Three Zombie Novels

by David Wellington

  I figured it was better to be fast. I ran up to the ghoul as fast as I could in my bulky suit, the knife held high so I could stab it right down into the top of his head. I stopped cold, though, when the dead man spun on one unsteady ankle and turned to face me head on. His eyes were so obscured with white sclera that his pupils were completely hidden. He must have been nearly blind. His jaw hung loose under his skin, unconnected to the rest of his skull. I had never seen a dead man in such lousy shape. Pity welled up inside of me but not before I had brought the knife down, skewering his head. He dropped to the pavement in an ungainly heap.

  We reached the edge of Central Park less than an hour later. We scoped out the devastated landscape—dried mud, lots of it, and plenty of denuded trees which offered some cover. We could see a few of the dead milling around but they were far enough away not to spot us. We hoped. Jack led me into one of the transverses, the streets which run crosstown through the park. We headed down between the stone walls that turned the transverse into an artificial box canyon and soon we were up to our ankles in brown water. When the dead ate the grass and the plants of Central Park they removed the only thing standing between the manicured public gardens and erosion. The first good rain had turned Central Park into a series of arroyos, prone to flash flooding and the weathering effects of white water. Now the transverses were shallow rivers and the old water catch basins of the park—the ponds, the lakes, the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir—were reduced to oily puddles. It’s impossible to walk silently through standing water but luckily we didn’t have far to go. About a hundred and fifty feet into the transverse we came across a pair of tall iron gates set into the retaining wall. Beyond lay darkness—a lot of it.

  Jack took his police lockpick out of his bulging pack. The lock on the gates looked simple enough but it took quite a bit of straining and twisting to get it open. At one point Jack took out a metal file and noisily scraped at the face of the lock. Perhaps it had rusted shut. I was busy keeping an eye out for the dead so I couldn’t tell you. Finally the lock popped open with a clang and we were inside.

  The tunnel beyond the gate had a sandy floor (now submerged under a few inches of water—I could see the sand at my feet, glittering here and there with flecks of mica, the sand erupting in billowing clouds every time I shifted my weight) and a vaulted ceiling of white brick. There were lights up there but they weren’t working. A fine mist of water filled the air of the tunnel, obscuring visibility past about ten feet ahead of us. Our own shadows loomed before us in that mist, floating on vapor. Every movement I made seemed magnified, enlarged beyond all significance. The shadows multiplied as we moved into the darkness, their swirling shapes looming toward me or racing away on the reflections of our lights in the water. There could have been anything in that tunnel—an army of the dead could have been coming straight at us and we would never have known. The close walls and round ceiling of the tunnel seemed to stretch out, threatening at any moment to disappear and drop us into infinite darkness without warning.

  Eventually we came to a room full of turbine equipment—long dormant, thankfully, or we would have been electrocuted. The big round machines lay in a row like eggs or sleeping forms between us and a wrought iron spiral staircase that lead upward into misty darkness. Our rubberized boots didn’t clang so badly on the steps but the water that poured out of the folds of our suits as we ascended made for a sloshing, dripping, noisy climb. At the top of the staircase sat a room made of brick, containing only a few sticks of broken furniture and a stained mattress in one corner. There were windows but they showed nothing but sloppily-joined bricks. There was one door, a big locked steel fire door that was our next destination. Assuming it lead anywhere.

  Gary had built his tower across a big patch of Central Park without, apparently, thinking much about what was in the way. He had torn down many of the park’s buildings for bricks but others—those near the Great Lawn—had simply been incorporated whole into the structure. Belvedere Castle, one of my favorite places in New York City, had become little more than a buttress for one enormous curtain wall. On the uptown side of the tower the southern Reservoir gatehouse had found a similar purpose. It had been built right into the tower, something Jack had seen in the video product we took from the Predator. What Gary didn’t know, we hoped, was that there was a tunnel leading from the south gatehouse to one of the transverses. The tunnel we had just come through.

  It was possible that the door we faced now could have been sealed off during construction. It was also possible that it opened directly into Gary’s personal apartments. Or into a guard room full of violent corpses. There was no way of knowing without trying it.

  This was our plan, then. Ayaan would distract the dead—drawing as many of Gary’s thousands of soldiers to her as she could, holding out as long as she might on top of the Museum of Natural History. Simultaneously Jack and I would break into Gary’s fortress, kill any of the living dead we found inside (including Gary) and get the survivors to a place where Kreutzer could come pick them up in the Chinook. It was the best idea we’d come up with. I was committed to it, ready to give my life for its success. We both were.

  Jack didn’t waste any time. He grabbed the doorknob and turned. The door swung open on well-oiled hinges, revealing a dark brick-lined corridor beyond. None of the dead appeared out of nowhere to attack us. Dry air blew across us, blowing away all but a few tendrils of mist rising from the spiral staircase. He closed the door again—we weren’t quite ready to stage our raid.

  Jack shrugged out of his heavy pack and dropped it to the floor, then helped me do the same. He unzipped my pack and started drawing out long silver cylinders with nozzles on their ends, the kind you would use to store compressed gas.

  I had never seen them before. “What are those?” I whispered, my voice sounding inaudible even to me inside my faceshield.

  Jack looked up, his calm face framed perfectly by the square window of transparent plastic. “There’s been a change of plan,” he said.

  13

  The bodies arched and heaved, backs curling, heads pushed down by feet looking for purchase. A thousand moving corpses strained with their arms and legs, pushing each other upward, the limbs of the ones on the bottom snapping like dry sticks. The one on top, an Asian girl in a pair of blood-stained pink Sanryo overalls, reached up with one hand and touched the coping of the planetarium’s roof. A Somali girl with a bayonet on the end of her rifle lunged forward and impaled the dead girl’s head like a pineapple. When the bayonet retracted the Asian girl rolled down the side of the undead human pyramid to smack the asphalt of Central Park West. A man in an Armani suit with one leg hanging in tatters slumped forward to take her place. One of the Somalis opened up with a .50 caliber machine gun mounted on a tripod and his body erupted in chunks of rotten meat that pelted the bodies below like foul rain.

  The inhuman pyramid wasn’t going to work. Instead Gary turned to his original plan and looked through the eyes of a dead man deep within the ruins of the Natural History Museum. A small squad requiring constant attention had found its way through some of the rubble, climbing clumsily over fallen statuary and through gaps in collapsed piles of shattered brick. Stained with red dust, their eyes drying up in their sockets, three of them had clambered up a length of twisted and broken track lighting to reach the fourth floor. Gary had left them to their own devices for only a minute or two while he tried to assemble the pyramid but in that time two of his dead scouts had managed to walk right off of a balcony and fall back to the story below. One had a pair of broken legs and was useless—Gary snuffed the life out of it on principle. The other didn’t need his attention. She had impaled her own head on an exposed shaft of rebar. The third, still functioning corpse had come up short, unable to proceed. He was standing quite motionless, his arms at his sides, his head moving back and forth. He was trying to process what lay before him, a shadow looming out of the cool darkness of the museum—a skull big enough for him to climb inside wit
h teeth like combat knives and eye sockets bigger than his head.

  It was a Tyrannosaurus Rex skull. The dead man was trying to decide if it was food or an enemy or both. It was neither, of course—there wasn’t even any marrow to suck out of the bone, since the skull was merely a replica made out of polymer resin. Gary snarled and seized direct control of the ghoul’s arms and legs. His soldiers had always been stupid, of course, but they also hadn’t been fed since the day Mael took control of them. As a result they were losing ground against the more insidious kinds of bodily decay. Their eyes were white with corruption, their fingers gnarled and contorted. By forcing the dead man to march at a brisk pace Gary was damaging his vital tissues beyond repair. In a matter of hours this particular vessel of his attention would fall apart completely. Irrelevant, he told himself. He only needed a few more minutes out of this one. According to the museum directory the hall of saurischian dinosaurs butted up against the top level of the planetarium. If there was a way to reach the roof it would be nearby.

  Gloom hunched over the dinosaur exhibit but not total darkness. Gary tried to relax the corpse’s failing eyes and perceive where light was coming in. By trial and error he eventually managed to steer the dead man in the right direction—to a sizeable gap in the wall, a place where bricks had fallen away and plaster had crumbled until sunlight could thrust inside in a whorl of fresh air. Gary shoved his distant body into the hole and pushed. The dead man’s flesh snagged on broken pipes and wooden beams, snagged and tore away but he moved, inch by inch, closer to the outside. Finally his face emerged into the light and for a moment Gary could see nothing but white as his avatar’s degraded pupils tried desperately to constrict. When his vision finally cleared he looked down and saw just what he wanted to see—the roof of the planetarium, not three feet below, tarpaper and ventilation fans and Somali child soldiers. He had a way through! Gary immediately switched his attention to call up hundreds of his troops—no, thousands—and head them toward the Natural History Museum. He intended to exploit this weakness fully.

  Then he dropped back into his scout’s damaged brain again, just to scope out the situation—and found himself staring into the face of a smiling teenaged girl. She had a small spherical green hand grenade in one hand. Gary tried to make the dead man snap at her fingers with his teeth but he couldn’t stop her from pushing her grenade into the dead man’s mouth. He could feel the roundness of it, the uncomfortable weight in his mouth. He could taste the metal.

  He hardly needed to stick around for what came next. The gap in the wall would be useless, then—the girls would be aware of it and could easily cover any troops he tried to send through.

  “Fuck!” he shouted, and turned away from the ramparts of the broch. Back in his own body for the first time since the siege had begun he stamped down the stairs, the mummies following close behind him. He left Noseless on the top level to watch the ongoing battle. In a sort of half-hearted way he continued to pay attention to the struggle to the west where his troops were being picked off one by one but he wasn’t immediately interested in the details. Ayaan wasn’t going anywhere and neither was he. He just needed a little time to regroup, rethink.

  He reached the main floor of the tower and slumped gratefully into his formalin bath. It was getting harder to move around on his own these days—perhaps he was spending so much time in the eididh that his muscles were atrophying. Something to worry about when he had a chance. When this was over and he could—

  PHWHAM. PHHHWHAM. PHHWHAM.

  Brick dust sifted down from the galleries above and sprinkled across his bath like paprika. Gary sat up with a great sloshing and grabbed for information. The west side of the broch was wreathed in smoke that hung motionless in great wreaths in the air. Noseless had fallen to the wooden planking of the top gallery, knocked clean off his feet by the impacts. Gary forced him to stand up again and take a look.

  One of the girls had a rocket-propelled grenade launcher—the same weapon Dekalb had used on the dead riot cops. She was firing directly at the broch, the rocket grenades coming at Gary’s vision like deadly footballs spinning through the intervening air, trailing behind them perfectly straight trails of white vapor.

  PHHHHHHHHHWHAM.

  Gary stewed in rage as he summoned up more of his troops—screw it, all of them!—and hurled them toward the Natural History Museum. He would end this now, any way he had to. If he had to knock down the entire planetarium with the sheer brute strength of a million dead men he would do it. If he had to tear the place down himself he would! He sent his giant striding forward through the undead tide, his long legs propelling him forward faster than the rest of them could walk. He sent Faceless out to be his eyes—she had eaten recently enough that her vision wasn’t clouded by rot. This wasn’t going to stand, goddamnit!

  The army of the dead was surrounding the planetarium in ranks a hundred deep, their shoulders bent to pushing at the frame of the building until they were trampling one another, when Gary heard the gunshot. With his own, physical ears. His attention snapped back to his own senses at once.

  That sound had come from inside the broch.

  14

  Jack got to work by the illumination of a handful of chemical lights. We took off our hazmat suits to make it easier to work and I waited patiently for Jack’s instructions. He unzipped the big pack I had carried into Gary’s fortress and took out a couple foil packets covered in warning stickers and small print type. I peered into the pack myself and had no idea what I was looking at. Other than the metal gas cylinders there were neat stacks of electronic components and bricks of something soft-looking and off-white. I did notice what was missing: guns. There weren’t any firearms in there at all. No pistols, no assault rifles, no shotguns. No rocket launchers or sniper rifles or machine guns.

  No knives, either. The combat knife strapped to my suit’s leg was the only weapon I could find. I unzipped Jack’s pack, thinking maybe he had carried all the armaments because he didn’t trust me not to accidentally shoot off my foot (a fair enough assertion, if that was what he had actually been thinking. It wasn’t). He reached over and stopped my hand. “I’ll unload that one,” he said.

  “Are you ready to tell me what we’re doing?” I asked, cautiously.

  “No,” he said.

  Pure Jack style. Just no, negative, unh-uh. He took the Iridium cell phone out of my pack and laid it on the floor after checking for probably the third time that it was set to vibrate and not to ring. It almost certainly couldn’t get a signal through all those stone walls but he wouldn’t take the chance. “One at a time, and very slowly, start handing me those bricks,” he said, pointing to my pack.

  I took one out. It felt slightly powdery, like a crumbling bar of soap and it came wrapped in a thin sheet of plastic like Saran wrap. I left a depression in the brick where I held it with my thumb but Jack didn’t seem to mind. He stripped off the plastic and then picked up one of the compressed gas cylinders and wrapped the putty-like substance around the cylinder, smoothing it quite carefully. As he worked with it the stuff lost its powdery consistency and became rubbery and malleable.

  I had seen the stuff before. It’s common enough and cheap enough that it regularly shows up in the arsenals of most developing countries. Not to mention terrorist training camps. “That’s semtex, right?”

  Jack glared at me.

  Foolish me, I thought he was angry because I had used the European name for it. “Sorry. C-4. Plastic explosive. You’re going to blow Gary up.”

  “Something like that.” He returned to his work, fashioning a charge around the end of a second cylinder.

  I had to know. I picked up one of the cylinders. It had a faded sticker near the nozzle showing two symbols. One was a triangle containing a broken test tube. Cartoon fumes rose from the point of breakage. The other symbol was a skull and crossbones.

  The foil packets contained two piece atropine auto-injectors. First aid in the event of a chemical weapons spill. “What is i
t in those cylinders, sarin?” I asked, very, very calmly.

  “VX,” he said, with something of a sniff. As if I had offended his professional pride. “It’s got an LD50 of ten milligrams, either inhaled or cutaneous.”

  A lethal dose of one thirty thousandth of an ounce. One little droplet is all it takes. I knew a hell of a lot more about LD50s and cutaneous versus ocular exposure rates than I had ever wanted to. This stuff was my worst nightmare back when I was working as a weapons inspector. It would have been everybody’s worst nightmare if anybody had ever been crazy enough to use it. Even Saddam Hussein, when he tried to wipe out the Kurds, had used less dangerous nerve agents than VX. The British invented it. They traded it to the US in exchange for the plans for the atomic bomb. It was that lethal.

  “The military tried everything they had when the Epidemic broke out,” Jack told me. “There was a rumor they were going to nuke Manhattan but I guess they couldn’t make it happen in time. They did try gassing Spanish Harlem. This is all that’s left of the assets they brought down for that project.”

  “They used nerve gas against the living dead?” I asked, incredulous. I suppose if I was put in the same position I might have grasped at straws, too, but surely that was overkill. “Did it… did it work?”

  “It should have. A dead guy is pretty much just a nervous system that can walk around and VX is a nerve agent. It short-circuits the acetylcholine cycle. It should have worked.”

  Obviously it hadn’t. If anything the military had probably only succeeded at wiping out any survivors holed up in the neighborhood while leaving the undead untouched. The things we do with the best of intentions… I shook my head. “Then you aren’t here to kill Gary at all.”

  Jack reached into his own pack and pulled out a handgun, a Glock 9mm. He didn’t point it at me, didn’t threaten me at all. Very carefully, the barrel pointing at the wall the whole time, he placed it on the floor.