by Brett Abell
The man looked up, dead serious. “Sir, if they opened this, you won’t have to worry about going to work, or home, or any long-term plans. The package you delivered is hell, pure and evil hell.”
“Then why in the fuck was it in my truck! Who the hell has something like this shipped? You guys must have absolute fucking geniuses working here.”
The man charged at him and Earl puffed up his chest. “You take three more steps towards me, and I’ll fucking lay you out, boy, you understand me?”
The man stopped his approach and held up his hands, taking a deep breath, trying to think out what he should do. He knew that if he went through the proper channels, his career would be over. He grabbed the clipboard and pulled Earl’s cell phone off of his hip before he could catch his hand. He dialed the number and it rang.
*****
Charlie, Lisa, and Tim flew into the room, slamming and locking the door behind them, their chests heaving. They pushed one of the science tables in front of the door, barricading themselves away from the mob of flesh-crazed students who followed them. The cheap glass was the first to go, then the wood frame started to buckle with the increased weight. Tim was rightfully getting nervous, “Charlie what do you want to do? I mean, it is your lab; is there somewhere we can go to get out?”
Charlie pointed for the windows along the edge of the room that led to the campus commons. Tim said, “That is the best you got? There’s no secret way out of here?”
Charlie just stared. “Really, we are lucky enough that they let us have a basement lab at all. There is no way in hell they are going to have anything that cool down here. Wishful thinking, but hell no; aint gonna happen.”
Tim grabbed a stool and as he brought it back to smash out the window, the ringing of a landline began. Charlie ran to the phone, grabbing it, and aid, “Hello? Hello? I need help—we need help.”
The doctor on the other end said, “Wait, is this the lab’s professor? Are you in charge? Who is in charge there? I need to speak to them immediately!”
Charlie stopped and said, “Uh, the professor is out of town. My name is Charlie, and I’m running the lab while he is gone. Who is this calling?”
The man, who could usually read off his list of degrees and achievements without breaking his train of thought said, “That isn’t important. What is, is that case that got shipped to you on accident. We need you to sit on it until I can get there. Do you think you can handle that? We can be there in less than an hour. Can you do that for me? Are you listening?”
Charlie stammered and said, “I can’t. I’m sorry.”
“What do you mean you can’t? You do have it, do you not?”
Charlie nodded and knew there wasn’t any way for him to answer without making the man lose his mind. Charlie said, “Well, I still have the case, but I … I …”
The man was silent for a moment before screaming violently through the phone, “You opened it, didn’t you? Did you open it? Is there anything weird going on at your school?”
Charlie said, “Yeah, you could say that. Yes, we did open it, but we didn’t think that it was going to be anything like this.”
“Well, I’d sure as fucking hell hope not. I can’t believe this; what is happening there?”
Charlie went to speak, but Lisa ripped the phone away from him. “Look, you need to send help. You need to send the police—wait the state police—oh fuck, you need the army … yeah, the army, with tanks. Lots of tanks. The kind that can really blow shit up. Do you understand me?”
The man on the other end said, “Can you tell me what is happening there?”
“Oh, yeah, I can tell you is happening. My dumbshit ex-boyfriend got some case that he busted a nut over, and he decided to call all of us down to watch him check it out—because it was going to be ‘so damn cool.’ Well, when we did, we saw nothing cool. He thought it was some stupid flu, but when we went upstairs to check out what was going on with the pep rally, the majority of the student body was eating each other. Those that tried to get away were not having much success. Now we are locked in this stupid fucking place and we can’t get out. They are out front and they are trying to get into the science lab!”
The man said, “Son of a bitch! You try to stay there, or do you have somewhere safe you can go? It’s a small town, right?”
“Yeah, about the same size as an ant’s dick.”
The man was quiet for a moment, not used to speaking to anyone like that. “Yes, an ant’s dick, exactly. Well, I need you to get somewhere safe and I need you to do it now, or you aren’t going to have a chance. I’m going to call the National Guard and have them lock the city down. Any survivors will need to protect themselves. Wherever you think is the safest place is where you need to go.”
Lisa said, “They want us to go somewhere safe. Where the hell can we go?”
Tim said, “We can go to the old bunker.”
Charlie said, “Which one?”
Tim snapped his head Charlie’s direction. “What do you mean, ‘which one’? The one by the fire department; that’s the only one that I know of.”
“We’re going to head to one of the town’s bunkers,” Lisa informed the man on the other end of the line.
There was no reply; he was gone.
Charlie scanned the room, feeling defeated already. He knew how far away the bunker was from there. He stepped over to the fire equipment box on the wall, broke the glass, and pulled out a wooden axe. He went to the lab gear and grabbed three air masks and three pairs of goggles. He slid his on, and Lisa looked at him, tilting her head. “Let me guess; you are going to see if you can make them laugh at you until they drop?”
Charlie said, “You know exactly how they turned into those … things, Lisa?”
She shook her head no, and Charlie threw a mask and goggle set to each of them. “Well, that makes two of us, and until I know, I don’t want to breathe air that may be contaminated. And I don’t want their blood in my eyes.”
Tim raised his hand. “Three of us are clueless. I think that is a good idea though. What blood are you worried about?”
Charlie held up the axe. “Anyone of those try to get us, I’m going to put this axe blade through its fucking head. There’s only one axe in the room though.”
Tim walked to a wooden table, bent down at the knees, and flipped the table over. He stepped back a few feet and kicked the leg as hard as he could. It broke off, leaving a nasty, jagged splinter-looking club. He did the same and made a second one for Lisa. The three watched out the window, waiting impatiently. When it looked clear enough, they made a break for it, smashing the glass, and climbing out. Lisa was the first to go. The two boys heaved her up, practically throwing her out of the window.
They heard her scream, then watched in horror as blood sprayed the window. Before Charlie could react, her screams turned into a gurgling sound and her legs shook. Charlie screamed for her, but Tim slapped him across the face, knowing that they had seconds to make up their mind.
Tim screamed, “I get it, but she’s buying us the time we need. We have to go, and it has to be now.”
Tim jumped up off the table and out the window. He stretched a hand out toward Charlie, who was losing his mind thinking of the love of his life dying as he was using her death to escape. Charlie snapped out of it, and they made their way through the campus.
Parents and alumni were arriving. The two boys waved their hands screaming at them to get back in their cars and leave. Parents watched in horror. Those unlucky enough to see their children, rushed them, thinking there was something they could offer them besides being a meal. There were bodies laid out everywhere across the commons and one by one, they were rising again. Although they were slow, their numbers were massive.
Charlie and Tim fought their way through the commons grounds. The ones that got within feet of them were rewarded with blunt force trauma to the head until the dead stayed that way. Charlie screamed, “There are too many of them, Tim. What the hell are we going to do?
”
Tim ran forward, not slowing down. There were three in his path; he smashed the first one in the knee. As it fell to the ground, he swung the giant table leg in an arc, sending a plethora of teeth into the air and painting the ground with blood. The second got a bat to the nose, cracking its head back so hard that its neck broke. The third got the splintered piece through its eye socket.
They made their way to the fire department, where they knew they could find safety, barely making it in time. The guards at the door to the bunker kept it opened as long as they could, sending away those with wounds. Those who couldn’t take no for an answer were piled next to the entrance. Those who didn’t die right away, lay bleeding from their head wounds.
As the horde made their way down Main Street following their prey to the fire department, Tim and Charlie watched as the last of the survivors were allowed in before the guards slammed the doors shut and locked them. All that was left to do was wait. Wait for someone or something to save them.
In the dark, somewhere in the back of the crowd of survivors, a lone voice rose and floated through the silence.
“I don’t feel so good.”
*****
Floyd walked through the streets. Food was nowhere to be found, no others around to help him. He looked around, knowing that he had nothing but time until they figured out what was going to happen. When he looked into one of the large picture window mirrors, he saw the blood on his shirt. He touched it; it felt wet and tacky. He wanted to scream but couldn’t when he saw a dozen soldiers come into view from behind. He stared nervously, hoping they’d not seen him and would just keep going. He knew if he had enough time, he’d be able to get into a bunker, or he’d be able to find a respectable place to hide. The soldiers behind him raised their rifles quickly and took aim. The window in front of him splintered and fell away, but not before he saw the blood spatter that replaced his reflection.
He didn’t feel the shots, but he watched his chest as the bullets pierced it, unsure how he was still standing. When one of the soldiers finally found his aim and pointed it at his head, the bullet went through Floyd’s skull and the blurry light he was able to see went out.
The soldier walked up pointing one more time and putting a second bullet into its head. A young man said, “Sir, you gotta shoot them in the head. You gotta shoot zombies in the head. It takes care of them.”
About Mike Evans
Mike Evans lives in Iowa with his wife and children. He writes for character depth because he wishes for you to love the character, regardless if they are the villain or the hero. He likes to write from a unique perspective, doing things with books that no one has done before. He keeps his characters realistic, there are no superhero like events that will happen. There are no perfect characters in his books, everyone has their flaws much like that of life.
The Man Who Started it All
Joe McKinney
Dr. Sandy Harris grunted as she rolled the dead man over onto his back. The corpse was potbellied and flabby, nude from head to toe, and she knew, just by looking at him, that once she started to cut his liver into steaks she’d find plenty of stones. He had all the signs of a lifetime of heaving drinking—the jaundiced eyes, the lesions in the mouth, the distended belly. She sighed thoughtfully. Another victim of the bottle.
It wasn’t the first time she’d wondered how many different industries were kept afloat by liquor.
Especially her own.
Glancing at the scale, she confirmed what she’d already guessed. Big Boy weighed in at two hundred and eighty pounds. Sandy, who was the Eugene Gibson Distinguished Professor of Forensic Science at Middletown University, stood only five-four and tipped the scales at a dainty hundred and two pounds. The corpse was easily twice her size, and she wasn’t looking forward to doing this entire autopsy on her own. But it was Saturday afternoon, just before two, and she could hear the roar of the crowd and the horns from the band coming from the football stadium on the far side of campus. Everybody else had lives.
Sandy would have much preferred to be among that throng. She liked the press of people, their smiles, the sound of laughter. When you spent eighty hours a week in a refrigerated room surrounded by decomposing corpses, you appreciated the rattle and hum of life all the more.
That life wasn’t for her, though. Never had been.
Her life was here, down among the dead.
She grabbed her scalpel and made her first cuts into the man’s bloated torso, putting a lot more muscle in it than usual in order to cut through the tough layer of brown fat under the abdominal wall.
In minutes, she was lost in her work.
“Holy hell,” said a man near the door. “Lady, what are you doing?”
Irritated at the interruption, Sandy looked up.
The UPS guy was standing there with a package in one hand and his little tablet thing for signatures in the other. Sandy caught a flash of well-muscled leg in those brown shorts they wear and couldn’t help herself. He was a good-looking guy, early thirties, with a strong jaw and dark, short hair, a good solid build. Handsome enough, she supposed, except for that cheesy mustache. He did not wear it well. He was probably going for the Clark Gable look, but instead came across as the type of man her female students sometimes referred to as a douchebag.
“Seriously, what are you doing?” the man said.
Sandy held up the soup ladle and iced tea pitcher she was using to remove Big Boy’s organs. She couldn’t help herself. The UPS guy was cute, but she only had so much patience. And she had a lot of bodies still to go.
“I’m scooping out this man’s kidneys,” she said. “What does it look like?”
His face fell.
Sandy smiled. She was well aware of the way TV and crime fiction had stereotyped her profession. Weird little men and women so desensitized to the horrors of death that they could eat a sandwich while carving up a body crawling with maggots.
Sandy wasn’t like that, though.
Twenty-two years of performing autopsies and the smell of a perforated colon could still send her to the sink to vomit.
“Did you need something?”
“Uh, yeah,” he said, not quite able to look away from the corpse that had been hollowed out like a canoe on the table. “You got a package.”
“A package? What is it?”
“How the hell would I know, lady? They don’t tell me. They just tell where to deliver it.”
“Fine,” she said. She nodded toward the desk beside him. “Just leave it there.”
“You gotta sign for it,” he said.
Sandy grumbled under her breath. She didn’t have time for this. “Did you see a young guy upstairs? Hair like a bird’s nest, real skinny?”
“Yeah, I saw him.”
“Good. Get him to sign for it.”
“He looked kind of busy.”
“Busy? What was he doing?”
“Lugging a pile of trash bags out to a truck. I didn’t spend a lot of time asking him about it, though. Those bags were leaking all over the place.”
“For the love of …”
She dumped the ladle into the pitcher and nested it between Big Boy’s thighs. Her gloved hands were covered in blood, so she slapped the intercom button with her elbow. “Charlie, you there?”
No answer.
“Charlie!”
After a moment, the voice of a frazzled and distracted young man came over the speaker. “Uh, yes, Dr. Harris? I, uh … sorry, I was …”
Sandy hit the speaker button again. “Charlie, shut up. Just get down here.”
“But, I’m …”
“Just get down here.”
“Uh, I, uh … okay. Yes ma’am. I’m on the way.”
A tattoo of footfalls on the stairs, and a moment later, Charlie Noble, her TA, stumbled into the room. He was in such a hurry, he nearly knocked the UPS guy over. Charlie was wearing gray rubber wading boots that came up to his knees and a white t-shirt and jeans under that. The boots were suppos
ed to go up to the thighs of normal people, but Charlie stood six and a half feet tall. He was skinny as a rail, with a huge, jutting Adam’s apple and slightly bulging eyes that made Sandy think of Ichabod Crane every time the boy walked into the room.
“Sorry,” he said. “I was moving the bins out to the disposal truck, like you asked, and the … well, the … the bags sort of ruptured.”
Sandy frowned. There were literarily hundreds of pages of state and federal regulations dealing with the proper cleanup and disposal of human medical waste, but today, she just couldn’t make herself care.
“Did you get it cleaned up properly?” she asked, and left it at that.
“Yes, Dr. Harris.”
“Good.” She nodded toward the UPS guy, who still wore a look of utter disgust on his face. “Would you sign for that, please, and figure out where it goes?”
“Yes, Dr. Harris.”
Charlie signed for the package and Sandy went back to her work. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Charlie reading the label and frowning, while the UPS guy got out of there in a hurry.
Sandy returned to her work.
She was uncoiling the rope of the man’s intestines when something crashed over by the door.
Startled, she looked up to see Charlie facedown on the floor next to a toppled chair. The package was halfway across the room.
“What in the …?” she said.
“I tripped. Sorry.”
“Would you please stop saying you’re sorry. I hate that.” She paused. Caught herself. “Are you hurt?”
“No, I’m okay. Just clumsy.”
He tried a self-deprecating grin, but she ignored it. She walked over to the package and picked it up. It was about the shape of a pizza box, and it looked like the UPS guy had run over it before delivering it.
