Zombie Fever: Origins

by B. M. Hodges

  There was an emergency exit near Tomas but its two-foot thick shutters had closed blocking his retreat. A fork lift sat idle in the hallway facing the exit. Tomas jumped onto it and by raising the fork into a tall stack of wooden crates, managed to create an avalanche onto the lower end of the travelator, momentarily blocking the security guards from reaching the first floor.

  Then Tomas grabbed a tank of oxygen from a rack and hefted it into the driver’s seat against the gas pedal, released the brake and unleashed it on the shutters.

  The fork lift accelerated into the shutters, pulling them off their hinges, and bursting through the double doors. Tomas climbed over the wreckage and squeezed through the opening. He did a quick sprint away from the damage then slowed to a casual walk in the direction of the front gates.

  San Diego fire trucks and emergency personnel had come through and responded to his call with everything they had available. There were countless firemen evacuating workers and spraying the roof of the administration building where his first two supposedly low-yield explosives had turned the building into a raging inferno, billowing black smoke and flames rose above the structure. Stunned Vitura employees gathered in groups towards the perimeter gate, mouths agape as they watched the fire dance and leap across the central walkway onto the other buildings setting those ablaze as well. The rear building where Tomas had just escaped was yet to be touched by the flames but it was obvious that the fire was out of control and it was just a matter of time before all the buildings were ablaze.

  “You!” a fireman supervising the fire noticed him in his guard’s outfit walking towards the administration building, “Get back towards the fence with the rest of your colleagues. We don’t need your assistance up here. Make yourself useful and tend to your personnel.”

  “Yes, sir!” Tomas saluted.

  Well aware that the remaining guards on duty had been alerted to his presence and were combing through the compound below, Tomas walked towards the groups of Vitura employees, casually turning towards the curved path that led up the hill to the gates. He slipped out of the compound as two more fire trucks drove inside, sirens blaring, their red and white flashing beams lighting the night.

  The Nighthawk fired up and Tomas took off towards the freeway. He roared up the onramp and, instead of turning south towards Lindbergh Field and his awaiting plane he turned north instead.

  Vancouver was a long, long motorcycle journey from San Diego, more than a thousand miles of road grime and blacktop.

  Tomas vaguely wondered if the thirty year old motorcycle would be able to handle the trip to Canada then shrugged off the negative thoughts as the cool night hit his bare face under his black half helmet, the air crisp and salty.

  Tomas gunned the engine and as the miles ticked by, tried to empty his mind and keep his thoughts in the present and the physical sensations that kept him rooted in the moment; on the sound of the engine, the smell of the ocean, the vibration of the motorcycle underneath.

  But his father’s fate and thoughts of zombies kept creeping back in.

  The End.

  Additional Works by B.M. Hodges

  Horror

  Zombie Fever 1: Origins

  Tomas decides to spend the summer with his father, who works as a security guard for

  Vitura Pharmaceuticals. Soon after his arrival, his father disappears without a trace.

  Tomas searches for his father, only to discover Vitura is more than it seems to be.

  Zombie Fever 2: Outbreak

  A young woman is cast in a reality TV show. Zombies are running rampant.

  The contestants race cars deep in the Zombie Quarantine Zone.

  Who will become infected with zombie fever?

  Who gets eaten by the zombie horde?

  And most importantly, who wins the million dollar prize?

  Zombie Fever 3: Evolution

  In less than twenty-four hours, the Zombie Fever virus has mutated and is out of control.

  Vitura has sent Jayden to hunt down Tomas and Abigail and bring them back, dead or alive.

  Tomas must find Abigail and get to her to safety.

  Only they can stop the virus from becoming a global killer.

  Science Fiction

  The Martian Escape Plan

  (Coming in November 2012)

  After leading a failed effort to colonize the Planet Earth,

  Darius Janner thinks he’s finally found a way home.

  Dystopian Rodent Literature

  Buddy the Rat

  An innocent rodent subjected to fickle fate.

  Sent to a house filled with the worst of humanity.

  Escaping and finding solace in a forbidden love.

  Yet peace will not be had. Onward he travels...

  Short Stories

  Germaphobia Singapura (An Annoying Short Story)

  Roy had always dreamed of living abroad in the tropics, somewhere remote and exotic.

  So accepting the offer to teach in Singapore was a no-brainer.

  But poor Roy failed to anticipate how living in one of the world's most

  densely populated cities would arouse his intuitive preoccupation with cleanliness.

  Naively Irrelevant (A Bitterly Short Story)

  An ode to the anguish and bitterness of infidelity.

  Thank you so much for purchasing Zombie Fever 1: Origins.

  I hope you've loved reading it as much as I loved writing it.

  If you enjoyed this book, please consider leaving me a review at Amazon.

  About the Author

  B.M. Hodges was born in Utah, U.S.A., in 1973. He studied in the United States and Singapore where he was awarded a Master's Degree in Literary Studies. He began his writing career in 2008 with the dystopian rodent literary novel Buddy the Rat. In 2012, he published Zombie Fever 1: Origins and Zombie Fever 2: Outbreak and, most recently, Zombie Fever 3: Evolution. He is currently living in South East Asia and working on the fourth installment of the Zombie Fever series that will be released in March 2013.

  ******

  Bonus Preview

  Zombie Fever 2: Outbreak

  ******

  IMAGINE grainy, shaky handheld footage of crowds running frantically down dim-lit streets. See the bloated carcasses lying in pools of green-tainted blood and guts with their crushed skulls and random bullet holes. Cut to hospitals overflowing with feverish patients strapped to gurneys, chairs, to each other. Can you sense the fear and panic of family members holding onto their loved ones as they struggle against their restraints, biting at the air towards healthy flesh, eyes unfocused and bloodshot as they seek to spread the virus? Listen. Can you hear the gunshots and screams resounding in the night?

  This is zombie fever and the reality of the contagion isn’t pretty.

  I know as I’ve seen the contagion first hand.

  I’ve witnessed the devastation and carnage the disease wrecks on innocent people.

  Now ask yourself if you’re the type of person who devours these sights and sounds brought to you by so-called journalists in flimsy hazmat suits with their sensational tabloid stories of the walking dead. Are you one of the millions who gets voyeuristic chills from viewing those poor lost souls shuffling around in the streets consumed by a primordial cellular hunger, destined for a death from starvation, dehydration, exposure or a bullet in the brain? Have you bought any of the merchandise? Watched the blockbuster film? Did you play the video game?

  Like most people, you probably answered ‘yes’ to most of these questions.

  Heck, not long ago I was just like you.

  I was even a willing accomplice in the exploitation of the disease and its tragic sufferers. In fact, I was one of the participants in that reality TV show that you may have watched right before the global outbreak that originated in Singapore and spread across Indonesia, Australia, then Europe, Russia and North America. You know the show I’m talking about, the one where they sent pairs of contestants in Cera cars to compete in events, racing throu
gh Malaysia during the height of the zombie outbreak. Even if you didn’t catch it, I’m confident you know what I’m talking about. It was an international phenomenon, very popular, and the precursor to the outbreak of zombie fever that spread throughout much of the world.

  Although, if you are one of the millions who saw and believed the events that occurred during the simulcast of the final day of the Cera’s Amazing Rally Showdown, I’m here to tell you that what you witnessed was carefully and artfully manipulated to show a sequence of events and outcome that were, well, not entirely true.

  Maybe I shouldn’t wreck your perception of those days’ events, but you need to know the facts. Believe me, I’ve contemplated keeping silent. After all, we’ve been practically blamed for the beginning of what some would say was the end of humanity. And who am I to try to change public opinion?

  But I need to tell my story because I feel compelled to try to convince you, the world, that it was the show’s production team that was to blame for the virus escaping the quarantine zone and not, as the media have portrayed, the honest and dare I say naïve contestants who were merely vying for a million dollar potentially life-changing prize.

  So with your permission, I’d like to recount that week of filming as clearly as I possibly can down to every detail that I can think of. And I’ll try to keep conjecture to a minimum and just try to tell you as factually as possible about the events that Jamie and I participated in throughout the Malaysian Peninsula and back in Singapore for the grand finale.

  However before I begin, please bear with me for a moment so that I can give some background details about IHS, i.e. zombie fever, for those people who’ve been living under a rock or who simply go out of their way to ignore mainstream media.

  As you well know, IHS is a viral infection that turns people into zombies.

  Well, not zombies per se.

  Unlike the zombies you see in the movies or read about in books, real life victims of IHS aren’t actually dead. We’ve all heard countless times from the experts parading around espousing their clinical diagnosis of the zombie plight. They say that the infected are survivors of a virus that begins with a raging fever which destroys most of the brain’s cerebral cortex. Meanwhile, the infection floods the extremities with a greenish viral soup of contagion causing a grotesque swelling the infected’s limbs, their taut skin reminiscent of overstuffed sausages. The virus then seizes control of the host and sends a never-ending loop of instruction, something along the lines of, ‘Seek out humans. Hungry, Hungry, Feed!’ Once the smoldering fever cools, the bloated near catatonic shell of the former person rises with a new lease on life. An existence, however, that is now restricted to a never-ending appetite for living human flesh.

  Like SARS and H1N1, we’ve been told that IHS originated in animals but instead of pigs and birds, this time the critter culprits are tropical ground squirrels. Those experts say the virus jumped from squirrels to humans in rural Asia where tastes are more exotic and where it’s quite common to clobber those adorable creatures over their cute little heads and, after careful preparation, mix a little of its meat with rice or noodles depending on your preference.

  I remember when I first heard about the first documented IHS outbreak. I was sitting around one evening with a group of friends at a nearby bubble tea café and having a great time chatting about math homework and netball. Out of the blue, the café owner rudely interrupted a rather handsome athletic young man singing karaoke to a Canto pop video. The jerk switched the feed streaming on the big screen that made up the rear wall of the café from the karaoke station to international news, leaving the hunky crooner hanging in the middle of the chorus. Then the café owner cranked up the volume, forcing us to listen to an English speaking reporter in the middle of announcing that something terrible had happened in the Guangdong province of China.

  Flashing on the screen, the caption read, “ZOMBIE ATTACK!” just like that, in all caps.

  The broadcaster was in the middle of his report but the gist of the story was that after a meeting of the brethren, clan members from a secret society in Guangzhou discovered that one of their own had collapsed on the floor in the rear of their clandestine conference room. At the time he was uncommunicative and had a dangerously high fever. The clansmen rushed him to the most experienced practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine in the Panyu district. The acupuncturist and his hunchbacked female assistant attended to the new patient while three helpful clansmen held their colleagues thrashing limbs against the steel doctor’s table. Utilizing his expertise, the medicinal practitioner inserted a long, thin needle into a pressure point in the ailing gentleman’s thigh just above the knee intending to lower the man’s heatiness. As if under a great deal of internal pressure, a gushing fountain-like expulsion of fluid erupted from the small hole, expelling a putrid smelling greenish-yellow puss into the air and infecting all in the room save for the surgical mask wearing doctor who had erroneously inserted the needle into the taunt and swollen leg in the first place.

  Within twenty-four hours, those three clansmen and the hunchbacked female assistant passed the contagion on to their close family members. Within a couple of days, it was estimated that there were over thirty-two thousand infected wandering around the Panyu district of Guangzhou, scaring residents and tourists alike with their herky-jerky shuffling advances and monotone moans of hunger.

  Fearing that the contagion may spread, the Chinese military ordered the carpet bombing of the entire area, effectively eliminating the spread of the contagion along with, unfortunately, about a quarter million of their citizens who were unlucky enough to be in the hot zone.

  We listened politely to the news report and then the café owner switched the screen back to the karaoke feed and we went back to our inane conversations. That may surprise you, but our response to the news wasn’t unusual in Singapore. Most Singaporeans responded in a similar unconcerned manner to the zombie outbreak, considering the news was about China and so far away from our daily affairs.

  As for the rest of the world, instead of the global panic you’d expect, the response to the new disease was more akin to a morbid fascination with the footage and news stories. Maybe it was the overblown hysteria brought about by the nerfed pandemics of SARS and H1N1 that caused a kind of pandemic apathy. Then add to that the last few decades of terrorism, war, torture, economic upheaval and severe natural disasters brought about by global warming. Who knows? But instead of the alarm you’d expect, people across the globe accepted this new reality with curiosity and awe. Cable ratings of shows covering the contagion’s advance across Asia were off the charts. Internet networks crashed from millions of hits each time a new clip of some unfortunate wandering bloated soul was uploaded onto the web.

  “Zombies?”

  “You serious?”

  “WTF?”

  “Get out! Zombies are the stuff of horror movies not day-to-day life!”

  “Infected people walking around trying to eat other people? What up wit dat?”

  “Awesome!”

  Stories of zombie sightings and outbreaks became daily news and the butt of many late-night comedian jokes. They morphed into wet market gossip between aunties here in Singapore and idle chit-chat around water coolers in high-rise corporate offices of business districts around the world.

  Many of these zombie tales became reminiscent of folklore, having been absorbed into the collective consciousness. One of my favorites is the one about the supposed second IHS outbreak. I’m sure you’ve all heard this one, but it bears repeating and, I confess, I enjoy telling it as well.

  About two months after that initial outbreak in Guangzhou, an aged rice farmer turned zombie shuffled and lurched his way into Tangxi village on Hetang Island in the early hours of the morning and fell into the communal well, wedging himself upside down. An auntie in need of a bucket of water for the morning washing up came upon his two bulbous legs protruding out of the well, kicking slowly in the frigid pre-dawn air. She ran to
the large ancient iron-caste bell in the main square of the village and rang out for emergency assistance.

  Not realizing what they were dealing with obliging villagers answered the call, went to the well and pulled the zombified farmer free. Once upright, and to the astonishment of his rescuers, the farmer promptly tried to eat one of them. Fortunately, an elder of the village had wisely brought his small black-market pistol to the village center and, after hearing the surprised screams from his neighbors at the well, stepped forward, pulled the .22-caliber revolver out from his dingy robes and pointed it in the direction of the moaning farmer. When the zombie lunged a second time for the exposed fleshy forearm of a simple but helpful young woman, he put a bullet in the farmer’s left eye, slowing and eventually stopping the unsightly gnawing motion of that blackened diseased mouth as it stretched towards the bared limbs of his rescuers.

  Regrettably though, while the infected rice farmer was wedged upside down in that village well, his saliva and stomach acid had dripped down into the drinking water. Within a week, most of the villagers were either down with a debilitating fever or up and walking around with an inappropriate appetite.

  The moral of the story of the zombie farmer and the well are twofold. First, kill the infected immediately by any means necessary and second, stop drinking from communal wells, you stupid peasant hicks.

  I can’t decide if that story of the zombie farmer is supposed to be funny or serious. And the only shred of evidence that gives this story credence is that around the time of this second supposed outbreak, the Chinese military carpet bombed the entirety of Hetang Island, calling it a ‘routine military exercise’.

  Anyway, the original Guangdong outbreak was four years ago.

  Since then, isolated cases of infected and pockets of contagion have continued to crop up around Asia. There have been sporadic reports of the fever in parts of Java, Myanmar, Vietnam, North Korea, Mongolia and Malaysia.