Monster Nation: A Zombie Novel

by David Wellington

  Clark shook his head. “I’ll tell you all about it en route. I’m running out to California tonight and you can come with me if you don’t mind the jet lag. It’s a virus, we think. The symptoms are ataxia, aphasia, and severe dementia. Aggressive behaviors including cannibalism.” Vikram gasped and Clark nodded in agreement. “It’s also got an incubation period of just a few minutes. Yes, it’s bad.”

  “I have never heard of such a thing happening in nature. That kind of effect should take months to manifest. God simply does not create something so virulent unless… you think it has been weaponized.”

  Bannerman Clark knew he could count on his friend’s razor intellect. He nodded discretely, because he didn’t want to say it out loud yet. He’d come to the same conclusion. A pathogen that could destroy a man’s mind and turn him against his friends and co-workers with homicidal intent in a span of minutes would be the ultimate terrorist weapon.

  “We’ve got a lid on this place and it’s tight enough for now,” Clark said, pointing out the double-layer cyclone fence the 8th CST had erected around the entire prison compound, in addition to the prison’s own fences. “I’ve got digital topographic imaging and satellite support so vigilant I can see every acorn hidden by every squirrel in a twenty mile radius. I’ve got air and ground troops watching every corner of this site.”

  “Then why, my friend, do you look so frightened?” Vikram asked quietly.

  Clark kicked the dirt in frustration. Not a terribly efficient way to get out his anger but he was running on twenty-four hours without food and it was starting to get to him. “Because the warden of this prison may very well have been carrying the virus when he took off on vacation three days ago. All of this,” Clark said, gesturing around at the fences, the helicopters, the mobile labs, “might just be my way of locking the barn door when the horse has already run away.”

  Where is your family’s Emergency Meet-Up Point? Where is your personal Go Bag, at work, at school, in the car? How many days worth of water do you have in the house right now? [Emergency Preparedness Update #7, published by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), 1/05]

  The kerosene lamp whoofed into life and threw some yellow around the bare plank walls of Bleu’s root cellar. Dick could still see moonlight coming through the slats and he wondered how long it would take one of the homicidal climbers to break in. Bleu didn’t seem particularly scared. Just anxious to get the job over with. “What happened to them?” Dick asked. “What makes people act like that?”

  “I was going to ask you the same thing. It has to be some kind of government germ warfare thing gone wrong, doesn’t it?” Bleu lifted the lantern and clomped down a narrow flight of stairs cut into the earth. They came into a low space with bowed walls and Bleu hung the lantern on a four-by-four that held up the ceiling like a toothpick holding open the mouth of a predatory cat in a cartoon. Stacks of cardboard boxes and bags full of potatoes and radishes filled most of the space. At the far end from the stairs sat a door wrapped in black plastic of the kind contractors use. Bleu went to the door and stopped. “I reckoned if anybody would know about that it would be you. Hell, kid, that’s what I called you down here for.”

  Dick’s eyes went wide. “Me? I’m just a low-level bureaucrat. A livestock inspector! I don’t know anything about biowarfare.” He thought about it a second. He was with the government, which must be all that mattered to Bleu. “Look, I’m on your side, you know,” he said, trying to remember what hippies stood for. Flower power, sure, and they didn’t like the Vietnam War. “Um, peace and love, right? Love is all you need.”

  Bleu opened the waterproof door and light spilled over its contents. Five racked hunting rifles, most of them .22 caliber rimfire weapons but also a good old-fashioned thirty-ought-six. Even more insane: one was a heavy-duty big game rifle, a centerfire, bolt-action Weatherby Mark V Safari Custom, something Dick had only ever seen in gun magazines. An elephant gun, to be blunt about it, though most likely the Skye family had planned on using it against bears when they bought it.

  Below the rack of rifles hung three shotguns in various gauges and below that pistols and revolvers, high-powered enough to cut a man and half. At the bottom of the closet sat box after box of ammunition, cleaning supplies for the weapons, and sheaves of paper targets, some of them used. On the back of the door someone had taped up one target showing a human silhouette with the bullseye where the man’s heart would be. Dick saw an almost perfect grouping, six narrow holes right in the center. In the white space of the target someone had written NICE SHOOTING STORMY and OCTOBER 17 2002, STORMY’S BIG DAY.

  Dick couldn’t help but stare. He was looking at an arsenal, a survivalist’s wet dream, enough guns to hold off an invasion of ATF and FBI agents for a week. He had thought he had been sent back through a time warp to Woodstock. Instead he’d wandered into Ruby Ridge.

  Chapter Eleven

  AUTHOR'S NOTE: Getting about as far as possible away from the undead, I just wanted to mention that the good folks over at Penny Arcade are starting up this year's "Child's Play" charity drive now, at http://www.childsplaycharity.org/ They collect video games, console systems, and assorted stuff and deliver it in time for Christmas to kids in hospitals around the country. You can donate games, systems, or just cash if you want to. If you're going to buy ten dozen Christmas gifts this year anyway, why not add one more thing to your list? Okay, enough preaching. Let's get back to the dead people.

  --David Wellington

  What the Government Doesn’t Want You to Know: RATE OF CATTLE MUTILATIONS SPIKES! [“UFO Insider” magazine, February 2005]

  Nilla was standing in the hospital’s cafeteria, devouring sliced beets out of a tin can she’d found sitting open on a counter when she heard a violent squawking noise coming from outside. She swallowed and went to the window. It was dark outside but blue and red light kept flashing across the slats of the Venetian blinds. With her clumsy hands she pushed open two of the slats and looked out.

  Oh, God, no, she thought.

  FEMA MOVES HEAVY EQUIPMENT THROUGH ILLINOIS AT 3 AM: What are they preparing for? [ctrl.org, 3/20/05]

  “There are SWAT teams ready to storm the building. You still have a chance to come out of this in good shape if you’re willing to release some hostages.” The words blasted against the brick face of the hospital and rebounded off into space. No answer was forthcoming. The sheriff’s deputy switched off his bullhorn and turned to shake hands with Clark and Vikram. He was a big man, clearly a weightlifter in his off hours. He had a blonde crew cut and dark deep-set eyes. “You’re from the Army, huh? I didn’t know we rated that kind of attention.” The deputy looked dazed. He was out of his element here—his town had always been a quiet place, one of a thousand Californian hamlets between San Francisco and Los Angeles where nothing ever happened. Now he was overseeing an actual hostage crisis. A complete breakdown of the social pecking order.

  “We’re just here as advisors,” Vikram soothed, giving his biggest smile. He asked about the boy’s tattoos. The deputy seemed grateful for the diversion but was too riled up to give more than one word answers.

  Clark wasn’t particularly frosty himself. He very, very much wanted this to be a wasted trip. He wanted to go back to Colorado safe in the knowledge that the thing, the bug, the virus or whatever it might be was wholly contained in Florence.

  He forced himself to relax by grabbing his keys in his pants pocket until the jagged edges bit into the ball of his thumb. The discomfort helped him focus. He studied the layout of the denied perimeter the sheriff’s office had created. The hospital was a three story building studded with windows. On the side that faced the street it had only a single entrance, a wide lobby of automatic doors leading into the emergency room. Blue and red light flashed across the glass: the deputies had formed a wedge with their patrol cars, a covered forward position for the negotiation phase.

  Beyond the doors darkness filled the building like a fluid. Clark saw occasional flashes of
motion in there but he could never make out any details. Just inside the emergency room, illuminated only by the police lights, he could see what looked like a leg—the wrinkled sole of a foot, the bumpy shape of an ankle—as if someone had collapsed in the shadows. “There,” Clark said, pointing it out. “Do you see that? It looks like a man down. Can you get someone in there to retrieve casualties?”

  The deputy glared at Clark but then he looked away and lifted his radio handset to his mouth. He uttered a few quick strings of police code numbers and after a moment three SWAT troopers in full armor emerged from a truck behind them. Two of them took up station in short range of the entrance while the third conspicuously put his weapon down on the ground and advanced. He kept his hands in plain view as he ducked under a flapping cordon of caution tape and advanced on the doors. No weapons fire or any other indication of resistance came from the hospital so the trooper moved in closer and then slipped quickly and silently through the glass doors.

  Clark couldn’t see him after that. “This is SWAT Two, 10-97,” he heard crackling over the deputy’s radio. “11-44.” Clark knew that code—it meant “possible fatality.” “Oh, man,” the trooper said, his breath heavy as it roared out of the radio. “Oh, man, it’s just a leg, it’s been torn off…”

  “Is there anyone else in there?” the deputy asked. “Anybody alive?” He looked like he might be sick.

  “10-6, 10-6,” the trooper insisted, asking them to stand by. “I see six, maybe more males—it’s very dark, they’re approaching my position.”

  Clark stiffened. He squeezed his keys until the pain made him wince. “Get your man out of there now,” he demanded.

  The deputy waved at him is dismissal. “SWAT Two, are they armed?”

  “SWAT Two here, negative… 10-6, okay, okay, one of them tried to grab me…”

  The radio crackled with silence. Vikram put a hand on Clark’s shoulder and he realized he’d been about to jump up and run inside. He let out a deep breath and then sucked in a new one when the door of the hospital slammed open.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuuucckkk!” SWAT Two screamed as he came barreling out, the severed human leg clutched in one hand. The trooper dashed to cover as the doors slid open again and three badly wounded men came staggering out.

  Blood covered one’s face. Another wore no shirt and Clark could see he’d been disemboweled. The third’s left arm dangled at his side, the skin flayed off down to the elbow. They made no sound at all as they limped toward the fleeing SWAT trooper. They didn’t even look up when the deputy demanded that they halt.

  A firearm went off very close to Clark’s head and he instinctively ducked. When he looked again the three injured men were spinning in place, the dark craters of bullet wounds tearing open their flesh. “Hold your fire!” Clark shouted but the deputy bellowed over him, demanding that the SWAT team fire at will. “What are you doing?” Clark demanded. “Those men are unarmed! They need medical attention!”

  The deputy set his mouth in a hard line. He studied Clark’s face for a moment, then turned away to spit on the ground. “I have had just about enough of this shit,” he said. “I don’t care if they’ve got rabies or ebola or what the fuck ever—six of my men are in that hospital right now and who knows how many civilians and I know just one thing. This. Ends. Here.” He pointed at the ground to emphasize his point.

  Clark shook his head sadly. This was where it would truly begin.

  In the red and blue light the three men jittered and danced as the SWAT team, their eyes vacant as they tried to walk forward through the hail of gunfire. Clark knew that look. It was the same one he’d seen at ADX-Florence.

  Chapter Twelve

  “He was just leaning against the … standing there, he looked kind of confused and every once in a while he would knock on the door. With his fists, you know, maybe he was trying to break it open but… he wasn’t my husband, not anymore… I didn’t know what to do!” [Caller on the “Buzz Linklee Show”, 1290 AM KKAR, Omaha, 3/19/05]

  On the snowy roof of the Skye house Dick sipped at his coffee and tried the police again on his cell phone. When that didn’t work he tried his office, and finally his sister in Montana. No signal, not even a bar. It had been that way since the first time he’d tried but he couldn’t seem to just put the phone away.

  “Remember,” Bleu said. “You have to go for the head. The brain, sure. Otherwise they don’t so much as feel it.”

  They had some moonlight, which was good, and plenty of guns, also good, and they were up on the roof and had pulled the ladder up behind them which was the best idea ever as far as Dick was concerned. It was also freezing cold and they couldn’t go down until all of the climbers were dispatched. Bleu had a leg of mutton on a string that she dangled over the edge of the roof. Fishing for dead people.

  The thought made Dick laugh and he wiped at his face as he chuckled, rubbing away the paste of dried saliva there. His mouth had dried out like a piece of jerky. “Gnugh,” he moaned as he scratched at his leathery tongue. She stared at him and he realized he was being inappropriate. “Sorry,” he mumbled.

  He wasn’t doing so well with the fear.

  “Don’t be sorry. Be ready.” It sounded like something she might have told her son. Her dead son. Her dead survivalist son—well, he hadn’t survived the walking dead, had he? Dick wanted to giggle again.

  “When I say ‘be ready’, that means you should check your weapon there, sport.” Bleu clomped over to the other side of the roof. Her hobnail boots had cracked some of the shingles and Dick was afraid to follow her over there. Instead he worked the action of the Weatherby rifle and checked that there was a round in there. Of course there was. He’d put it in himself under her supervision. He was the shooter because his eyes were better but she knew all about guns and she didn’t really need him. He could just leave. His car was waiting for him just over the ridge. He just had to get past two or maybe three ghouls.

  “There! Come on already, get your shot lined up!” Bleu was pointing out into the sighing pines, one boot stamping repeatedly on the shingles. Dick tried to bring the rifle up to his face and nearly dropped it in the process.

  Okay, okay, he told himself, calm down. Just calm the fuck down.

  “Do you see him? She’s leaning on that tree. It’s a perfect shot.”

  Dick nodded—he did see something kind of human-shaped—and brought the scope to his eye. Let his night vision adjust until the image cleared. Yes. A human figure, dark against the snow. The climber in question had been a woman once, judging by the shape of her hips. Now she looked like a rotting pumpkin perched on top of a sportswear mannequin. The scientist in Dick rose to the top, trying to understand what he saw and it made sense, sure. Being frozen all winter hadn’t preserved the climbers as much as liquefied them: when ice crystals formed in their muscle cells the sharp apices of the crystals had shredded the cell membranes, turning the climbers flaccid and gooey. He remembered the one he’d fought with. Putrefaction hadn’t weakened them at all.

  Immaterial. The only thing that mattered was the shot. He tried to remember his time in the Boy Scouts. He had passed the requirements for the marksmanship merit badge. Seat the rifle, line up the shot, adjust for windage—

  “Take the shot al-fucking-ready!” Bleu howled.

  Dick fired spasmodically.

  The magnum round hit the tree a few inches above the climber’s head. The wood exploded, showering the dead woman with pulpy fragments and splinters of bark. Bleu didn’t credit the climbers with too much mental wattage but it looked like they understood what it meant when the tree you were leaning on exploded. Without looking back the climber slumped off into the darkness.

  It had taken them three hours to pick one shot and he missed. Dick wiped at his mouth again. He didn’t feel so good.

  New Flux Generating Step Identified in the Metabolic Pathways of Human Prion Protein (PrPsc) [New England Journal of Medicine, 11/6/04]

  Nilla watched the three men get cut do
wn by the SWAT team through the Venetian blinds in the cafeteria. Her blood wasn’t circulating in her veins anymore but it went cold anyway. They weren’t asking questions down there. They weren’t trying to help people. The police were just slaughtering anyone who came out.

  Maybe not just anyone. Maybe live people got a pass. Nilla was undead and she knew she would be on the short list for the firing squad. She had to get out—she had to escape the hospital somehow.

  She tried to run but her legs cramped up instantly when she started to sprint. In pain she hobbled past a room full of nurses and orderlies bent over a bed. She didn’t look too closely—she could hear what they were doing.

  Out in the hallway she saw heart rate monitors and pulse oxygen readers mounted on IV poles, she saw bad art on the walls, pictures of kittens and houses in New England and, ugh, a streak of blood pointing towards the stairs. She leaned up against a wall, her leg muscles screaming at the workout she was giving them, and sank to the floor below a line of windows that let cold black night air belly in.

  “This is the police! We’re coming in! Everyone needs to be on the floor, now, with your hands in plain view!” someone shouted outside, his angry voice electronically amplified. He made it sound as if they would shoot anyone they found inside the hospital. Fear made Nilla’s hands shake so much she shoved them in the pockets of her stolen coat.

  She got up and followed the blood trail only to find a dead guy in a jumpsuit blocking the doorway, motionless, his head tilted back a little. As if he was expecting to receive transmissions from space.

  “Move!” she said, trying to shove at him. He had a foot on her and maybe fifty pounds. He wouldn’t budge. Slowly, excruciatingly slowly his jaw began to drift down and his eyes started to focus on her.