by D. J. Graves
“Sorry,” Pane murmured as he handed me a worn grey towel from a metal cabinet near him.
I wrapped the towel around me. “Don’t worry about it. I know how messed up I look.”
Derek gave me a black t-shirt and pajama pants. “You can wear my clothes until yours are clean.”
“Thank you.”
Derek and Pane got dressed while I dried myself off.
“So, what are the dynamics of this place. Karen's in charge and you four men do what?”
“Karen is definitely in charge,” said Derek. “This whole thing, this place was her idea. We’d all be dead if it wasn’t for her.”
Pane threw his used towel into the dirty clothes basket. “As far as I can tell, we gents spend our days running patrols to keep the surrounding area clear of zombies and maintaining our home.”
“Interesting...And Karen?”
“Like I said. She’s in charge,” said Derek.
We came out of the restroom clean and were met by the wonderful smell of food cooking. I grabbed my stomach when it growled, anticipating the food that scent promised.
“Whatcha cooking?” asked Pane as he entered the large room ahead of Derek and I. “Smells great.”
“Potato soup,” We heard Karen answer. “You have impeccable timing. Three others need the showers.”
“Three?” asked Derek just ahead of me.
“We have another guest,” said Karen. “He says he knows Erin.”
I came around the corner last and saw him sitting next to my sleeping baby. He looked at me with a crooked smile that would haunt me for as long as I lived, however long that might be. I grabbed Derek’s forearm. He looked back at me.
“Erin?”
“Jensen,” I said with real fear in my eyes.
Derek and Pane’s posture changed at the sound of his name, from relaxed to alert. Derek put a hand on my shoulder.
5
JENSEN stood as I moved into the room. My hand was still tight around Derek’s arm. Jensen was giving everyone his best ‘good old boy’ smile, but between the fear in my eyes and Derek and Pane’s new hostile postures, Karen seemed to have gotten the clue that something wasn’t right. Before anyone could say another word she pulled a gun out from a cabinet and pointed it at Jensen.
“Hey now,” Jensen said with a voice just dripping with patronizing fret. His short hair was a mess and his clothes were ripped and bloody from fighting the zombies, yet he still exuded authority, like his father.
Everything about him, from his height to his handsome face, from his likable voice to his kind brown eyes told you to trust him, to follow him. That would not be wise. He was a sociopath. Just for shits and giggles, he liked to get you under his control and then push you to the point of your death or the death of your blood innocents.
I watched him take a father under his wing once. He came off all ‘brothers in arms’ bull shit, swapping horror stories. But he quickly turned the man against his wife and kids. I watched Jensen poison his mind with thoughts of male dominance and the innate evil of women and spoiled children. The man came into the church a loving father, scared for his beautiful family, who had made it this long in our devastated world, and within a couple of weeks he was whoring his wife out to Jensen and the other men, to rape and beat as they liked. He sent his two sons to Finn’s room to learn to be men. What he did to his little girl was too monstrous to think about. I wasn’t a religious woman, but to me, he was the devil.
Jensen didn’t look scared, even with a gun pointed at him. He looked calm and almost amused. “Let’s just all calm down,” he said, playing the reasonable one.
“Grandma, put the gun away!” shouted Will, as he stood up beside Jensen.
Gerald said nothing and he made no obvious move, but his right hand was tucked deep between the couch cushions.
“Step away from the couch, Mister,” Karen said.
“Or what? For what reason do you point your gun at me?” Jensen asked, and his voice and face said two things that his words didn’t. They said that she was being a stupid woman and he was in charge here. He was the sort of person who was always in charge, even in a stranger’s home.
“Don’t push me, boy. I know trouble when I see trouble. I’m no fool.”
“You didn’t have a problem with me earlier,” and he turned and looked right at me. “Has she been telling lies?” he asked them, referring to me with an incline of his head in my direction.
“We saw the bruises you gave her,” said Derek.
Jensen ignored him. “Did they tell you, Karen, that she tried to kill one of your men? Gerald here. They told me they had to knock her out because there was no reasoning with her. You can’t trust what she says. I was just defending myself from this mad woman. I don’t blame her, though. People are losing their minds out there.”
Karen didn’t look my way. Her eyes were glued onto her target. “That true?” she asked no one in particular.
“Which part?” I asked.
“Did you try to kill one of my boys?”
“Yes. I’ve learned to kill first when it comes to both the living and the walking dead.”
“You see? She is out of control,” Jensen said.
“Men like you taught me that,” I tried to say calmly, but I couldn’t stay calm. He was trying to manipulate them and I’ve seen him do it too often not to know that it works, it fucking works every time! “Men that rape, men that kill, men that think the chaos we’ve been thrown into gives them license to do whatever sick and evil things that come into their morally deficient minds!” I yelled. “You and your father are disgusting monsters!”
Jensen threw his hands in the air as if my outburst proved his point. Shit! Did it? Arrogance was painted so thick on his face, the fumes made me sick. He gave me narrow dark eyes and the room seemed dimmer for it.
“You see! You see the truth of my words!” he roared, and he sounded so like his father. He was trying to hide it but his face was distorted and discolored by his anger.
He moved closer to me but Karen moved up to him with her gun.
“Hay! Gun, remember? Everyone, calm the fuck down!”
Christopher sat up on the couch, finally unable to sleep through our yelling. When he looked up and saw Jensen standing over him, he let out a blood-curdling scream. From the lips of babes...
Gerald finally let us know what he was palming between the cushions as he brought his hand up and pointed a small gun at Jensen’s head.
“Take the baby, Will,” Gerald said, and Will cautiously bent down and grabbed Chris. Chris fought him like mad, screaming and kicking and squirming, but Will managed to get him away from Jensen’s reach. Will let Christ go and my son ran into my arms and buried his little head in my neck.
“Look, I don’t know what bad blood you two have, but one of you is staying and one of you is going, and I think you know which is doing which,” Karen said.
Jensen smiled wide. It was a scheming smile. He looked around the room, not at the people but at their resources. Shit. “I think that’s best. I’m sure I can find my way back to my people, no problem.”
Karen waved her gun toward the entrance and Jensen walked around the couch. He flashed angry eyes my way and started on down the hall toward the hatch with Karen at his back.
“You can’t let him go or he’ll bring back the others,” I said to Pane.
“WAIT!” shouted Pane, and he began running after and Jensen. “Wait, he can’t go!”
Jensen started to sprint for the hatch and Karen stood her ground and shouted at him, “Stop or I will shoot you!” but she didn’t and he kept running with Pane at his back and gaining on him. The guy could run, but Jensen reached the hatch first. It was no use to him, though. He climbed the steps and found the handle stuck and the door immobile and Pane tackled him down.
I looked to the dining table and found Will behind a laptop. “It’s locked,” he said. “He’s not going anywhere. Now, will someone kindly explain to me what’s goin
g on?” he asked.
“There’s no way Christopher is going to calm down enough for us to talk with Jensen here,” I almost yelled over Chris’s crying.
Derek joined Pane in holding Jensen down while Karen loomed over them with her gun held loosely in her right hand.
“You’re making a huge mistake here!” Jensen yelled. “Get off me!”
“I’d love to get this git out of our sights if he’d just stop fighting,” Pane said through gritted teeth.
“On it!” called Gerald as he ran out of the room. He came back moments later with a small brown straw. He blew a tiny arrow at Jensen and it hit him in the arm. Jensen fell other instantly, just as I had.
“Thanks,” said Pane, exhausted from trying to hold the man down.
“Tie him up and throw him in the storage room for now,” instructed Karen, and the three men carried him to a storage room and tied him to a support column so we could talk in peace in the dining room.
6
I told them what kind of man Jensen was and what type of place I just escaped from. “I’ve encountered a lot of horrible people in the past few years, but nothing like Finn’s church. It’s a place of violence, rape, cannibalism and torture. Pane was right to stop him from leaving. If you let Jensen go, the first thing he’ll do is tell Finn that he found a place in need of spiritual cleansing…which is be bull shit for kill us all and take your resources.”
“No wonder you tried to kill me,” said Gerald. He and Will were fresh from the showers and looking much more relaxed out of their zombie-killing gear. Will was wearing a flannel shirt and jeans while Gerald was sporting a Star Wars T-shirt and pajama bottoms.
“It was a long road of ass holes that brought me here,” I almost smiled; not because what I said was particularly clever. It’s just been a long time since I’d seen Christopher eat so heartily. Sure, the church had its big feasts every couple of days, but it was human meat. I couldn’t let him eat that, and the food their garden yielded was sickly. No, we were half starved the entire time we were there. But now he sat on my lap eating his fill. I hadn’t taken a bite just yet-I always let my boy eat first- but it smelled amazing; hearty potatoes, veggies, spices and chicken broth.
“So,” began Derek. “What do we do with Jensen? He can’t stay, he can’t go.”
“I have plans for him,” Karen said into her bowl of soup.
“PLAN?” I asked.
“I think he’d make an ideal research subject,” said Karen.
I couldn’t keep the worry off my face or out of my voice when I asked, “Research?”
Karen gave me a hard look. “Yes.”
“What sort of research?” I asked. Please don’t say, zombie. Please don’t say, zombie.
“Zombie, obviously.”
I wanted to stand up and leave right then but I honestly had nowhere to go and no plan. “Well, that’s a horrible no good idea. Why would you purposely invite that into this place?”
“Because we have a purpose. Believe me, it’s safe. I’ve taken every measure to ensure that.”
“Erin, don’t worry about it. We’re all in over our heads here but trust my Grandma. She’s a scientist,” said Will. “She’s the only reason any of us in this room are alive right now, including you.”
“You’re right. I’m no scientist. I was just an office administrator before the epidemic hit and now-everyday of my life is Dawn of the Dead meets Fury Road.”
“We all had lives before this,” said Derek quietly. The comment was curt and for some reason the table fell uncomfortably silent. I felt I missed something...
Eventually, Karen broke the silence. “I’m trying to understand the zombie virus. We can’t create a cure, vaccine or plan of action against it if we don’t know more about it.”
“A cure? How do you begin to cure what’s out there? How do you treat it?” Pane said they had known about the zombies before the world went to shit. “How the hell did you guys even know to build this place? And, if you knew what was coming, why didn’t you try to warn everybody? You could have saved billions of lives!”
“Erin,” Gerald said, trying to calm me down.
“No, you all knew and you just let it happen. Why?”
“We didn’t…” Derek started.
“We did, but we didn’t,” said Will. “Grandma told us about the disease and convinced us to build this place in case it got out of hand, but none of us actually believed her. We thought she was senile.”
“Thank you for that,” Karen said.
I looked at Karen. “So you knew....”
“I knew, but look, I couldn’t even convince my grandkid and his friends let alone the rest of the world, and I tried, I really did, for years. I was written off as a crackpot conspiracy theorist. It cost me my career. You and I are just lucky these boys entertained the ravings of an old woman off her rocker.”
“It sounded fun,” Gerald shrugged.
“But how did you know? How did this happen to us?”
She looked at me with her cold eyes and stern face and said, “I’m a bioengineer with the CDC, or I was. Years ago I was at a dinner party in Moscow, a business-related affair and I overheard something I shouldn’t have. It was way above my clearance, but they probably thought the statement was innocent enough, that no one would read into it... They said that Nezhit’ Kontsa was too contagious to contain and the men looked genuinely afraid.”
“What’s that? Nez-konsta?”
“Nezhit’ Kontsa is a drug that sends its users into a panicked frenzy, like a violent trip on cocaine. It also restricts blood flow to the extremities causing infection and rot if an injury occurs while under the influence.”
“I’ve never heard of Nezhit’ Kontsa before.”
“It’s Russian. It means the undead end,” said Karen.
“Or, Zombie Apocalypse,” said Derek. He was helping himself to a third bowl already. I was trying not to stare, but pigging out was something I hadn’t seen anyone do in a long time.
“So,” I began, tearing my eyes away from Derek’s massive appetite. “You overheard some men discussing a drug that basically turns people into crazy ass-holes, and just thought to yourself, I’d better get my grandson and his friends to help me build an underground bunker in case of a zombie apocalypse?”
“No, not at first. That single statement was loaded with information. This drug changes its users into highly violent people with aggressive rotting and it’s somehow evolved into a contagious virus, one that the Center for Disease Control’s Global Health Department was concerned about. After that night, I made sure I was a part of the team that sought to control this new virus, but there was so much we didn’t understand and still don't. At first, our research was all about discovering how this happened and curing it, but the virus was evolving at such a fast pace, we couldn’t keep up. A few weeks into our research, the Russian government kicked us out of the country in favor of eradication.”
“Eradication?” I asked.
“They killed everyone infected,” said Will.
I made a quiet ‘Oh,” sound.
“We came home to the US and continued to study the virus here,” she said.
“You brought it here?” I asked.
“Yes, to the University of Washington. They have some highly capable men and women...had.”
“But it got out and the world went to shit. Is that about right?”
“Yes, it wasn’t as simple as that, but yes.”
“And you don’t see how bringing it in here could be a terrible idea?”
“It must be studied, Erin. Those zombied men and women out there are physically dead, but their bodies are still moving. How is that possible? We need answers.”
“You’re putting everyone here at risk because you’re curious?”
Karen stood up fast. “It’s not a matter that’s up for discussion.” And she left…
“I’m with you,” Pane whispered into my ear.
7
Karen had
a lab inside their bunker. It was a large room divided in two by a thick glass wall. In the first half of the room, there was a desk and a chair and shelves lining the walls. The shelves were full of books and lab equipment and jars that varied in size. The jars were full of zombie body parts in liquid. On the other side of the glass wall, Jensen lay naked, unconscious and strapped to a table surrounded by monitors.
“I know you’re scared of my experiments,” Karen said.
“I think you’re making a mistake. You should kill him while he’s unconscious and dump his body far from here.”
“I assure you there is no reason to worry.”
“Is that why you invited me to your creepy laboratory in the middle of the night while everyone else is asleep? To calm my nerves,” I said with one eyebrow raised.
“Yes. Knowledge is the enemy of fear.”
“I’ve always found a certain amount of bliss in ignorance.”
“Do you cower in fear of God's wrath during lightning storms?”
