Three Zombie Novels

by David Wellington

  The pilot answered on the helmet circuit. “Negative, sir. These little farm places, they’re full of illegals. Probably more afraid of la Migra than they are of the infected. Do you want me to initiate a search pattern of maneuvers and look for survivors, sir?”

  “Yes,” Bannerman Clark said, his fingers working nervously at the cap in his hands. He found a loose thread and started to pull. “Yes, I do.”

  “You’ve got dead—or infected, or whatever—people wandering into streams and reservoirs and rotting there. You’ve got healthy people being shuttled around like livestock to camps where they don’t even have basic health services. We’ve got sanitation breaking down all over the west and with that comes cholera, with that comes typhoid, and giardia on a scale you can’t imagine. In Arizona, in New Mexico dirty water is going to kill us faster than these cannibals.” [The Surgeon General in a briefing for NIH Field Agents, 4/2/05]

  Dick did not know why he’d been brought to this zone of naked blood-red rock. The sun was intense. It dried him, leached the moisture out of his most hidden orifices. He chafed and blistered and the skin of his thighs wore away in red patches but he didn’t stop. The dead don’t stop for pain.

  The voice in his head that was no voice knew what needed to be done. Dick did not question his instructions. He marched with his two-step gait—bare foot, then the boot, bare foot, then the boot—and devoured the miles beneath him.

  Dick lacked any kind of sense of time. He could not have determined how many hours or how many days passed when he finally came to the edge of a cliff and looked down on white, foaming water. His dry body cried out for the smooth kiss of that moisture and the thing that steered him agreed. Dick toppled forward and fell, an ungainly diver, into the hissing silver of the river, heedless of rocks, uncaring of his clothes. He surrendered himself to the current and for a while he drifted along the bottom, his toes brushing the stony riverbed, his eyes closed. When he opened them again he had washed up on the far bank and water poured from his wet clothing, rolling back down into the stream.

  He did not know how many times he had done this before, or how many bodies of water he was yet to visit. Someone else, some other force kept track of those things.

  Time to move on to the next errand. Dick pushed his face into a crack in the rock and dug out some ants with his tongue. Just enough to give him strength. Then he headed forward, once again into the excoriating sunlight.

  STAY TOGETHER! Know your group number by heart! [Signage posted at Evacuation Centers in Los Angeles, CA, 4/2/05]

  Nilla couldn’t help herself. She knocked on the door of the little apartment behind the motel’s registration desk. No one answered, of course. She stepped inside into a faint smell of mildew and a lot of dust that jumped up out of her way everywhere she moved.

  She found a dresser in the cramped bedroom and touched the smooth wood of its drawers for a moment before opening them. It wasn’t so much that she felt bad about stealing another person’s clothes, though there was that. It was more the lack of familiarity. She couldn’t remember her own dresser, if she had one. She couldn’t remember her own bed, the smell of the sheets, whether they were starchy or silky or even what color they were. It felt less like she was intruding on someone else’s domain than as if she were inventing each gesture—this might have been the first time she ever opened a drawer, the first time she ever pulled on a pair of simple cotton underwear. Things she must have done thousands, tens of thousands of times before in her living life.

  Every single thing was new. Maybe that was a good thing. Maybe her life had been tragic and horrible. Maybe even that didn’t matter. Maybe getting a second chance, one where you didn’t have to be aware of the old life you’d lost—maybe that was something valuable and good by itself.

  The clothes in the dresser were men’s clothes. Maybe the man on the tree, the one who blew out his own brains with a shotgun—

  The airy light coming in through the apartment’s windows wouldn’t let her dwell on thoughts like that. The little apartment was too cozy, the day too bright. She brushed the image right out of her head. It wasn’t hard. She felt good, amazingly good. Maybe not as exultant as she’d felt in the middle of the night with her hands steeped in the blood of the bear. But good.

  She zipped up a pair of low-riding jeans around her hips and buttoned down a soft white cotton shirt, rolling up the sleeves because they were too long. She caught her reflection in a mirror hung behind the door and had to stop a while and just take it all in. Her skin was clear. Pale, still, but her eyes were big and warm and bright. No dark circles, no bags, not even crow’s feet. Her hair looked like it had just been styled. She pulled up the shirt to check her abdomen, standing on tiptoe to see it in the mirror—a man’s mirror, it only showed her from the neck up—and saw there was no discoloration there anymore. Even the wound on her belly had settled down to a few thin lines of scar tissue that looked old and well-healed where they bisected her tattoo. The only real injury she retained was the one that started it all—the circle of tooth marks on her neck and shoulder where she’d been bitten to death. They were red and fresh but there was no inflammation around them. The wound didn’t look infected at all.

  “How about that,” she breathed, a smile folding her lips. Pinkish lips, not blue. She laughed out loud, just a single ha but it was natural, spontaneous.

  She looked great. She sniffed her armpits—nothing.

  She was still admiring herself in the mirror when she heard a door slam nearby and someone come clattering out onto the motel’s breezeway. Charles and Shar.

  Now what was she going to do about them?

  It is imperative, especially now, that facilities for worship and religious observance are made available for the use of relocated persons. In the interest of saving space a standard multi-faith chapel may be erected, as long as it follows military guidelines on diversity and tolerance. [FEMA Supplementary Notice No. 74: Relocation Camps: Facilities, issued 4/2/05]

  From the Bakersfield checkpoint cars were standing three miles back, most of them with their motors switched off. The marines from Twenty-Nine Palms were Iraq War veterans and they knew how to perform a vehicular search quickly and efficiently. They also knew the danger of letting anything at all slip by uninspected.

  “Sir, with all due respect.” First Lieutenant Armitrading, United States Marine Corps bit off what he was about to say. He gestured at the soldiers arrayed around the checkpoint. They wore the new ACUs with digital camoflauge, something the Marines had invented and the other service branches were starting to adopt. The grey and black uniforms looked pixilated up close as if the marines were characters from some violent video game. “I get five thousand thumb-suckers a day through here, headed for the camps at California City. Most of them are blonde.”

  Bannerman Clark watched, only mildly indignant on her behalf, as a fifty-nine year old woman was subjected to a DNA swab from the inside of her cheek by a nineteen year old girl in pigtails, freckles, and Interceptor body armor complete with CAPPE plates. The woman’s four children, the oldest the same age as the marine, stared through the windows of their stopped car as if they never expected to go anywhere again, as if they assumed they were going to set up housekeeping right there at the roadblock. The test the marine performed was the creation of Desiree Sanchez, Clark’s main medical investigator in Florence. She claimed it was foolproof. A few epithelial cells taken from the cheek could be examined under a microscope. If they looked vital and healthy the person was not infected. Easy.

  “You heard me about the tattoo, correct? This is important. I need you to start looking for her—she could be the answer to this thing.” This was the place, it had to be. She was heading east, toward Nevada. Clearly she wanted to get out of California. From Lost Hills Route 15 was the easiest way to do that. If she went too far north or south she would be trapped—every road around Los Angeles and San Francisco was locked down and she would be picked up in minutes. 15 was the only way out. There
were smaller roads, more circuitous paths but they all lead right through hell on earth. She’d be a fool to go that way and infected or not she had some intelligence left.

  Down the line someone honked his horn three times in rapid succession. A marine dashed across the heat-smeared blacktop and smacked the hood of the offending car with the butt of his SAW. The honking stopped but the driver and the soldier had more than a few words to exchange.

  “Sir, I will reiterate my respect for your rank,” Armitrading sneered. “However this is not a joint operation, sir. You are far from your jurisdiction right now, sir. I promise I’ll keep my eyes open for her. Now, if you don’t mind?” The First Lieutenant turned and dashed off, his M4 held at low ready, barrel pointed at the ground, finger on the trigger guard.

  Up the line a car door opened—the sun flashed off of it like a warning beacon. A twenty-odd year-old man holding a little girl in his arms got out and just walked away, leaving his car chiming plaintively behind him. Clark wondered where he thought he was going to go.

  Others in the line must not have shared Clark’s insecurity. A family of four followed the young man out into the shoulder on foot. A trio of college age boys in sweatshirts came next. Soon a small crowd had gathered at the checkpoint, their cars forgotten, intent on crossing on foot.

  The marines were there before them, falling into perfect formation. A single line of men and women, weapons in plain sight but not pointing anywhere in particular. There was a lot of screaming and gesturing going on but none of it came from the soldiers.

  What were these people fleeing from, Clark wondered, that would make them face off with marines armed with automatic weapons? He pondered going inward, to Los Angeles, to see what was becoming of California. He was stopped from actually planning such a move by Vikram who came running over from the helicopter waving his arms in distress.

  “Bannerman!” he shouted. “Come quickly!”

  LOOTERS WILL BE SHOT ON SIGHT! [Signage posted in Los Angeles, CA, 4/3/05]

  Nilla was sitting in the backseat when Charles and Shar arrived at the car. When they saw her they stopped and didn’t open the doors. They stood there very close to each other for a while and then Charles climbed in.

  “Damn, woman, you clean up nice,” Charles said, looking at her over the back of his seat. His eyes searched her face, looking for something. He didn’t find it.

  Shar stood perfectly motionless outside the passenger-side doors. Nilla couldn’t see her face from that angle, just the fists she kept clenching and releasing, clenching and releasing. Nilla wondered what the two of them had said to each other last night.

  Eventually Shar opened the front door and got in. She buckled her seatbelt very carefully.

  All citizens unable to reach the evacuation staging area at Loma are implored to stay in their homes and only open the door to law enforcement personnel with appropriate credentials. Please do not use your telephones: this will only tie up vitally-needed lines of communication. [Emergency Broadcast for Grand Junction, CO 4/3/05]

  The afflicted had broken out of their containment facilities.

  There was no time to go to Commerce City, even if it wasn’t denied territory. What would he find there anyway—some ruptured cyclone fencing? A latrine pit that had never been used? He landed in Denver, near the airport, and headed straight for the heart of the city. He had orders.

  “We’ve never seen organized behavior from them before,” Clark kept telling people. It felt like he was making excuses. He had to pass through any number of clerks and military police before he finally reached the Esplanade south of City Park. There was a high school there, a big brick pile with a clock tower. Alvin Braintree, the Adjutant General of the Colorado Army National Guard had turned it into a forward command post.

  In a class room set up for chemistry experiments—big black fiberglass tables, a row of sinks and exhaust hoods along one wall, periodic table of the elements on the wall—Bannerman Clark stood at attention and waited while the AG received the same sitrep that Clark had heard twenty minutes earlier.

  “The infected then formed what I can only describe, sir, as a human pyramid.” The chief warrant officer giving the report steepled his hands. “Some individuals went over the top, over the razor wire. Others simply pressed their bodies against the chain-link perimeter fence until it gave way. We attempted to contain the situation but we lacked sufficient force to subdue the detainees. They headed south-west, toward the downtown area. We gave pursuit but again, we lacked the manpower to overcome them and eventually had to break contact. Had we been allowed to aggress on them I think we could have done something but we had strict orders not to endanger the infected.”

  Clark felt the temperature in the room drop about twenty degrees. Those had been his orders, of course, that the infected should not be harmed. The chief warrant officer was suggesting, in a not very politic way, that Bannerman Clark was personally responsible for what was happening to Denver.

  Namely: it was being overrun. They had lost small towns before, all over the west. This was the first time a real city was endangered. It was the biggest setback of the Epidemic.

  The AG put his feet up on the teacher’s desk and looked at the two soldiers before him. “That order is rescinded as of this fucking minute,” he said. His mouth, under the white stubble of a long day, was as straight as a ruler. “You will shoot the infected on sight and no more of this willy-wogging. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Sir, yes, sir!” Clark shouted, his voice echoed by that of the CWO.

  “You both need to hear me on this, because I’m putting you in charge of platoons today. It looks like I’m short on real officers.” It was a slight—a soldier of Clark’s rank should be in command of a full company, as many as two hundred warriors. Instead he was being given thirty. “Chief Warrant Officer, you’re dismissed. Go get your men and sort out what vehicles you can commandeer. Captain, you’re with me.” The AG stood up and headed for the door. Clark hurried to catch up, staying a step behind his commanding officer at all times. The AG was the highest-ranking member of the COARNG, answering only to the Governor. As far as Clark knew this was the first time in the man’s life he’d ever worn camo.

  Now he wore the full battle rattle—body armor complete with shoulder-mounted flashlight, protective gas mask stowed at his belt, a tank commander’s CVC helmet with Nomex liner under his arm with a clip for his nods—and he clattered as he hurried down the hallway lined with students’ lockers. “This is your mess, Clark. I don’t particularly care to know what you were thinking but now I know you’re a real barnacle on the world’s backside and at least that’s something. You were supposed to keep this thing contained in the prison. You were supposed to give us appropriate guidelines for how to proceed when that failed. You were supposed to find a cure. Have you done anything but watch this mess ignite right in front of your face?”

  It wasn’t a question requiring an answer. Clark stayed at attention and fought the urge to explain himself. Making excuses in the face of such wrath would be seen as cringing if it wasn’t treated as outright insubordination. Clark had been a military man long enough to know the drill—when you were being chewed out you shut up and took it. Anything else was unacceptable behavior. He and the AG stepped to one side of the hallway to let a file of enlisted get past, their sergeant keeping them in step with obscene jody calls. “Don’t feel too bad, Captain,” the AG said to Clark as the men stomped past, even their footfalls in unison. “You’re going over Niagara Falls for this, yes. I have my own career to consider. But maybe your friends at the Pentagon can find you a job when this is all over. I think you’d make a perfectly capable dog catcher.”

  Clark clamped his teeth shut, ashamed more by the AG’s lack of professionalism than his own complicity in the breakout. The rules said he was supposed to keep his mouth shut. They also said the AG was supposed to keep his temper under control and refrain from personal insults when addressing his inferiors. It was a leftover
of noblesse oblige. Clark didn’t say a word as he was lead into an impromptu armory set up in the gymnasium. The AG selected a sidearm for him, an M9 Beretta, the standard weapon for the officer corps since the mid-eighties and a definite step up from the old traditional Colt .45. It felt heavier than Clark remembered—he hadn’t hefted one since his last visit to the pistol qualification range nearly a year past. He’d never been a shooting soldier, really. At least never before. He fed his belt through the weapon’s holster and checked the safety before putting it away.

  “You’ll at least have a chance to redeem yourself,” Braintree told him. Clark kept his eyes front so he didn’t have to look at the man. “That’s more than I can say for the three troops who were eaten alive during the breakout.”

  Clark felt his knees turn to water and he consciously forced his spine to stiffen. He hadn’t heard about those casualties. He had dozens of questions to ask—what were their names, had their families been notified, were they weekend warriors or heroes from the fighting in Iraq—but he hadn’t been given permission to question his superior officer.

  Vikram was waiting for him in the school’s lobby when he was dismissed. The Major belonged to the Regular Army and had no standing in the command post and in the interest of base security he shouldn’t have been allowed inside at all but Clark was truly glad to see his old friend.

  “He chewed out my fourth point of contact,” Clark said, surprising himself a little. It was a euphemism he hadn’t heard or used since the earliest days of his career. “I’ll be lucky not to be court-martialed after this.”