by Steve Wands
FOX was airing footage from Baltimore. A city bus security video showed a passenger stumbling on board. The driver went to assist the woman, who in return bit the driver’s forearm. The driver punched the woman off the bus and video ended.
Rachel didn’t bother turning to MSNBC because part of her feared it would just be a talking head of Rachel Maddow.
Any other day she’d be hopping into a steaming hot shower with a toothbrush dangling out of her mouth. She’d then sit down and watch the weather forecast while eating a yogurt and drinking a tall glass of orange juice. After that she’d rush out the door and head to work. Not today. Today she wouldn’t be going in, unless of course this was a joke. But before she could call in to the office, she wanted to call her mother and brother. If this was indeed real she wanted to make sure they were okay.
She dialed her mother first, and on the second ring she picked up, “Mom? You see the news yet?”
“Of course I have, dear. Been glued to the tube for the last hour. Terrible…terrible news. I was just about to call you. You okay?” Her mother was in her seventies now, but had a soft voice that seemed ageless.
“I’m fine, can’t hardly believe this, though. Do you think it’s real?”
“I’d like to think it’s a big hoax, but I doubt it. Outside I hear nothing but sirens speeding by, and some of the neighbors are huddling outside chewing the fat. Some of them still in their pajamas, you know how I hate that. Is it really so difficult to throw on some pants?”
“Mom, I’m sure they’re not thinking about pants right now.”
“No…no, I suppose not. Listen, dear, I want you to stay home today and stay inside, okay? Keep the doors locked and don’t you let anyone in, you hear? Especially not those damned Jehovah’s.”
“I was just going to say the same thing to you. Have you talked to Bobby, yet?”
“Usually I wouldn’t bother calling that lazy bum till after lunch with his hours, but he actually came over earlier, before I was even awake. Apparently the news started breaking late last night and well, you know your brother. He showed up with one of those giant cups of coffee, his entire gun collection, and his truck filled with all the food from his place. He’s prepared, he says. Prepared for what I don’t know, but I’m glad he’s here.”
Rachel breathed a sigh of relief. If what was happening was really happening she felt a million times better knowing that her screw-loose brother was with their mom. She often joked with him about his endless conspiracy theories and doomsday scenarios, but maybe come the end of the day she’ll be the one proven crazy for not thinking the way he did. “That’s great, Mom, I’m glad he’s with you too. Tell him I said hello.”
“I will. Actually, just before you called he left with all the gas cans from the shed. He took a drive down to the WaWa to fill them up. He was monkeying around in the shed. Took out your father’s old generator and has been fooling with that.”
“It sounds like he’s really on top of things.”
“Oh, I don’t know. No wife, no kids, no real job. I’m old enough now to be a grandmother ten times over and neither of you are making me one.”
“This really isn’t the time for—”
“Hush now. You both had time enough. I want grandkids before I’m walking around on the news, you hear me?”
“Yeah, I hear ya ma, and as soon as I find my Prince Charming—”
“Settle for whatever repairman comes to the house next. I don’t even care if he sticks around, I’ll watch the kid. I don’t care.”
“Ma, focus.”
“You could even adopt one of those Asian babies that are all the rage with the gays.”
“Ma…”
“Oh…I think your brother just came back. I’ll call you in a few minutes, dear.”
“No, wait—”
She hung up the phone, but Rachel didn’t want her to hang up. Not till she told her how much she loved her and how much she meant to her. She knew her mother already knew this, but it would comfort her to be able to say it.
Rachel called her back, but all she got was a busy signal.
She called work and got the same signal. She tried three more times and still the busy signal. She didn’t overthink it; she was sure other people would be calling out today and generally tying up the lines with talk about the risen dead.
Lowering the volume on the television, Rachel put down the remote, grabbed her warm can of soda and walked over to the window. She lived in a nice little townhouse in Applegate Estates. It was a corner unit but gave her a good view of the main street into the development as well as a sweeping view of a large portion of the estate. All seemed well. A few cars were coming and going, but no speeding police cruisers with wailing sirens. No people running and screaming down the streets and, most importantly, no zombies.
Curious, Rachel decided to shower and get dressed. She pulled her hair up and put on a pair of jeans and slip-on Vans sneakers. Though it looked to be a warm day, Rachel always had a chill in the mornings so on top of a baby blue t-shirt she pulled over a hooded sweatshirt that she mostly used for jogging. She grabbed her cell phone, wristlet, and car keys and headed out the door.
She walked down the pathway to her car as if she were on eggshells, but the morning looked like any other. She noticed she was being watched, however, by her neighbors, many of them peeking through the blinds or curtains in amazement. She got into her car, turned the key in the ignition and turned her radio on—of course the news reports matched what the television was saying.
The roadways outside were littered with slow moving vehicles, much like Rachel they appeared to be driving around in an attempt to observe what was being reported. As she drove on it reminded her of how she drove through her mother’s neighborhood in New Jersey in the days after Superstorm Sandy ravaged the coast taking in the damage with her own eyes as she did now, hoping to see something that would help her understand the situation.
She drove passed a gas station which at this hour would usually have two or three cars, but now it had at least thirty. The wait was so long that some of the occupants stood outside their vehicles talking. She passed a 7-Eleven—one she often stopped at—which had a full parking lot and patrons carrying out handfuls of household staples like milk, eggs, and cartons of cigarettes.
“Jesus,” she whispered, dismayed at how manic the town had become in only a few hours.
The further into town she drove, the more chaotic it became. Parking lots and gas stations had full lots and long lines. The people she could see looked afraid and on edge, like a big winter storm was going to blow in and trap them for days. But it wouldn’t be a big winter storm, it would be an all new force of nature entirely: the living dead.
Rachel jolted awake, throwing the blanket off and to the ground.
“Fuck,” she said, with that slow, raw voice that can only be heard upon first waking up, or after staying awake far too long.
The dream was becoming a repetitive one. The dream of how it all began. The first day of the apocalypse. Nearly every night it was the same damned thing with little deviation. One of her favorite movies, Groundhog Day, was starting to become a little too close to reality. Another shitty night of sleep in the mountain.
***
To understate it, Gregory Tran is a very intelligent man. He studied evolutionary biology early in his academic career, but quickly grew bored with it and decided to take up Theoretical Physics at New York University. He had authored several books on the subject, and prior to being sequestered away into this dungeon of a facility, buried into a mountain, he was working on another.
What he wasn’t well-educated on was death. Not death in a biological sense, of that he was well-versed, but of death as a sentient being he was not. Death as a being was no more logical to him than Santa Claus. His family converted to Catholicism before Gregory was born and haphazardly raised him as a Catholic, but it was something he grew out of, like bedtime stories, and not something that really shaped his world
view. For that, an early love of science and science fiction were his touchstones.
So for him to now be searching the archaic library for books that referenced Death as an entity or as a sentient being, he figured he might as well be spinning racks of comic books in search of any four-colored tales that showcased the Grim Reaper. Part of him felt foolish even considering that such a thing could be behind the probable extinction event they were facing, but another part, a more primal part of his psyche, was trembling in fear. He rationalized that if the dead could reanimate, not just the recently deceased, but the long dead, then it was possible that a death entity could exist.
He stacked book on top of book on an old oak library cart that had to have been crafted in the 60s, but with the exception of a heavy layer of dust, it looked brand new. It made him wonder how many books had been written on the topic of Death since this library was constructed, and if he were simply wasting his time, but the alternative was to navigate the facility’s intranet, which Rachel had already agreed to do. Tran may have been a modern man and a futurist, but he hated reading for long stretches on the computer and preferred to sit in a lounge chair and read by a lamp, preferably with a never-ending cup of tea. His vision of the future still had books made of paper, and tea kettles that sat on stovetops.
After some time, Tran had plucked all the seemingly relevant books on Death he could find and wheeled the dusty oak library cart to the door. Midway through the hall the cart’s wheel began to make an irritating squeak. It unnerved the man, and he wished he had a can of oil to grease the wheel.
Once he reached his quarters he filled an old stainless steel teapot with water and set it on the stovetop. He grabbed a small plate and mug from the drainboard and set it next to the stove and pulled a tea bag from a box in the cupboard. Then he turned back to the cart of books, grabbed as many as he could carry, and placed the stack on the ground near his chair. Then he rummaged through a small desk in the far corner and pulled out a highlighter marker and a stack of sticky notes.
Tran prided himself on being a quick study and a fast reader, but staring at the stack of books he suddenly regretted not learning speed-reading. Perhaps he could pick it up now, he wondered. As the thought dissipated the teapot whistled, Gregory Tran clapped his hands together and smiled queerly, quick-stepping to the stovetop.
“Tea-time!” He said excitedly.
With cup in hand he walked over to his chair, eager to become intimate with death.
***
Rachel Lucas sat at an old, yellowed computer terminal, an IBM from an archaic time, or so she thought. Rachel never owned a proper desktop. She preferred the flexibility of a laptop, and while she did bring hers along to the mountain, she forgot the charger. Now it was just an expensive paperweight.
She tapped her foot as she perused the facility’s intranet. Though the machine looked ancient, she had access to tons of archived information with relative ease and speed. There were even entries from the day the world went to hell and a few days after. She wondered how extensive the facility’s intranet was and what other information could be accessed. Would they have bothered restricting anyone’s access in light of the current situation? She doubted it, and once she was done with her tasks for the day she planned to put that to the test.
She typed in DEATH PERSONIFIED into the search field, and an overwhelming 2,300 entries began loading. She tried DEATH ENTITY and the amount of entries quadrupled. She went back to her initial search parameters and began to sort through them. There was a death entity for every religion, and in some there were more than one.
After a few hours Rachel felt beyond overwhelmed. There was just too much information to sift through. She had found that the concept of Death as an entity had been around as long as people had. And Death Deities seemed to have been around just as long. She followed the religions back through time and found Hinduism was the oldest organized religion that was written down. But she found much more that predated that, Egyptian religion, Mesopotamian religion, even Animism. Much of these findings seemed to be muddied by debate about what came first and it all became just too confounding.
She needed to find a way of narrowing down her parameters. She simply needed more information, and what she wanted was to speak to the entity again. But an overwhelming surge of guilt nestled in her throat as she thought of the young soldier who’d given his life for the briefest of moments to look beyond that black curtain of death. She didn’t know if her conscience had room for any more deaths by her assistance.
Rachel began to blink for long stretches of time, giving way to that old familiar nod of the Sandman calling. She tried to fight it off, but exhaustion won out. She decided she would close her eyes for a few minutes at the desk. Just a few minutes, she promised herself. But in a few minutes she was already revisiting the world of the dreaming.
3 THE SUICIDAL SQUAD
(back to top)
First Sergeant John Torrent, seated at the head of an old dusty oak table, had finished assembling his Alpha team and gathered them in one of the smaller conference rooms in the upper levels. To his right was 88M Niko “Mad Max” McKeever with a fresh cup of black coffee in hand. To her side sat Staff Sergeant Dustin “Dusty” Morales, who was part of the CIST (Counter Insurgent Sniper Team) in Iraq with 27 confirmed kills. Signal Officer (SIGO) Grant “Radar” Harburn sat across from them. He’d been in the same platoon in Iraq as Dusty and had run comms for their shop. Specialist (Army Ranger) Terry “Ranger Red” Robyn and Torrent had a long history, starting with Special Ops Mission Restore Hope in Somalia way back in 1992, with a few others, both sanctioned and unsanctioned, since then.
Torrent finished debriefing the team and he did his best to paint the same picture that Pymn had only hours earlier painted for him.
“What if the prison is already overrun with the dead?” Grant asked.
“We’re not tasked with cleaning it out, just locking it down.”
“No offense, Niko, but why is an 88M going to be flying the chopper?” Dusty asked.
“There’s no one I’ve covered more ground with, and covered it safely. Mad Max over here is one of the finest Transport Operators around, whether on the ground or up in the air. She can handle the hawk, and if we have to abandon the bird for whatever reason there’s no one better on the ground.” He could see Dusty was about to cut in, but Torrent held up his finger to have him hold on a moment longer while he finished, “Before the reanimates came along, she’d completed aviation school. Has done all the basic combat training, and has even specialized in the UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter, which is what we’ll be taking.”
This seemed to satisfy Dusty, who then leaned back in his chair and looked at Niko. Niko leaned forward, glaring at Dusty. “Is it my experience or my gender you’re worried about?”
“Neither.”
Torrent looked around at his team, a veritable suicide squad, and then asked, “Any more questions?”
Terry raised his hand, “Just one. When do we leave?”
“We leave in thirty minutes. Which gives you just enough time to take a shit, suit up, and get your asses topside.”
Dusty shook his head and grumbled as he left the room, “I wish. All the garbage we’ve been eating in here leaves me constipated for days.”
Harburn hustled behind him. The kid looked nervous as hell, but Torrent saw no need for concern. Some guys were like that. Some guys had to puke before they went out on a mission. He’d seen all kind of behavior, but the only behavior he cared about was thirty minutes from now. He had an excellent track record. Communications whiz kid. Torrent knew he’d need him at the prison.
Niko stood up and turned to Torrent, “Sir, the Hawk is prepped and I’m good to go. I’ll start ‘er up in twenty.”
“Roger that.”
Terry hung back and waited till Niko had left the room. He leaned against the wall. “John, what the hell are we doing taking a prison? Shouldn’t we be going out there and trying to put these mothers down an
d save some fucking people?”
“This is about saving people. The white coats they sequestered here are trying to figure this thing out and Pymn says they’ve got something solid. Thing is, they need guinea pigs. It’s the greater good, Ter.”
“Guinea pigs don’t sound too good to me.”
“Do you trust me?”
“Of course I trust you, what kind of question is that?”
“I dunno, Terry… You seem on edge. Looking a little rough, too,” Torrent said as he pointed at Terry’s scruffy face.
Terry smiled big and broad, “Well, Sarge, I guess I am looking a little rough. Seems corpses are up and walking about and that’s got me thinking about all the corpses I’ve made. So instead of shaving I’ve been…reflecting. And if this is the end, well…shit, there’s a place in hell for guys like us. And just because I trust you, doesn’t mean I trust Pymn. What’s he been Secretary for? Three weeks?”
Torrent nodded in agreement. Pymn was Deputy Secretary and only acting as Secretary of Defense since they’d lost contact with the proper SecDef.
“You reflect all you like. So long as you can still hit your marks, that is.”
“I don’t have a spotter, but I reckon I’ll manage,” and with that Terry left the room.
Terry’s thoughts had indeed been heavy as of late, but whose had not, he wondered. He couldn’t help but think of the possibility that this was the end of the world devised by the divine hand of God and all the wrath therein implied. A single quote from the bible permeated his thoughts, “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed…”
He wasn’t a religious man, but he’d developed a sort of faith. When you’ve survived too many close calls and coincidence becomes a hard pill to swallow, the idea of the divine sits a little easier on the mind. And surely, Terry thought, if there can be such evil as the living dead, then can’t there also be something of equal and opposite measure?
