by Jack Wallen
Senator Slaton
Although it was quite a relief to know there was help somewhere, my brain couldn’t wrap itself around the idea that this woman knew of our plan. Only four people on this entire planet knew what we were doing and none of them were her. My only guess was that Sam had to have informed someone outside of our group. Naturally my instincts were to fall back to paranoia. I again wasn’t sure if we could trust our new friend Sam. This multi-layered shit sandwich is as hard to puke up as it is to choke down.
I wanted to reply to the Senator, but I knew that would only give away the fact that I was still alive and planning something fairly counter-productive to the group’s ability to stop me at all costs. Without being able to contact my source how could I ascertain the truth of this rather significant development?
There was one thing we could count on. Even if the senator knew her daughter was dead (and she must since she’s obviously reading my blog), she knew how hard I tried to keep Susan out of harm’s way. I could only hope that would go a long way towards keeping me in the good graces of the woman. For a short period, Susan was as close to a child as I have ever had. I honestly feel I took on the responsibility as nobly and earnestly as a real parent would. The memory of Susan’s loss was certainly a bitter pill, which only gave birth to the more painful memories of Jacob. No matter how constant the chaos is, the thought of that man is always just within reach.
“Bethany, I have it,” Jean said as he popped out of the room and into the hall. “We have enough vaccine for all of us and will have enough remaining for reproduction or research.” The doctor continued speaking as he marched on by. It was quite obvious Jean was in a hurry to return to the truck. Being in the hospital must have creeped Jean out as much as it did me.
After I caught up with him, we reached the door to the stairs and the realization that Michelle was not with us hit both of us at the same time. Our eyes locked and our ears tuned into the ambient noise. There wasn’t a sound on the floor.
“She would have let us know if she was leaving, right?” My question was rhetorical, my fear was not.
I didn’t recall hearing a door slam or an elevator chime. Something did not feel right.
Without so much as a nod to one another, Jean and I took off toward the heart of the floor. Michelle had to still be here. Something had to have attracted her attention. But what? No matter the what, we had to find her. We’d already lost enough time.
Jean predicted my next move and followed me down the hall. The urge to scream out Michelle’s name hit me hard, but I fought it back. The less attention we brought to ourselves, the better our chance to survive this little suicide mission.
It wasn’t until we reached the very last room in the hall that we found her. She was on the floor, huddled over something. When I entered the room, what she was huddling over became very clear.
“It was Mikka’s,” Michelle said, her voice hiccupping with violent sobs. “It still smells like him.”
If ever there was a time I wanted to join another human in weeping for loss, now was that time. In that moment everything became so small, so insignificant. No matter that hell had been loosed upon the Earth, no matter how difficult the mere act of survival had become, life was still a very precious treasure.
So instead of joining Michelle in sorrow, I wrapped my arms around her and held her as I would hold a sister in a moment of grief. In that space and time everything stopped. The conspiracy, the death, the monsters, decay, pain hopelessness – it all withered away. Michelle and I became our own microcosm and nothing could reach us until we were ready to allow it.
Mikka was gone. In his place was a bloody mess on the bed. The only remaining evidence he had even been there was the dried blood and the backpack. There was no way to know if he had transformed and ambled off, or if he had been attacked and eaten alive.
At one point, the walls of this hospital had offered us a sanctuary. The only sanctuary we now had was one another. If I have learned anything over these last lost weeks it is that everything is now so transient. If ever the phrase nothing is permanent was apropos, that time is now.
Without a word, without a breath to give warning, Michelle stood. Wrapped tightly in her frail embrace she held Mikka’s bag. Michelle’s angelic face was covered and smeared with the fluids of sorrow. Although the look in her eyes let the world know her heart could not possibly be broken further, she gave me a look that she was ready to move on.
And, bless his heart, Jean had remained a silent sentinel, watching over Michelle and I throughout. We were lucky to count this man as one of us.
We made it safely back down to the first floor of the stairwell, but when that door was pulled open, everything changed. The sound of machine gun fire greeted us and the sight of Sam, prone on the ground, blasting away at a small army of undead sent us into action.
As soon as Sam saw us he yelled, “Distract them for me!” He turned and fired off another barrage of rage.
“Hey! Over here!” I screamed. Jean looked at me as if I was nuts. “What? It’s what we’ve always done. Come on!”
“Cerveaux! Cerveaux de phase!” Jean tossed out. When he caught me staring, he pointed to his head and explained, “Live brains.”
Had it not been for the currently fucked up situation, I would have laughed. Instead, I joined in with Jean, assuming these were French-speaking zombies.
Jesus…French-speaking zombies? Really?
“Cerveaux! Cerveaux de phase!” My accent made the words sound ridiculous.
“It’s working! Sam, it’s working!” I yelled out just before another round of gun fire peppered the air around us with its hideous noise. “Oh shit, he’s tossing a fire bomb this way!”
I grabbed Jean and pulled him toward the stairwell. The timing was movie-like incredible, and the door closed just as the bomb hit. The blast of air felt like a road trip to the sun.
After the flare of heat dropped down a few hundred degrees, I cracked the door open. The zombies were all ablaze. The smell greeted me, bringing to mind the smells of a barbeque. I forced the thought back down, deep within the recesses of my brain and gave Jean the go ahead.
As the zombies did the burning man dance, Jean and I managed to wind our way back out to the safety of Sam and the truck. Sam immediately looked up at me gravely.
“One got me. Just leave me here, I’m done,” Sam continued down the hero’s path. I refused to let him go.
“No, you’re not. Let me have your arm. Hopefully the infection hasn’t had time to spread.” Jean was already prepping a syringe.
“Is that the–”
“Vaccine? Yes. It’s going to burn, probably quite a lot in your case.” Jean sunk the needle into Sam’s arm.
After Sam protested with a slew of profanity, Jean went about vaccinating Michelle, who of course felt guilty as hell that Sam had been attacked. She was certain that, had she not broken down, we would have made it out in enough time that Sam wouldn’t be worrying if the vaccine could overtake the infection in his system. Jean seemed very confident the infection wouldn’t take hold, but this didn’t ease Michelle’s guilt in the slightest.
Unfortunately, I have come to believe confidence is nothing more than our mind’s reaction to shutting out the fear of the unknown. And since everything is now unknown, everything is to be feared.
Blog Entry 12/16/2015 7:26 p.m.
I drove the SUV to the pick-up spot with Sam’s guidance. Seeing an empty military base was probably one of the most eerie sights I’ve laid my eyes on to date. The very purpose of the military is to protect. In the vast emptiness of the base, it was clear there was no one available to protect us from the monsters.
Or ourselves.
Sam doesn’t seem to be showing any signs of infection. Jean and I both know a lack of fever or desire for brain pâté is no indication you are in the clear. There is an unpredictability to this virus that doesn’t allow for a moment to breathe a cleansing sigh of relief. Until it reared its ugly h
ead, one never knew if chaos was being spread through the system or not. But, for the moment, I was just happy with a ‘so far, so good.’
The SUV was parked next to a small jet-like plane. As soon as I put the truck in park, a head popped out of the plane’s entry door. My heart stopped for a brief second when it occurred to me this could have easily been a trap. That level of irony would suck the marrow from my bones. Honestly, I have no idea why the idea of a trap hadn’t crossed my mind. Maybe it was a desperate hope to find a way into the Zero Day Collective. The possibility that my brain was already on overload from zombie attacks, the constant search for food, and the desperate scramble to create the cure was certainly a cause for oversight. Or maybe I have reached near exhaustion.
As soon as the person attached to the head spotted Sam awkwardly exit the truck, he offered a quick salute and hopped out to help the hobbling man into the plane. Obviously there was no militia waiting in the wings to take us down. This was just an officer and a plane ready to take his superior – and his superior’s new ‘army’ – to the States.
“What the hell happened to you? Your ex-wife finally track you down?” the younger man chided Sam.
“Would I be alive if she had?” Sam shot back; a good sign. “These are the survivors that we’re taking stateside. Help them load their gear into the plane and we’ll fill you in.” Sam gave the officer the quick and dirty.
“Yes sir.” The young man saluted again.
“And Dunham, as much as it pains me to say this, we’re civilians now. You can shitcan the salutes.” Sam’s words to the young man were all the assurance I needed that we were doing the right thing.
We loaded the plane in silence, no exchange of pleasantries, no introductions, no nothing. We just added our provisions and weapons to the already well-stocked supply on the plane. We were now ready, it seemed, to take on the world.
If ever there was a time where ‘Us vs. Them’ was more applicable, I couldn’t think of when that would have been. Just like every good conspiracy theorist’s wet dream, it did eventually turn out to be us against the government. And, as fate would have it, on the side of the government was big business. I’m sure this question has been asked by many and asked often, but I will dare broach the subject once more: How did we get here?
In truth, the question is rhetorical. It’s fairly certain that what led humanity to this point was greed and an epic thirst for power. To that mix I would add a bit of ignorance. Why ignorance? The human race has proven itself ignorant on so many levels. But the very idea that a weaponized virus which turns humans into brain-eating zombies could be a justifiable means of retaliation for an atrocity committed in the early 1940s proves the ignorance so deeply embedded in mankind’s psyche.
Or, in laymen’s terms, we are one fucked-up species.
Once the last bag was shifted from truck to plane, we sealed the cabin and sat down to prepare for what lay ahead. Sam made all of the necessary introductions and, oddly enough, named me as the leader. Dunham was to follow my every order and offer up any information that would be helpful to the mission at hand.
Dunham was a sidekick in every respect. In opposition to Sam’s thick-necked, heavy muscled, ice-blue eyed countenance, Dunham was short and wiry, with deep-set eyes and a nasally voice. He was, at least on the surface, the brains to Sam’s brawn. Of course the coming days would prove just how much ‘brain’ Dunham contained in his skull. Would he be a snack or buffet for the zombie horde?
The high-pitched drone of the jet’s engines overtook the cabin, heralding the fact that we were about to finally leave for my home country. Honestly, I never thought I would live long enough to see it happen. But as I took in one more breath, the wheels of the plane left the earth and the plane was in flight. That was a certainty that could have easily been applied to the situation – a certainty dictating the death of each and every one of us. These odds were, at the moment, so heavily stacked against humanity it seemed no one would ever beat them. But here we were, a bunch of misfits cobbled together from chaos about to take on a mission that has a higher possibility of failure as did our chances of even surviving thus far. The odds seemed to dictate this was a one-way ticket to Hell.
I believe it is safe to say, in the year 2015, the existence of Hell is officially redundant. Hell exists, and it is the planet Earth.
“So, what’s the plan?” Sam’s rusty voice jerked me out of my philosophical waxing.
As much as I hated it, all I had was a skeleton of a plan. We fly to New York and take down the Collective. With that task accomplished, we would then begin creating enough of the vaccine to distribute around the world.
Outside of that rough draft, I had nothing. But what little plan I had offered up enough to begin crafting a full-fledged assault on those that struck first.
“Our first step is to know where to best gain access to the building. We can’t just show up at the front door and ring the bell. We need to have a way into the building that offers cover enough to slip in undetected.” Sam’s military mind was working in overdrive. I like that in a man.
“I know exactly the spot,” Dunham called back from the pilot’s seat. “Top of the building is an exit for the helipad. We get access to the roof, we can get through that door.”
Obviously we couldn’t just commandeer a chopper and set it down on the roof of the UN building. There was no way of telling what type of security the building had, but it didn’t take a terribly complex system to know if a heli is dropping down on your roof. What we needed was stealth. In this scenario, obfuscation was the only way we could possibly succeed.
“Does this plane have Wi-Fi?” I’ve flown all over the world and was accustomed to the ‘no Wi-Fi zone’ on planes. It was a very annoying inconvenience to hackers.
“Sister, this is government issue – we have everything you could possibly need, just short of a dance floor,” Dunham chimed in again, only this time I was getting a heavy flirting vibe coming from the pilot.
Dunham gave me the SSID and password to access the plane’s wireless capabilities. He had the fairly complex authentication credentials memorized. I was impressed.
The second I logged on, I did a Google Earth search for the New York UN building. The 3D rendering of the city block gave us a perfect feel for what we were up against. I pointed my laptop monitor Sam’s way, so he could see the lay of the land and come up with a plan.
It didn’t take him long.
“Zip line. We’ll attach a zip line between these two buildings. That will allow us undetected access to the UN roof.”
“How do we get a zip line from one building to another?” I asked.
Sam answered me as if the answer was quite obvious. “Standard Army-issue zip line gun.”
The U.S. Military, it seems, has an answer for everything.
“We get to the top of this building, fire a line to the roof of the UN building, and one at a time zip over. Once we’re there, we just have to get into that door,” Sam added with finality, pointing to the access point.
“And certainly a metal door would not be able to stop the Army right?” I chided Sam.
“Unless said door was Army issue?” Jean chimed in with a bit of a chuckle added for good measure.
For a very brief moment everyone on the plane shared a laugh. The laughter wasn’t the heartiest laughter ever registered, but it was probably the most wonderful sound I’d heard in a long, long time. The ringing joy died down fairly quickly. Even with the levity, there was a severity overcasting the group. We all knew the challenge that lay ahead. Not one of us was spending much time fooling ourselves. The probability of not making it out alive was high. If the zombies didn’t get us, Zero Day would. One way or another, death would do its best to wrap its clammy fingers around our souls and drag us, kicking and screaming, to the afterlife. But no matter how fucked we were, we planned on a little fucking of our own.
That did not come out right.
But my point, I am certain, did.
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br /> “So, Bethany,” Dunham started, a tad nervously, “what started this whole mess? Are we talking Night of the Living Dead government conspiracy or what?”
Fancy that – one hand of the government not knowing what the other hand was doing. Not a shock, but a dilemma. Although it seemed Dunham was in tight with Sam, he is still an unknown entity. Can this man be trusted? Being a hacker, it goes against my very nature to trust any branch or member of the government. This includes the military. Hell, the military is, after all, nothing more than the equivalent to Star Trek’s Borg. A singular hive-like mind with the singular goal of assimilation.
“So, once inside the building,” Sam’s tired, raspy voice cut in, “what next?”
As soon as Sam asked the question, it struck me that I had no idea who was in charge of ZDC. This bit of information was fairly congruent with success.
“Who is the leader of Zero Day Collective?”
“No one really knows,” Dunham said, a little too quickly. The scrawny, nerd-like man-boy quickly picked up on his faux pas and back-peddled his way out. “Rumor has it, ZDC is led by committee.”
Dare I call shenanigans and dig deeper under Dunham’s skin of truth? He could split open like a foul egg and spill his rotten innards all over the floor.
“If we have no lock on the leader, then we take them all down,” I said, opting for the surprise attack to see how the new addition would react. I was met with silence. Either the whole group was mulling over the ramifications of my plan or shock and awe was a new weapon in my conversational tool kit.
“What about this?” Dunham offered. “What if, before we go in, we cut power to the building? Emergency lighting will kick in, but it will give enough cover for us to do what we need.”
“And that is?” Jean asked.
“How do we even know the leaders of the Collective will be in that building?” I countered. “I mean, why would they purposefully locate every higher-up in one place?” Logic finally began to seep in. “The obvious action would be to get into the building, grab someone to interrogate, and get the information we need.”
