Zombies! (Episode 6): Barriers Collapse

by Ivan Turner

  "Well, thanks. Have a good evening."

  After that, Arrick beat a hasty retreat from the man. He didn't like being perceived as a zombie fighter. Getting into the ring with one didn't appeal to him as it might to others. He had nothing to prove. So, as he boarded the train, he completely forgot about the man and his crazy idea.

  ***

  IT was full on nighttime when Abby got off the train. The first thing she did was call the gym to see if Whitaker had heard from Martin. He got all insulted that she didn't trust him but she assured him that she had spent forty five minutes on the train and was concerned that he had tried to call and couldn't get through. This seemed to satisfy him somewhat. Martin hadn't called. As she hung up, Abby wondered how the hostility had grown between her and Whitaker. He was a nice enough kid, but she'd liked him better when he didn't care so much about his job.

  Taking out the directions she'd printed off of the internet, she got her bearings and began to walk. It was only a couple of blocks to the address and it was still ten minutes before seven o'clock. She'd timed it almost perfectly. The Queens neighborhood wasn't the best. The houses were small and piled on top of each other. Of course, she didn't have a house so she probably shouldn't have been so judgmental. But the houses weren't just small. Most of them were run-down as well. She guessed that the neighborhood was forty or fifty years old and so much of it looked original. As she passed by them, she caught sight of some movement behind curtains, heard the sound of a dog barking, and saw an elderly man dragging an old-style Oscar the Grouch trashcan down his driveway.

  Before too long, she arrived at the address Peter had given her. This house seemed worse off than most of the others. The siding was showing signs of wear. There was peeling paint and a few hanging bits. The drapes in the windows were faded. Abby double-checked the address. It was right. She didn't know whose house this was, but it wasn't Peter's. That much she knew. He lived out on Staten Island. For a few moments, she stood there, not knowing what to do. Ultimately, she decided that it was better to be a little early than to stand out in the cold so she went up the walk and knocked on the door. A woman answered. She was probably a little bit younger than Abby, pretty but harried looking. Abby could tell she had put on makeup and done her hair so that she might make a good impression. But all of the preparation couldn't hide the worry lines around her eyes. It couldn't hide the deep, deep sadness.

  "You must be Abby," she said with a smile. "Peter called. He and the others are running late."

  "Should I come back later?" Abby asked.

  The woman smiled. "Of course not. Come on in. I'm Melissa Benford."

  "Nice to meet you."

  Abby went into the house and Melissa took her coat. If anything, the house seemed smaller on the inside than on the outside. While she kept a clean house, Melissa could hardly contain the clutter. There were boxes here and there, as if she had recently been packing. But they looked haphazardly stacked, pushed out of the way. She wasn't packing. She had stopped packing. They went through a short hallway and Abby got a glimpse of a tiny living room with an old sofa and older television set. Even Abby's set at home was newer than that one. At the back of the house was the kitchen. Probably the largest room in the house, there was enough room for a round table. Normally, it would accommodate four, but Melissa had stuck three bridge chairs around it. Abby took one of the regular chairs.

  "Coffee?"

  "No thanks." There were some cookies on a plate, which Abby would do her best to ignore.

  "So, how do you know Peter?"

  Abby laughed mirthlessly. How indeed? "He didn't tell you?"

  "Something about the hospital," Melissa said. "He wasn't specific."

  "Oh. It was at the hospital. I had brought a…friend into the ER because he was sick. It turns out he had the zombie plague and he died and…well, he became one of them. Before we knew it, there were three zombies and we were all locked into the ER together."

  Melissa's eyes went wide. "You were there? Peter was there?"

  "He didn't tell you that either?"

  Melissa shook her head and sat down beside Abby. "I thought his hostility toward the zombies was just because he saw them come in and out of the hospital all day. I also knew that his hospital was where that had happened, but I never put it together. That's when it started."

  Abby nodded.

  Melissa looked away, her thoughts drifting from the conversation.

  "Peter's the one who locked down the ER," Abby said. "He was trying to protect the world."

  Now it was Melissa whose laugh was empty. "Fat lot of good that did." There was a lot of bitterness in that statement, true bitterness. For the first time, Abby saw what lay beneath the smile and the makeup.

  "Did you lose someone?" she asked tentatively.

  Melissa nodded and a tear came to her eye. When she realized it, she quickly swiped at it and grit her teeth, allowing her anger to smother her grief. "My son was twelve years old."

  Abby gasped. She knew that children had become infected. Heron had told her of Zoe Koplowitz, Larry's daughter. That poor girl was still holed up in the basement of Arthur Conroy Memorial Hospital. They kept her in a cellblock that they referred to as the Zoo. Confronting Melissa Benford, though, was a reality for which she had not been prepared. No matter how much time passed, she could not forget the utter dread she had felt when Sammy had been sick. If Sammy had had the plague, then, if he'd died and become one of those things, it would be Abby with the worry lines and sadness. All at once, she recognized Melissa Benford's motive for being there in the first place. Her trauma had left her wounded and she felt she could heal that wound with revenge. But would revenge against a mindless horde really bring satisfaction?

  After that, they struggled their way into and through some small talk. Abby told Melissa about the gym and what she did there. She mentioned her family, but spoke little about them, seeing the pain it brought the other woman. Melissa had been a single mom. She worked for a dentist as a receptionist and a bookkeeper. She was thirty six and had been with that particular dentist for twelve years. She had given everything she could to her son, Jason, and it had amounted to nothing. He'd come home from school sick one day and never recovered. Maybe he'd gotten it from another student. Maybe not. It didn't matter.

  At length, Peter arrived with four other people. He was delighted to see Abby and introduced his companions and their terrible stories one by one.

  Coming in close behind him was an older man. Rudy Gordon was in his late fifties. He was a black man who had grown up working high steel and railroad construction. Working hard had always been his precept and family had always been his solace. Two weeks before, he had taken his family upstate for some skiing and come back alone. It had been a classic zombie adventure where the family had awakened one morning to find that the whole world had been overcome. But it hadn't been the world. It had been just the bed and breakfast where they had stayed. A zombie had wandered in during the night and bitten both owners and the other guests. They hadn't found the Gordons during the night but had been waiting for them when they came out. Gordon had been forced to kill his wife, his son, and his son's fiancé. It was pure luck that he himself hadn't been bitten, although whether that luck was good or bad was still unresolved. Still, he'd gone to Sisters of Charity for a blood test upon his return and met Peter Ventura. Then he'd tended to the funerals.

  Just behind Gordon was Emily James. Emily was barely sixteen years old, all hard edges and grim thoughts. Her terrible story was probably more terrible than any zombie story and didn't have any zombies in it at all. Her father had left them when she was young. Her mother had paraded a series of boyfriends, including three stepfathers, through the house over the years. One of her stepfathers had killed her older sister. She would have gladly fed him to a zombie. And yet, she was a survivor. Abby didn’t quite know what to make of her. She found it unreal that she should be intimidated by a girl that was thirty years her junior, yet she worried about what
Emily thought of her. Peter had met her at the rock clubs. Emily had been sneaking into them since she was twelve. Peter had recruited her not because she wanted to fight against zombies but because she wanted to fight against something and have a chance at making a difference.

  The last two people came in together. Their names were Jeff and Belle Percy. If Abby had been told their names over the phone, she'd have thought them upper class snobs. Instead, they were a saddened middle class couple, huddled together against the cold without and the cold within. Belle's hair had the look of being once dyed but no longer. Perhaps it was the washed out color over time or the fading of her brown skin, but the colors didn't match. Jeff was prematurely gray of both hair and eyes. Their daughter Tiffany had been bitten a few weeks earlier while on a hunt. They had been given the opportunity to see her at Arthur Conroy but not for long. She became symptomatic after only a few hours and lapsed into delirium shortly after that. The doctors had politely but firmly ushered the Percy family away and they had never seen her again. Even her funeral was conducted without a body.

  Once the introductions were done and the coats put away, the group crowded around Melissa's kitchen table. Emily drank coffee like it was fuel and downed half of the cookies. True to her promise, Abby stayed away from both, but she found it interesting that Gordon politely took one or two. Jeff Percy took a couple and Belle ate one. Peter took a glass of water but left it sitting as he spoke.

  "We've identified three locations where the ZRA are collecting zombies. They've padlocked all of the exits and it doesn't seem likely that any of them can get out, but I've seen zombies push open a door before." He gave Abby a knowing look which made her distinctly uncomfortable. "Anyway," he continued. "As much as I'd love to go inside and take out every zombie, that's just not feasible. We're going to have to fight this war with paper and print. The ZRA have a pretty good propaganda campaign going and I'd like to be able to offer up something comparable."

  "I can do that," Emily said. "I'll write you a web site and it'll be number one on every search engine for fifty keywords."

  Peter smiled. "Good. I don’t think there's anyone who's more qualified to shove this right in the face of the internet community." He looked at the group. "They need to see that zombies take from us and that's all. In the end, they're nothing more than plague rats."

  "Peter," Abby said. "You should be careful with your language."

  They all looked at her and she looked at them.

  "What I mean is," she continued, "you're trying to get a point across without alienating people in the process. Remember that every zombie was a person. It's difficult for people to let go of loved ones under the best of circumstances. If they're walking around, no matter what state they're in, people want to believe that they can be brought back. You need to approach this with the opposite side of that emotional coin. Hate isn't going to buy you any support.

  " We're all here because we've suffered a trauma." She looked at the faces of the people around her. "Yours worse than mine. I know it's asking a lot from you, but I think we should publish your stories on the web site. If you tell people in your own words, the way you did to me, they won't be able to help but be moved. We'll get support from those who've also been affected by this plague. We may even sway a few people who are thinking the other way."

  Rudy Gordon was nodding. "She's right. Revenge doesn't cure grief. We're here to prevent others from feeling what we're feeling right now."

  Jeff and Belle Percy were nodding, too. Emily wasn't. Her cold stare remained cold. Abby looked up at Melissa. Maybe it was because of the few minutes they'd spent together alone, but Abby felt strongly about her. She knew the pain Melissa felt. She'd marched right up to its borderline and peered over at it. But there was no assent from Melissa. She had embraced her rage. Abby was a little worried about her.

  When no one offered up any other points, Peter went to the hallway and returned with a small box. Inside were leaflets. Abby glanced at one. In large black and white letters, it read, ZOMBIE SAFE HOUSE!

  "We also need to fight this war on a physical front," Peter said. "These three locations represent a danger to the community at large. I intend to paste these flyers all over the locations where the ZRA are collecting and hiding zombies."

  "Why don't we just tell the police?" Abby asked.

  Jeff snorted. "My daughter was bitten at Angus Construction Yard. It's this old place in Brooklyn. When the police found her, you know what they did? Nothing. I went there two days later and it was business as usual. I even saw a zombie wandering around on the grounds."

  Abby found it hard to believe that the police were doing nothing. With Heron in charge of the zombie squad, it seemed to her that he would probably clean out a place like that without hesitation.

  "Anyway," Peter said. "This will make it public. Anyone going by there will see the signs and begin to wonder. Eventually, the news people will catch on and then we'll really have made our point. When it comes out that the ZRA are the ones hoarding the zombies, it'll open up a can of worms that they won't be able to ever close. They'll be ruined."

  "Are we putting these up tonight?" Gordon asked.

  Peter nodded. "We'll split into three groups and each hit one location. Jeff, you and Belle have a car so you can go over to Angus. Put up the flyers all over the fence. I've got some cans of spray paint also if you want to go that far. Gordon, why don't you and Emily go into Manhattan. There's an older building way uptown on the west side." He reached into his pocket and pulled out a series of small papers and sticky notes. Looking through them, he found one and handed it to Gordon. "Here it is."

  Gordon looked at it and then at Emily. She gave no expression so they took that as agreement.

  "Great. Melissa, Abby, and I will hit the apartment building in Astoria. Can you all meet here at the same time in three days?"

  Everyone nodded except Abby who wasn't sure she would be able to find an excuse to get out. She also wasn't sure if she was happy having thrown in with this group. Neither of the activities that Peter had outlined were illegal or dangerous, but she was still wary. These people were motivated by destructive emotions. She was afraid of the where that river might take her.

  Minutes later, they were outside saying their goodbyes. Melissa started her fifteen year old Ford and waited while it warmed up. Peter exchanged some final instructions with the others while Abby stood by shivering. She noticed Peter lingering with Emily. They hugged before he came back over. That seemed odd.

  "Ready?" he asked her.

  She shrugged. Ready for what?

  Peter climbed into the front seat and Abby got into the back. Melissa pulled out and drove slowly, following Peter's instructions. There are no areas of Queens that are not populated but there are some that shouldn't be. Melissa drove for a short time until the lights on the streets grew dim and the buildings were dark and foreboding. Some of them had been condemned and bore hazard stickers on the doors and windows. Peter looked at each of these, reading off instructions as he went. Finally, excitedly, he told Melissa to pull over.

  Nestled between two buildings that still seemed to have some life in them was a squat building with blackened windows and peeling paint. Though everything looked old and out of use, there were chains through the doors and fresh padlocks holding the chains in place. Peter got out of the car and went right up to the building, bouncing on his feet like an excited little boy. Putting his ear to the door, he listened. Melissa shut the engine and the two women got out of the car. They followed him up to the door and waited while he listened.

  "I don't hear anything," he said. Then he rapped on the door twice.

  There was a pause and then the door bounced out, the chain keeping it closed. All three of them jumped back in alarm. After a moment, the door rattled again. Someone, or something, was trying to get out.

  "I think we have a winner," Peter said, running back to the car.

  Abby did not share in his exhilaration. While he and Melissa
split up the leaflets, she just watched the door, expecting a wave of the undead to come crashing through. But the thing behind it tried only twice more and then went still.

  "Keep alert," Peter was saying to her as he shoved a canvas shopping bag into her hand. "There's tape and glue inside here along with the flyers. Put all of them up. Watch out for anyone watching you." Then he left, running off to cover a different side of the building.