EVACUATION
A Vaccination Novel (Book 2)
by
Phillip Tomasso
Copyright 2013 Phillip Tomasso
www.philliptomasso.com
[email protected]
Praise For VACCINATION
“I loved this book because of the concept; zombies didn't just appear after somebody woke up in a hospital bed! The group of survivors were believable, and I loved the fact that they weren't perfect. Highly recommended.” – D.A. Wearmouth, bestselling author of First Activation
“VACCINATION is a thrill a minute. Narrated in a gritty noir voice, Phillip Tomasso drags you into a zombie outbreak face first and doesn’t let you go until you’ve ripped your fingernails off clawing for help. Smart, intense and damn right frightening, VACCINATION is a must for any zombie fan.”– Max Booth III, author of Toxicity
“It’s hard not to get emotionally attached to the small group of survivors and root for them despite their personal flaws. It’s pretty much impossible to describe the end without giving away too much. I’ll just say that it was a great twist. Whether you are new to zombie fiction or have been a fan for years, I’d tell you to check this one out. It’s a great read.” – Ian McLellan, Zombie-Guide.com
“Tomasso created a Zombie book that seems all too possible! This book kept me wired tight from the beginning until the very end. If you like awesome adventure, and vivid storytelling, then you will LOVE Vaccination! 5 BIG Stars!” – Cedric Nye, author of The Road to Hell is Paved with Zombies
“There's a bit of a cliff hanger at the end of the book, which left me wanting more. I'm anxiously awaiting the publication of the second book. If you're looking for a great zombie book, then I highly recommend you grab a copy of Vaccination. Props to Phillip Tomasso for writing this fantastic zombie novel!” – J. Cornnell Michels, author of Jordan’s Brains
“Tomasso explores a humanity left dormant in the infected with graceful elegance. While we get glimpses into that unexpected possibility throughout the book, I would have loved digging deeper down that rabbit hole and see what he would have gifted us with. Simply put, however, VACCINATION is on fire!” — The Bookie Monster
Praise for Phillip Tomasso
“This is different … confident, addictive storytelling, great characters, and an intriguing plot. You’ll read it fast but remember it for a long time. ” —Lee Child, best selling author of One Shot and the Jack Reacher series
“(Tomasso) takes the standard fare of the private investigator genre and adds twists and turns to make it anything but standard. Tomasso’s writing is crisp and clear … thoroughly enjoyable.” —Joseph Nassise, author of Internal Games and King of the Dead
“Phillip Tomasso understands what drives people who live on the edge. His characters are three-dimensional and they engage your sympathy and your anger. . .”— William Meikle, author of Night of the Wendigo and The Midnight Eye Files
“I have a selection of authors that I turn to when I need a break from Fantasy and Phillip Tomasso has just become one of them.” —The Eternal Night Magazine
“Phillip Tomasso breathes new life into an old genre – an EXCELLENT read!” —M. R. Sellers, Author of In the Bleak Midwinter and Never Burn a Witch
Dedication
This book is for my son, Phil. He has been my sounding board, and biggest supporter. Without his help, I don’t think the second book in the trilogy could have been completed! Thank you, buddy!
Special Thanks
I need to thank my beta readers: Phillip Tomasso IV, Wendy LaForce, Sues Melia and Janice McFadden Mickolas. Also a huge thank you to Joe M. Diebold. He saved this story in a way most people could not. And to my family and friends at 911 for making VACCINATION such a success! You were the characters. i was just the scribe.
Prologue
Things spun out of control. Felt like months ago, instead of days, when life was . . . well, I wouldn’t call it normal. You will never catch me calling it that. I worked four to midnight at 911, dispatching fire trucks, ambulances, and taking emergency calls. Tough job. I was trained to take a call, send help, and move on to the next. No looking back. It was easier said than done. Which was what I did, and made a living at it. The divorce had been the hard part. It kept me from moving forward and drained me of emotions. I wouldn’t say I didn’t give a fuck about anything, but I’d be hard pressed to put together a list.
One saving grace, which was a term I absolutely hated, were my kids, so the term was accurate. I had two. Charlene, who was a teenager and, unfortunately, becoming quite the beautiful young adult quickly; and Cash, who was nine and quiet and looked a lot like me.
Signs were there in the days before what I now thought of as Armageddon, melodramatic, I know, but again it felt accurate so I used it. I saw them now, but I hadn’t realized what it all meant at the time. Don’t think any of us did. It was the simple things. At work, people called off shifts--meaning they were supposedly too sick to come in. Or didn’t call in at all and just didn’t show up.
Calls that came in at work were strange, but honestly, no stranger than most summer nights. Fighting, biting, stabbings, shootings, toothaches, and infant deliveries. Nothing out of the ordinary. What could have been a red flag were the increased missing person calls. Loved ones who never made it home from work, school, from grocery shopping, or nights out on the town. Again, standard. Just the increased volume was odd for October.
I don’t think the vaccination hit everyone at once. Didn’t turn them all into zombies on the same night. It was a gradual escalation that finally said fuck it and went haywire. The reports on the news started the panic. Some homeless guy on a freeway eating the face off some other guy or people in college partaking in cannibalism. Hospital security calling to say dead bodies were missing from the morgue.
The clues were there. The signs. The red flags. Shouldn’t need a group of kids in a Mystery Van with a dog connecting the dots. Yet, no one had done that. No one thought zombies. I mean, why would you?
You wouldn’t. In fact, if someone had, we would label them a 78 and send a cop to check on their welfare, and stage an ambulance ready to transport the patient to a psychiatric wing at one of our many treating facilities.
Me? My divorce had been far from amicable. I didn’t kill her or her boyfriend at that time. Thought about it. Now, don’t get me wrong, I wanted to, but what would have been the point? She didn’t want to be with me. Maybe I didn’t make enough money? Wasn’t a good enough husband? Didn’t pay enough attention to her because I was busy working my ass off; crazy hours, trying to pay bills and put food on the table. I wasn’t going to fight to keep someone who thought they needed a guy richer than me. Fuck that. Moreover, killing them would only land me in prison. Not that I would have cared. I think there would have been satisfaction in that. Rotting away in a cell, knowing, you didn’t make an ass of me. Just yourself, baby.
Couldn’t do it, though; I had two important reasons.
Charlene and Cash.
Bam! Right there it was. Cards on the table. I needed not to kill anyone so I could continue being a father to my children. They were, and always have been, my priority. My first and only priority.
Once it became crystal clear that a fucking Armageddon had hit our planet, I had only one goal. Get my kids.
Wasn’t a chance in hell I was going to leave them with my ex. She might be a good mother–-I never indicated anything otherwise, but in times like these, times where zombies are eating people like starving kids with Happy Meals, no, they needed their father. I knew I’d be able to protect them. I knew I’d protect them better than she or her aged husband ever could.
Add the fact that I knew both she and her husband had been vaccinated against s
wine flu, and my time-is-of-the-essence mode kicked into high fucking gear. Let me tell you, high fucking gear.
I had met my goal. It hadn’t been easy. Allison, my girlfriend and also a dispatcher from 911, and I had saved my kids. Charlene might only have been fourteen, but she’d taken care of Cash until we had reunited.
Then the military saved us; Border Patrol copter spotted us; Army rode in on a Humvee and got us off the plaza roof and into the vehicle.
Maybe that was why the worst thing I did was think; now we’re all safe, the nightmare has ended.
I didn’t really believe that. Might have thought it, but proof otherwise surrounded me.
We were packed tightly inside the Humvee. Two soldiers sat in front, with a gunner up top. My kids, scared to death, hugged me tight as shit. Allison looked as if she might start crying any second. Dave, well, he seemed all right. Back when Allison and I first met Dave and his brother on the way to rescue my kids, I thought he would be a hindrance, especially after his brother Josh was shot and killed. Dave kept an arm draped around that woman we’d saved outside the hotel, just prior to seeing the Border Patrol choppers--who in turn called the military out to help us. That woman was Sues Melia.
Sues, on the other hand, didn’t look good. Her body trembled. I was just too tired to react other than to tell Dave.
“Hold her tighter, man. I think she might be going into shock.”
“I got her,” Dave said. He made me feel claustrophobic. Built like an ox, the other five of us barely had room to turn our heads. He looked as if he didn’t have room to breathe.
A handful of days changed not just my entire life, but as best I could tell, the world’s. At the very least, our country’s. Here we were in Rochester, a previously dying city, sandwiched between two larger cities also in the midst of decay, and then in a blink, swine flu destroyed civilization.
Not the flu so much as the vaccination against it.
“Sir,” I said. The soldiers made it clear they weren’t answering questions. They didn’t even seem to want us talking. They were kids, really. In their twenties. It didn’t deter me, since I was at a point where I simply didn’t give a fuck anymore. “We were just on I-390 north, and now we’re on the parkway, east. Only thing I can think of is the Coast Guard station along the river. Is that where we’re headed?” Border Patrol was right in the same general area. It had to be one of the two, best I could guess.
“I am not going to tell you again,” the soldier in the passenger seat said. “Where we are going is classified.”
“You know what? We’re all in this together. Are you afraid I might share your precious intel with zombies? Give them a map with passwords and launch codes? You don’t have to be a dick, Private.”
Allison shot me a look. Felt it. Piercing blue eyes did just that. Pierced. I tried to shake off the intensity of the glare.
“Sir, your friend back there insisted we save you from the roof. We did. That’s after the helicopter spotted you, and sent us to save you from the field. I recognize we’re on the same side of the outbreak. Our mission, whether you like it or not, is to evacuate non-infected humans and to keep classified information, get this, classified. And I am not a Private, sir. I’m a Corporal.”
Evidently, I got under his skin with a simple insult to rank, because he came unraveled. We were all on edge, but his weakness was apparent, too easy to spot. That couldn’t be good. He was just scared. No different from anyone else. Didn’t necessarily make him a dick, but I at least had his number. That was good enough, for now.
I remember having heard all kinds of facts about the flu; the respiratory disease introduced to humans from pigs. Can you beat that? I think the first case of the swine flu showing up in humans was verified, out of all places, in Mexico in 2009.
Like any virus, washing hands and covering your face when you sneezed or coughed might have prevented the epidemic. You know what, though? People are gross. Filthy. No different from pigs infecting us, really. We are the epitome of Orwell’s Animal Farm. Just at a zombie-level. Wasn’t going to be long before our race stepped aside and let the next semi-intelligent organism have a shot at running things. That, unfortunately, I believed.
It was in the autumn of ‘09 when a vaccination was made readily available to the public, and this is what bothers me most. I didn’t have a heck of a lot of time to think this over the last several days. Here, now, sitting in the Humvee headed northeast, I did.
The call I’d taken the night all hell broke loose, pardon the cliché, is what got to me. The guy worked at some lab at one of the hospital campuses. He indicated that shipments of contaminated vaccination vials were shipped all over the U.S.
The contaminated vials still might have prevented people from getting the swine flu, but the side effects were more than bargained for. Anyone inoculated became a zombie.
My kids, Allison, Dave, Sues, I’m guessing, and these soldiers, must not have received the vaccinated shots. Therefore, we were not zombies.
The problem, and I am making this percentage up, is that like 80% of the country did receive their vaccination, were infected, and now spent their days trying to eat non-infected people. Unless it was raining. They hated rain, which would make Seattle residents generally safe in a holy fuck it finally pays off for all of the terrible weather kind of way.
The two things that seemed relevant--head shots killed zombies best, just like in all the b-horror films, and getting bitten, or scratched didn’t seem to turn non-infected humans into flesh eating monsters. At least, so far as I could tell that just wasn’t what happened.
So, again, what bothered me the most, I mean really nagged at me, and was the reason why I’ve never received the vaccination, ever? Here it is, kind of laid out in a nutshell:
How did the United States identify the cause of the flu in Mexico, develop a viable vaccination, and proceed to distribute it across our country in less than a year?
Science didn’t work that way. Government sure as fuck didn’t seem too, unless it served their best interest. Did that seem even remotely possible? Do we have a vaccine for the cold? A cure for headaches? I won’t even touch on cancers and MS.
The answer is no, we don’t. Yet, in months, we had a vaccination against the first outbreak of swine flu that, best I can remember, infected one Mexican?
We were close to Lake Ontario, worse, the Genesee River--so excuse me if I smelled something fishy. I think we were involved in the disease, the spreading of it, possibly its creation and it just happened to come back and bite the US in the ass is all, literally. In the ass.
Does that make me a conspiracy theorist? Or an asshole?
Me?
I didn’t trust the fucking government at all. This was their mistake. I felt it and I knew it. Now, we’re all just collateral damage. Collateral. Fucking. Damage.
Chapter One
Halloween, Saturday, 0958 hours
Headed eastbound on the Lake Ontario State Parkway, we’d just passed the Latta Road exit when the Humvee came to a stop. Moments later, rapid machine gunfire erupted.
“We’re not getting through,” the driver said. I heard what sounded like a gloved fist pound a steering wheel. I would have asked, but it wasn’t relevant.
“Make a path.” Didn’t need to see the Corporal to know he’d just checked the clip on his AK rifle, and smacked it back into place.
I missed my shovel. I don’t remember what happened to it, where I had left it. Or my hockey stick. I’d done some damage in the mall with that thing. Slap shot.
I opened my mouth. Allison set a hand on my shoulder, which was clearly a passive way to shut me up, no doubt. I allowed it for the time being.
The engine revved and the Humvee lurched forward. We went up and over things, with the bumps making us bounce inside. I don’t think the thing had shocks. The monster could climb over cars and boulders, but the engine protested with a long steady and loud whine.
“This isn’t going to work,” the driver sa
id.
I sat facing the rear, staring at Dave and Sues. Dave’s eyes were wide, watching whatever unfolded out the front windshield. There was not enough room for me to turn and look, not with kids on my knees and Allison beside me. “What’s going on?”
“Can’t tell,” Dave said.
Out the side window, I saw zombies along the side of the road. They looked interested as they made their way toward us. The running ones were gunned down. The slow walking ones, ignored. The sound of the engine and the gunfire was what drew them at us in the first place. It was a Catch-22 if I had ever seen one.
“Must be obstacles in front of us,” Dave said. “Cars maybe.”
Cars, yes. Zombies, too, I’d bet. It felt like that might be what we crawled over, bodies, because I didn’t hear metal crumble and glass pop and shatter.
I heard the driver yell, “I’m not leaving the vehicle. We’ll get by this, through this, and be on our way.”
“I see it,” Dave said. “Couple of those eighteen wheelers, jack-knifed.”
“They’re not supposed to use this road,” I said.
“Well, okay, but that’s what’s out there. Two of them. At least. That’s about all I can see. One’s on its side.” Dave kept moving his head forward, back, side to side, as if it helped him see more out of the small front windshield or something. “And a ton of zombies. I mean, ton.”
I pursed my lips. The kids didn’t need to hear that. I could have kicked Dave in the shin. He deserved it, too. “They’ll get us through,” I said. I wanted to sound confident, the way a parent should. Comforting and confident.
Trouble was, I knew I didn’t because I wasn’t.
Cash cried. Not sobbed. His body didn’t shake. Tears just slid down his cheeks.
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