“No.” I sputter my answer out through sobs.
“What do you smell?” He demands slapping me again so lightening fast that I didn’t even see it coming.
I refuse to answer, I won’t even look at him.
“What do you smell?” He screams the question into my faces from inches away.
When I don’t answer, he slaps me again, and then again.
“What…the.. fuck…do….you…smell?” His voice is like thunder drowning everything else out.
I raise an arm to block the next slap, he gives me a slow nod of approval and looks at me expectantly.
“I …smell hospital disinfectant.” I answer in a thin whisper.
A radiant smile spreads across his face and he gathers me into his arms in a bonecrushing hug.
And then he flings himself backwards over the edge of the roof bringing me with him and we are falling.
There is a flash of brilliant white light, followed by an explosion of sound as I wake up in a hospital bed, trying desperately to scream.
But you can’t scream with a breathing tube down your throat.
Epilogue
Here are the facts as they were presented to me, after I woke up from the coma I had spent thirteen days in.
My boss at the day care had a crazy ex-husband who was some kind of genius at a big pharmaceutical firm. He developed a powerful new hallucinogenic drug that he used to get some kind of sick revenge on her. He sent her a package and when she opened it, a cloud of dust exploded from it.
That dust sent one out of three adults in the building into comas that were marked by extremely vivid dreams that the dreamers experienced as reality. The common thread amongst the victims dream states, was a post-apocalyptic world. The hallucengic experience was what the doctors ended up labeling as profoundly realistic.
The children in the center were unaffected.
The staff affected were all transported to an area hospital. All of us spent the next thirteen days in intensive care. All of us lived out years of our lives in whatever hell we were trapped in, inside of our heads for those thirteen days.
None of what I experienced, what any of us experienced, was real. It was all just a powerful prolonged hallucination, none of it really happened. No matter how real it was to us.
I am not, according to my court appointed shrink, coping well with adjusting to this fact.
A year has passed and I am still mourning a lover who never existed, missing friends and comrades who were never real and suffering from sick guilt over actions I never really took.
I am not alone in this, so far six of the staff dosed by the dust, including my old boss, have committed suicide. One is in prison for beating a man to death in a bar fight and two have been involuntarily committed to pysch wards.
So my court appointed shrink can suck it, I am not doing so bad, compared to some.
The media attention has died down some, the story got splashed all over the news for awhile and us survivors were hounded to tell our stories.
Most of us chose not to talk about whatever private hells we were trapped in for those thirteen days.
I nearly throttled one reporter who pushed me too hard, hence the court appointed shrink.
The ex husband, slash evil genius, is rotting in jail and I try not to give him much thought. He has told his story to anyone who would listen and paints himself the victim in all of this.
Nothing seems quite real to me anymore, plain old everyday reality seems like a bland dream compared to the intense zombie infested nightmare that used to be my reality. I have gone from fighting for my life day to day, to drinking too much and watching reruns of dancing with the has beens. I have gone from leading a group of survivors against zombie hordes, to working up the ambition to go cash my disability check to buy more booze.
Nothing but the sharp sting of cheap whiskey seems very real to me now, well almost nothing. A couple of weeks ago I bought a handgun from a guy behind a cheap dive bar. The weight of it, the hard edged metal feel of it seems both real and reassuring to me.
That is something I don’t share with my court appointed shrink.
We have spent hours, her and I, going over every detail I can remember from the dust induced dream. She has theories about every character and situation’s meaning. I know she dreams of writing an important paper on all of it someday. Apparently while trapped in the hallucination, my brain invented all sorts of stuff to try and lead me out of it. Henry, in her theory anyway, was a part of my subconscious meant to point out glitches in the logic of my dream world and to get me to question it.
My dizzy spells in the dream were nothing more than the drug slowly wearing off and my brain trying to reconnect with real input.
Even my reflection in the bathroom mirror doesn’t seem real to me, instead of a ruggedly handsome battle weary leader, I see a pudgy middle aged guy with sad eyes and a receeding hairline.
My shrink keeps pointing out small victories for me to hang onto. It was months after I got out of the hospital before I could walk past a child on the street without flinching for example. I can walk into a room full of people now, without triggering my fight or flight reflex or planning how I would barricade it against the undead.
Small victories.
Even smaller in the face of what I feel I have lost.
I miss Joyce, she never existed, but I loved her and within the confines of my nightmare, she loved me back. I miss my friends and comrades, I miss the feeling of comradery in our fight for mutual survival.
But, I go to my therapy and go through the motions. Like my shrink keeps telling me, our progress depends on both of us knowing our jobs and doing them.
I am at a low point tonight, I sit at my scarred up kitchen table, in my dump of an apartment, smoking a cigarette and listening to Flogging Molly sing one of my favorite songs, Far Away Boys. The pistol is on the table, gleaming in faint light from the flickering bulb in the light fixture on the ceiling, that always seems to be on the verge of burning out. I have a glass of whiskey in front of me and a full bottle sitting to the left of the glass.
I can enjoy music again now, for awhile it reminded me too much of using speakers to stun the zombies so we could take them out. Now, it is just music again.
Small victories.
There have been a lot of small victories, I suppose, but it is like I said in the note that I wrote for my court appointed shrink.
“You can win a hell of a lot of small victories and still lose the war.”
For now, I sit in this semi dark room with my whiskey and my pistol and wait to see what happens next.
The End
So ends the story of Jake and the Narwhals, I hope that you have enjoyed the Zombie Extinction Event Novels and I thank you for reading them. The story took a strange turn and ended in an unexpected way. I tried other endings but this is how the story seemed to want to tell itself and I have always tried to respect that. It is time now to turn my attention to other projects, stay tuned to our social media for upcoming releases and events. We love to hear from fans and you can reach it us at [email protected] .
A special thank you goes out to Russ Olson and Greg Bennet for lending their names to characters in this book. I hope you enjoyed the experience. I was also like to thank the owner and staff of The Pickled Onion Pub once again. This book like all the others was largely written at your fine establishment.
C.S Anderson
4/16/17
Zombie Extinction Event (Book 3): War Page 7
