrenching turn at the bitterness in her tone.
“Ash,” I said and placed a hand on her shoulder. She shrugged me off. I stared at her back for some time, but without a clue what to say, I got up to pack the stuff I needed for my trip.
I closed the garage door without a sound and sat behind the wheel. Ash was still pissed at me, although she also seemed nervous when I walked out the door. I had my own trouble with nerves and gripped the steering wheel to control my hands. I had secured the place as best I could to make sure Ash would be all right, but I didn’t like it. If I could get the things I had in mind, next time might be different.
| 16
Driving around, I had found the drugstore, at least what remained of it. It turned out my mapping skills weren’t that bad. Shattered glass paved the entrance. Most of the shelves were empty, but I found plenty of stuff on the floor. It took me a while to find some medication that might help ease Ash’s stomach.
