by S. Ganley
Society had started to crumble to its very foundations and as the working government began to either fall victim to the illness or flee to places far from seats of power, the citizens, soldiers and others left behind started taking measures into their own hands to ensure their personal survival.
Chapter 18
Satisfied that the house was as secure as they could get it for the time being and with both of their sick or injured guests now out cold, Garrett and Calvin sat together in the kitchen where Calvin filled his friend in on what he had learned in the past few hours.
Calvin explained that the night before he had taken Kimberly to visit one of her good friends who had come down with a nasty bug. Her friend lived in an apartment that she shared with another girl, Calvin made a moronic comment about a domestic partnership of some sort that Garrett didn't bother to pursue further. When they got to the apartment neither roommate answered their knocks on the door but they found the door unlocked and let themselves in. Calvin said that the place reeked like a dead body and he worried as soon as they walked in that they would find Kimberly's friend dead. He once again got sidetracked as he delved into a dialogue about how that discovery would have had the potential to be a cock block for him that night. Garrett couldn't believe the man sometimes, he was trying to get to the point about explaining how he had discovered that the world had been thrust into some kind of real life science fiction based zombie nightmare and yet he found it amusing to go off on tangents about his sex life. He put his foot down on the bullshit and told Calvin to get to the point already. Seeing an unusually serious side of Garrett, Calvin apologized and explained that it was just a way to help him cope with the situation. He admitted that while he had seen some pretty awful sights during his time in the military, those paled in comparison to what he had been dealing with over the prior twelve hours. He continued on and explained that despite the smell permeating through the apartment, they found both roommates alive and in their respective beds, both of them were very sick though. The girls had vomit all over their beds and were running incredibly high fevers, they were conscious but not very responsive and clearly delirious from their fevers. Calvin called 911 and he said it took him several times to get through, but when he did get an operator they told him that it would be a one to two hour delay for an ambulance. They said that there was a bad outbreak of flu in the area and that all emergency services were backlogged on calls. He had asked the best hospital that he could just drive the girls to himself and was told that they would not be allowed access to any area hospital or medical center. All such facilities were already well beyond capacity and state police along with National Guard elements were being deployed to turn people away. The best advice the operator could give him was to keep the patients hydrated and administer aspirin for fever. Calvin said that he was about to hang up when the operator lowered her voice and had said in almost a whisper that if either girl died to make sure the body was securely restrained. Before he could respond, the woman had hung up. He had been unable to get back through to 911 again after that. Without medical help on the way and after the ominous warning about the hospitals being guarded by armed forces and turning patients away, there was little they could do for the two woman except try and help them stay comfortable and make the best of available medications already in the house. What he had a hard time getting over was the warning the operator had conspiratorially given him about restraining either one of them if they should happen to die, at that time he had no idea what to make of that off the wall piece of advice from an emergency operator. The other thing that Calvin couldn't get over was the distinct smell of death hanging in the air inside the apartment. While Kimberly cared for the sick roommates, he decided to take a look around the rest of the building. He described it as a relatively small building, four stories with four fairly nice apartments per floor. It didn't take him long to find what he was looking for. He continued down the hallway past Kimberly's friend’s apartment and found the next apartment's door wide open. He said that the smell was overpowering at the doorway and after he received no response from his calls into the residence he stepped inside and found two bodies sprawled out in the living room amidst broken furnishings and other signs of a struggle. A naked woman in her mid-twenties was laying on her stomach bent over the arm of an overturned love seat, Calvin described an obvious gunshot wound to her temple. The other body was that of a man closer to forty and dressed in a rumpled business suit. He said that it looked like a married man dropping by on his lover on his way home from work. He was holding a small caliber pistol in his hand and also had a gunshot wound to his head, this one under the chin. In addition to the gunshot wound it looked like he also had a severe laceration to the side of his neck that Calvin swore looked like a deep bite wound. His suspicions about that wound were confirmed when he moved to the other side of the room and got a look at the girls face. Her mouth and lower jaw were coated in blood and gore and a strip of skin that looked like it matched the missing piece of neck from her boyfriend was still clenched in her closed teeth. His thought was that the guy had come into the house looking for a piece of ass and she jumped him while in the nude, but instead of some loving she had something much more deadly in mind and managed to get her teeth locked on his neck before he knew what hit him. He must have been carrying a small pistol in his jacket pocket and at some point during the struggle he managed to pull it and get a shot off that took her down. Somehow he must have figured out that a bite from someone in her condition would end up causing him to join her in the zombie world and he had chosen to take a different road by shoving his own pistol up under his chin and blowing his brains out. Calvin had noticed that while his wound left blood and brains all over the room from the ceiling to the walls in the hallway, the woman had lost only a few drops of already coagulated slimy looking blood, the only true evidence of her wound was a chunk of brain matter splashed across the back of the love seat where she had fallen. While neither of them appeared to have been dead that long, the woman was the one responsible for the acrid smell of decomposition filling the building.
Calvin told Garrett that by the time he returned to the apartment with Kimberly and the two sick girls, he found both of them dead and Kimberly passed out cold on the bathroom floor in front of a puke filled toilet. In the short time he has been exploring the neighboring apartment Kimberly had picked up a high fever and fell violently ill, the toilet was tinged with blood mixed into her vomit and her breathing was ragged and shallow. He suddenly found himself in an apartment building with at least four dead bodies, a very sick girlfriend, and 911 was no help at all. Even though he considered it to be nonsense, he took the advice of the dispatcher he had spoken with and tied down the arms of both dead roommates to their bedposts with rope he found in their utility closet. He had worried what the police would think if they suddenly showed up and found them like that, but he felt that since 911 calls are supposed to be recorded, he was at least covered by saying that he had acted under the advice of the emergency dispatcher.
Growing tired of the step by step details Garrett told him to try and get to the point about learning of a zombie outbreak. He had a feeling that it was getting to the time where the two of them needed to start discussing what their next move would be and Calvin could drone on for hours when he got into the thick of one of his stories.
Gathering his thoughts for a moment, he went on to explain that within a short time of tying the two bodies to their beds and returning to the bathroom to help clean Kimberly up, he heard a racket coming from the bedrooms. When he went to check it out, he found both of the girls who he knew for a fact had been dead only minutes early, struggling against their biddings and hissing and snapping like rabid dogs. He described them as just what you would expect from the zombies you saw in the movies, yellowed skin and dead puss filled eyes that he had never seen on anything but a corpse before. He had left the girls locked in their rooms, grabbed up Kimberly and made a run for his truck.
Once he
got her back to his place he had bundled her up on the couch and started scanning the airwaves with his police scanner to see what kind of news he could pick up. The television and radio were all reporting the same thing, that there was a flu outbreak and people were advised to stay at home and avoid hospitals and medical centers because they were becoming overcrowded. There was nothing being reported about National Guard troops on the streets or about the dead coming back to life. His scanner told a different story though, all night long he picked up transmissions about a zombie outbreak, that the dead were coming back in larger numbers and attacking anyone they could get their hands on. Police were being told to shoot suspected zombies through the head. Reports kept coming in about more and more people dying and that the situation was getting out of control. He had heard rumors that the government was on the verge of declaring a state of martial law and enforcing a 24-hour curfew to try and burn the virus out by trapping citizens in their own homes and letting those who were already infected simply die off. Calvin had spent most of the night listening to the scanner and caring for Kimberly until he started hearing the sounds of fighting and gunfire in the parking lot of his own apartment complex. He had grabbed one of his handguns and went onto his back porch to check it out when he came face to face with a man who had those same dead eyes and fucked up looking skin color that he saw when the two girls had come back to life on him. He had no choice but to put a round in the guy’s shoulder to try and stop him but it didn't even register with him that he had been shot. Calvin had ended up backed into a corner and forced to put a shot through his forehead to drop him for good. After that, he had to hunker down in his apartment with furniture piled up against the doors as a crowd of the things descended on the entire complex. He thought that gunfire from him and one of his neighbors might have attracted more of them from somewhere else. He had stayed barricaded inside his apartment for hours while listening to them tearing shit up in other apartments and trying several times to force their way through his doors. He had listened as four of his own neighbors had screamed in terror when their doors were forced open and they were attacked in mass by the things. It was only a little after the sun came up when enough of them had moved off that he felt safe enough to make a break for it. He had packed some guns, ammo and a few supplies and made a run for Garrett's place hoping that it might still be safe since it was in a more secluded part of town.
Garrett had several questions about Calvin's experiences the night before and the information he had picked up on his scanner. For the next hour they discussed the implications of their situation, the most pressing issue at that point became what to do with the two people sleeping in the next room. Based on what Calvin had witnessed and the news he had heard during the night, Steve was their biggest threat at that moment. Since there was no cure for a bite wound from a zombie and the end result would be that at some point he was going to simply die and then come back to life only to turn on both of them. Calvin suggested that it would probably be best to just put him down before that happened. It certainly wasn't a proposition Garrett was willing to take lightly, but at the same time he had to weigh the threat that Steve posed to them against his feelings. He had killed before and had long ago reached a point where he felt that taking a life under certain circumstances was acceptable when it came down to a choice between his own life or those he cared about and the ones he was forced to take. In this situation even though the threat was yet to come, it was going to come down to eliminating the potential danger on his own terms before it reached a point where they were forced into action and there was a greater risk of injury to either of them. Garrett wanted to put that idea off to the side for the time being while they discussed Kimberly, she was still hanging on, but as sick as she was it was possible that she would also pass away and then come back as the undead. While Steve's condition was a foregone conclusion that there was no hope for him given the lack of possible treatment for a zombie bite wound, it was less clear in the case of Kimberly. They didn't know if someone who was simply sick with the virus could recover and were very hesitant to simply put a bullet in her head if there was even the slightest chance she could pull through. Several times during their discussion they had taken quick breaks to check on Kimberly and Steve, while they didn't feel comfortable enough talking about these things in their presence they were also leery of the two of them being left unattended in the next room.
The agreed to consider their options for a little while before making a decision, in the meantime Calvin dragged in the bags he had recovered from his truck. He spread the contents out on the table and counters in the kitchen. Considering the circumstances, Garrett was pleased to note that his friend had taken the time to clean out his gun safe on the way over. On the table were two very well maintained AK-47 assault rifles each with six full magazines of ammunition and three boxes of spare shells, three semi-automatic hand guns also with ample ammunition, a pair of military grade high powered binoculars, four cases of meals-ready-to-Eat (MRE's) the plastic pouches carried by the military as field rations, two menacing looking tactical knives and a pair of short range encrypted radio sets.
Garrett whistled as he cast his eyes over the bounty spread out over his kitchen, "You don't screw around, do you?"
"You try being trapped in a small apartment with a horde of flesh eating zombies crawling all over the place trying to get their hands on you. Then you will better appreciate my affinity for firepower." Calvin replied.
"Oh, I have nothing but the deepest respect for you in that area. If things are really going to shit out there without any sign of help from the government, I have a feeling we are really going to need all of this." Calvin said as he picked up one of the AK's and checked the action.
"Well, what do you think our next move should be? My plan was to get as far as your place without having a chunk bitten out of my ass and I have accomplished that mission, but after that I am a little short on ideas."
"We should try and make contact with whatever authorities are available. You said that the last contact you had with a 911 operator mentioned military and state police guarding hospitals and medical centers? That would be a good place to start. Maybe they can at least tell us something, evacuation centers, refugee camps, the government has to be doing something to help the general population." Garrett replied.
They agreed on a local medical center within a few minutes’ drive for their first attempt at making contact with local authorities, and then the conversation turned back to the more grim matter of what to do with Steve and Kimberly. Both of them were in agreement that Steve was their biggest threat at the moment. As far as Kimberly went they would take her along with them and see if they could find help for her. From what Calvin had learned on the scanner, not everyone who got sick had died and returned. It that was true, than there may still be hope that Kimberly could pull through. Calvin pulled a coin from his pocket and offered to flip it to see who got stuck with taking care of Steve. Garrett snatched the coin out of his hand and put it into his own pocket.
"I knew him, you didn't. Wait here." Picking up one of the handguns from the kitchen counter he slammed a magazine into the receiver and racked the slide to chamber a round. Taking three deep breaths to muster his courage, he walked stoically from his kitchen into the adjoining living room. He watched the two sleeping forms from the door for a second, Kimberly was breathing softly interrupted by an occasional cough, her face was a sheen of sweat from the fever that would spike and then back down every so often. She was still out cold and Garrett was pretty sure that even the coming shot would not disturb her. Compared to her Steve was a mess, he was covered from head to chest in running sweat, his skin looked pale and clammy, and he had continued puking even though Garrett was certain he could have nothing left in his stomach to throw up. The room had a thick and stomach churning odor that the vomit was only partially able to take credit for, it reminded Garrett of rancid meat that had been left out in a warm damp room to slowly rot over time.
/> Garrett moved to within arm’s length of the man and raised the pistol to center the sights on his forehead. Without giving himself the opportunity to second guess his actions, he squeezed the trigger once and sent a jacketed round through the exact center of Steve's forehead. Garrett was completely focused on his neighbors face as he watched his eyes suddenly roll back in his head as if they were straining to look up towards the dripping wound while the rest of his body relaxed completely and his head dropped down towards his chest and remained still. The bullet had passed straight through Steve's head and dug out a fist size chunk of stuffing from the sofa cushion he had been resting against. That damage could have been overlooked if he were to use the sofa again, but the spray of brain matter that followed along behind the bullet was another matter entirely and left the bottom half of the love seat saturated in a thick stew of partially decomposed brain, blood and a fat chunk of skull with a swatch of hair still clinging to it. Calvin walked into the room following the sound of the shot and without a word passing between the two friends they each grabbed one of Steve's legs and unceremoniously dragged him out the front door and laid him on the grass next to the sidewalk.
