Planet of the Dead

by Flowers, Thomas S.

  You'd think all this partisan bullshit would be put to the side.

  You'd think.

  Where are our leaders? What are we're doing but running around chasing our tails. And Kristy, how did she get so sick so quickly?

  Just a damn scratch, right?

  Shock, maybe?

  No...I've seen shock. This isn't that.

  This is an infection, like with what happened on the prison show, Methodist getting swamped with folks from all over the city.

  Jonny accelerated and pulled into the far-right lane. Up ahead, an Exxon gas station was packed with sedans and trucks and SUVs and motorcycles. Horns blaring. People arguing. Some brawling over who got to the pump first. Inside the little shop, through the large glass windows, the clerk, a dark-skinned Indian man, was yelling as people dashed out with bags of chips and cases of beer.

  Continuing down Fairmount, Jonny turned left onto Space Center Blvd. There were more neighborhoods than stores through here. Vehicles sped by, darting in and out of their driveways and streets. He slowed and came to a stop.

  Karen put down her phone with a sigh. "I can't get a hold of anyone. Half the time the signal doesn't work. Hey--why did we stop?"

  She followed his gaze. Both watching silently, mouths agape at the sight of a man no older than twenty, military age certainly. He wore what remained of a Nike track suit. Over half had been ripped to shreds. Chunks of flesh hung out from his ripped sleeves, gushing blood down his pant leg and soaking his white socks and tennis shoes crimson.

  Jonny rolled down his window. "Hey, do you need help?"

  The bloodied twenty-year-old kept his sauntering pace. Glancing up at Jonny's Jeep, he said, "Don't go down that road," gesturing across the street to an adjacent neighborhood. Jonny turned to see what the guy was talking about. Smoke billowed up over some trees and the front houses. Shouts and screams filled the air.

  Jonny turned back to him. "Okay. I won't. You sure you don't need some help. We could call someone for you. The police, maybe?"

  The twenty-year-old shook his head, still sauntering across the road. "Nope. Nope. No more cops. No more firemen. No more help. Don't go down that way. It's bad."

  He watched the young man for a moment more and then started again down Space Center.

  Karen turned slightly, to look back at the guy. "Shouldn't we do something?"

  "He said no."

  "He didn't say anything."

  Jonny sped up. Flooring the gas through a blinking red-light intersection.

  "Jonny?" Karen protested.

  He gestured with a nod at Kristy laid out in the back seat of the Jeep. "We've got to look out for us. That's what we've got to do."

  Bradshaw & George

  Manchester,

  England.

  "Getting a bit lively over there, don't you think?" A tall lanky man with a thick black mustache that sat below his nose like a big fluffy stray cat clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. He stood by the front shop window. Broom in hand, apron powdered white, his gaze wandered outside. He gave a sort of distracted yawn into his fist and then shook his head.

  "What about it, George?" Bradshaw sat at a small circular table against the far wall. His bobby helmet across from him beside his copy of The Guardian, his yellow safety vest slung over the chair. In his hand, a warm oatmeal baked scone crumbled, bits of cake falling back on to his plate. He hissed and licked his fingers, pinching some of the crumbs and sucking them back into his mouth.

  George turned partially and scoffed. With his attention returned to the pub across the street, he said, "The Beehive, don't tell me you can't hear them. Bit early, don't you think, for such rowdiness?"

  Bradshaw took a sip of his tea, looking at the clock on his phone. "It's after seven, George," he reported, licking his lips, cringing against the taste of bitter spices.

  "Still, you'd think a proper manager would have better control over his customers." With that, George went back to his sweeping, giving no more attention to the loud pub across the street. He paused at Bradshaw's table. "And you'd think a town Constable would have something to say about it."

  Bradshaw smacked his lips, angling in his seat to get a better look out the bakery window. "Everything seems to be in order."

  George rolled his eyes and resumed his work with the broom.

  Bradshaw struggled to suppress a smirk. "Oh, come off it, George. With everything that's been going on, let the kids blow off some steam, yeah?"

  Behind the front counter, George swept the pile of donut and pastry crumbs and dust and lint and broken pieces of napkins into a dust pan and tossed it in the trash bin beside the register. He stood, hands on his hips and stretched out his back. He gazed across his store, out the window, frowning with a sort of contemplative look. "Steam, huh? I'd say there's more than just steam of late. I'm serious, something odd is going on, sweeping across the entire Country. All day on the telly, the news is telling everyone not to panic. Prime Minister saying the same. Well, when they tell you not to panic...that's when you should panic."

  Bradshaw sucked up the last remaining crumbs on his plate and slurped down his overtly tart tea. Dabbing a napkin on his chin, he tried not to recall the day's events, the seemingly endless shift that should have ended hours ago, especially for an officer of his...he'd called it experience, but his grandsons would call it age. Too many officers calling or otherwise out sick, his Captain had told his station Chief and likewise the Chief Constable had told him. He glanced up through the front window. The pub was getting a bit unruly. People were coming out into the streets, intoxicated no doubt by the looks of them, one too many pints of lager. Others running as if the Devil had gotten into them. He grumbled by the thought of having to go over there and ask them to calm it down.

  George popped open the register. Continuing with the rest of his closing routine, he counted out the bills and making notes on a ledger. "You got nothing to say about what's going on?"

  Standing and yawning loudly, Bradshaw turned to face George and shrugged. "What's to say? Full moon, maybe? Seems like there's always something going on and yet the world still ticks on by." He came up to the counter, fishing in his wallet for a couple nickers. "What do I owe you, George?" he asked.

  "I'll put it on your tab," George said, still writing in his ledger.

  "What tab?" Bradshaw scoffed.

  George gestured out the front store window with his wrinkled chin. "So long as you have a talk with them hooligans."

  Bradshaw sized up George, his brow furrowed. "Bribing a Constable of the Law, is it? If you're going to bribe me than you better well start with brewing a better cup of tea, then."

  Both men stared at each other for a moment and then started laughing. Starting off in a bellowing belly roar, the moment quickly passed to a gentle snicker.

  "All right, George," Bradshaw gave in, stuffing his wallet back into his trousers. "I'll go have a word with the owners over at the Beehive, yeah."

  George smiled, his gaze quickly snatched to the front store window.

  Noticing the baker's sudden distraction, Bradshaw turned partially around. "What now, G--?" he stopped, his voice trailing off at the sight of a woman shuffling towards the glass door.

  "What in God's green earth?" George whispered, his grey eyes wide, hand still poised with pen over his ledger.

  Both men gawked out through the glass as the woman approached. She looked drunk at first, or worse, involved with a hit and run as Bradshaw assumed. Parts of her dress were shredded, revealing bits of white undergarment. She had on one shoe, the other foot dragged behind her in a jittery limp. Where flesh showed through the fabric, the skin was bruised blue and purple with scrapes running downward in long streaks, oozing and dribbling a yellowish red puss onto the pavement. Half her face and hair looked burned away in a gritty, gnarled- looking rash. She reached out for the door with a strange vacant glare in her red-jaundiced eyes.

  "Dear God," Bradshaw muttered. Remembering his radio, he'd shut off
during his break, he reached down and switched it back on. Traffic erupted through the small speaker, squawking loudly with multiple reports of various incidents, most of which sounded like garble to him.

  Keeping his eyes on the mortally wounded yet still walking woman as she reached the glass and began pounding lazily, he pressed down on the receiver. "Dispatch, this is Unit 217, Westchester, do you copy?"

  The radio squealed.

  At the start of his shift and throughout the day, things had been busier than usual. Calls of missing family members, friends, elderly neighbors. Assisting paramedics on emergency dispatches throughout the city. And more notably, he thought, the number of abandoned cars and abandoned cell phones and other gadgets and clothing items, women's purses and men's messenger bags, all the things we carry with us to haul all our stuff, tossed to the side, not in waste bins or trashcans, but on the road or sidewalk or in shops and stores and bus stops, as if for some unknown reason, none of it mattered anymore and they were simply discarded.

  "Dispatch, this is Unit 217, Westchester. I have a wounded woman here, are paramedics available, over?" He pressed down on the receiver again, unable to quench the unsteady shake in his hands. "Dispatch, do you copy?"

  Still nothing, only the constant flood of panic through the tiny speaker.

  "Dispatch!"

  Finally, a voice broke through the gargle. "Post abandoned. I repeat, Unit 217, this is Westchester station, post abandoned."

  Bradshaw glared into his radio. "What does he mean, post abandoned?"

  Another shambling soul joined the wounded woman in front of the bakery, a man, no older than twenty-something, staring with that same vacant look. He wore a tank shirt and tan shorts, revealing defined biceps and tris, pitted with what looked to Bradshaw like teeth marks, swollen and irritated and bruised, that same yellowish red pus leaking down from the wounds. He stood beside the woman, but they didn't seem to register each other, pounding lazily with an expression of confusion, as if he didn't understand why he couldn't walk through the glass.

  And another.

  And another.

  And another joined in the growing mob of vacant staring eyes, most with wounds and injuries no living person ought to walk away with. And yet, they were walking, weren't they? Shuffling and slow and bizarrely disconnected. Those in front beat on the window and door, leaving streaks of grime and blood on the glass.

  "Closed," George shouted. "We're closed, go somewhere bloody else." His voice cracked and trembled. His hands just as worse, clutching the pen still poised over his ledger.

  Bradshaw pushed down on his radio again, "Dispatch, this is Unit 217, Westchester. We have a situation, over."

  And still nothing more than the same buzzing, screaming static and grabble as before. Whoever had answered before was gone.

  "Dispatch, we have a riot on Old Route 22 and Armonk Bedford. Do you copy? I repeat, there is a riot in progress on--"

  "Oh, give it a rest, Duncan. I don't think anyone is going to answer." George set his pen down, closing the register. He pulled off his powdered apron and tossed it on the floor. Running his fingers through his thinning, balding brown-grey hair, he took a breath and asked, "I don't suppose you have a service pistol?"

  Bradshaw looked at the radio in his hand and back to the shuffling vacant wounded mob. Someone was screaming outside, hidden by the flocking crowd. Tires screeched and horns honked. Chaos, total, absolute, chaos. He gaped out at them, the growing herd. Listening to their moans muffled by the glass. He watched as cracks along the window started to bloom, unaware of anything else except for what was in front of him. He'd seen something similar today, hadn't he? On a call escorting a paramedic. An elderly man, not much older than he was, who by all accounts looked as if he were dead suddenly sprung back to life. Sort of. He was thrashing and snipping at the air. Violent as if he was on something, some narcotic. Stumped, the paramedics strapped him to a gurney and hauled the old man to the nearest ward.

  The old man hadn't been dead, right?

  He couldn't have been.

  He'd passed out, heart attack the medics said.

  No way that bugger keeled over then.

  He must have passed out.

  Right.

  Right?

  "Constable Bradshaw?"

  "Huh?"

  "Do you have a service pistol?"

  Bradshaw licked his lips, feeling the cracks and tasting putty in his mouth. "No," he said, "I've never gone through the certification. Suppose to later in the year, the Chief Constable wants everyone certified, even old hounds like me."

  George pursed his lips, making his fat thick mustache twitch. "Well then--" he turned and disappeared through the kitchen door. A moment or two later he returned carrying two rectangular sticks with handles threaded in white tape. He handed one to Bradshaw. "Here, take one of these. There's more of...these unruly lot out back."

  Bradshaw gazed at him, blinking slowly. "There's no other way out of here?"

  "Afraid not."

  Looking over the thick, rectangle stick, he noted the drawn lions. "England Lions?"

  George smiled, if nervously. "Westchester."

  Bradshaw returned the same nervous expression. "I didn't take you as a cricket fan."

  Eyeing the window and the mob of bloodied jaundiced- eyed horde glaring through the blooming, expanding cracks of glass in the window, George said, "Since I was a lad. My paw took me to Regents park to play. You?"

  Bradshaw swallowed hard, flitching as pieces of glass began to splinter and fall to the floor. "More of a football fan, personally. I take my grandsons to the club whenever I get a chance."

  "Football, huh?"

  "West Ham."

  "Londoner, bloody right."

  "You?"

  "I've always kinda fancied Chelsea."

  Gripping harder on the cricket bat, Bradshaw widened his stance. "Chelsea? Ugh, what rubbish."

  George mimicked Bradshaw's stance, holding up his bat, readied to swing. "Better than those pansy Hams."

  "Are you trying to get a rise out of me, George."

  "Can't blame an old man for trying, Constable."

  "God save the Queen, eh George?"

  "God save the Queen, Constable Bradshaw."

  More of the vacant- eyed walkers joined with the rest, pushing harder into the others, moaning, drooling, forcing the front of the crowd farther against the glass until it finally gave. The large shop window ballooned inward and then finally gave and birthed, ushering a dozen or more of the dead-eyed mob onto the bakery floor, scrabbling to find their footing but failing as a dozen more fell in over them.

  "George."

  "Yes, Constable?"

  "Just wanted you to know, you have the best biscuits in Westchester. But your tea...your tea is for shit. You really ought to switch to a different brand."

  "Don't I know it."

  More and more of those awful yellow- eyed looters shambled inside, pouring and pushing over the ones that came before and fell into the shop. Bradshaw gave a dozen warnings that had no effect on the horde. They kept coming no matter what he said. He swung his cricket bat. The large rectangular wood connected with a man no older than forty-something wearing a business suit that looked mostly unmolested, if not for the torn collar and gaping chunk of flesh missing from his throat, exposing in part the gentleman's tissue, blue veins, and ivory windpipe. The bat struck him in the shoulder, and tottered him, but did not extinguish his pursuit. He swung again, yelling now, and collided with the man's skull. There was a loud smack, a mushy kind of sound, and then the suit fell to his knees and finally toppled to the floor.

  Beside him, George swung wildly, trying to hold back the crowd.

  "The head, George. Knock'em in the head," Bradshaw shouted to him, taking another swing at a woman wearing designer jeans and a tank. His cricket bat thudded her forehead as she slumped and fell away. George must have heard him; from his peripheral Bradshaw could see the baker taking aim and hammering down on some l
arge portly fellow dressed all in black with black eye liner and chains and some sort of t-shirt with the word, Carcass, written across the front.

  Feeling his lungs burn, Bradshaw took aim at another woman with long dark hair, swollen botoxed lips, heavy makeup, and a festering open wound down her chest to her upper abs. One breast hung out untouched and unnaturally large, the other was simply and horrifyingly gone. Bits of flesh clung to her flapping loose skin as she walked, shredded almost, as if someone had consumed her entire tit. Breathing heavy, he swung and crushed her perfectly crafted nose back into her skull. She wobbled and he swung again, this time cracking her on the top of her head. Blood sprayed and misted the shambling man behind her who came at the Constable with both arms reaching out, teeth bared and readied.

  Using the bat as a spear, Bradshaw shoved the end into the bloodied man's chin, knocking his head back. He fell and was pushed aside by another hungry rioter.

  Nearby, George kicked away an older woman in a flower print dress, swinging again widely, but this time aiming for their heads. Mirroring the Constable, he swung and batted and speared and kicked and pushed as many of the shuffling hooligans as he could, but the horde kept coming. And eventually exhaustion took him. The baker swung at a teenager and missed. His momentum teetering him off balance. He was quickly knocked down to the floor.

  "George!" Bradshaw yelled. He held off some posh looking fellow dressed to impress, reddish yellow eyed and reeking of the grave. He held the man and watched as his friend was surrounded, dozens of the mortally wounded mob reaching down and holding him and pushing and piercing his skin with their fingers, ripping and pulling apart flesh and blood and tissue. George gave a final high-pitched yelp as the horde opened his stomach and consumed his insides on the spot, dripping dark crimson noodled gore on the floor where he had moments before swept and cleaned crumbs of his locally famous scones.

  "GEORGE!" Enraged, Bradshaw knocked the posh man away and swung, the first strike splitting another man's forehead. Another swing thudded against a short fat woman in a red blouse. Another flattened the head of an older man in black pants and a black coat and a black button up and a white collar clamped around his throat. And another and another until his swings fell flat, hardly even nudging the crowd away. His radio squawked, picking up another signal in another city, something about a fire on London Bridge, and then the mob fell on him, pushing him to the floor. He shoved another away, but his arms burned with exhaustion. Grimy hands clawed and pinched his face. Dozens of them, fingers finding places to take hold. Two pressed hard into his eye sockets, blinding him.