There were eight chairs per round table, and more than twenty tables in all. The room was split in half. Straight ahead were two separate doors. Looked like one you entered to get your food, and the other you exited after paying. From here, I could see the white cash register.
The eerie red glow from mounted floodlights set a mood.
I wasn’t a man of words. If I had to name it, I’d label it: Distrust.
I sat at a table to the left of Gene. Allison, Charlene and Dave followed suit. We sat more side-by-side, despite the shape of the table. Gene nodded toward us, a clear sign of appreciation. Then he turned and faced his people, and with his hand, waved at the table next to us.
The group sat, but ignored the table next to us and instead opted for the opposite side of the aisle between the two rows. Gene shook his head and clapped his hands in surrender against his thighs. “Whatever. Fine. Sit where you’d like.”
“We need food,” I said.
“We’ll get to that,” Gene said. “We have food. Water. You--you’re bleeding. . .”
A guy at the other table jumped up, pointed a handgun at me.
Dave did the same, leveling his weapon at the man.
“He bit?” the guy said. He was big, dressed in black and yellow, hometown Pittsburgh Steeler get-up. Nothing like a die-hard of any sport. Always a little off their rocker, if you ask me.
“I don’t know, Andy. Who had time to ask?” Gene said. “Sir, were you bit by one of…one of those things out there?”
I shook my head. Wasn’t an easy way to explain it. “Cut myself in the plane.”
“The plane?” Andy said. “Lift your shirt. I want to see. I don’t wanna see any bite marks. I see bite marks, we’ve got a problem.”
“He doesn’t have to do shit.” Dave pulled back the hammer on his gun.
“If you guys want food, a place to rest, I’m afraid he does,” Gene said. Sounded like a diplomat.
I put my hand up to Dave to stop him. “They’re right. Lower the gun.”
I unzipped my vest, and lifted the flannel shirt up. The cloth material had dried to the wound. “If I pull, I’m going to start the bleeding again,” I said.
Gene took a step closer. “Melissa, please go fill a pitcher with warm water. Grab some napkins, too. Sir, why don’t you lie down on the table? Let me have a look.”
“You a doctor?” I said, missing Erway, more than just our token paramedic.
“I’m the school janitor, but I have training,” he said.
“EMT? Paramedic? You ride with an ambulance?” Charlene said.
“Internet.”
I laughed. Thought Gene might, too. He didn’t. “Wait, what? You’re serious?”
“Gene is a survival nut. One of those guys they might do a TV show on. You know, turned his house into a bomb shelter, can live off the land, that kind of thing,” Andy said.
“All from the internet?” I said. I hoped the sarcasm wasn’t dripping. “Like what? One of those preppers?”
“We pull that shirt off the cut, you’re right, gonna hurt.”
Melissa, with long dark hair, returned. She didn’t say anything but instead poured the water onto my chest. It wasn’t warm, as suggested. I cringed, and my muscles tightened as it soaked the flannel before I slowly lifted it off my skin.
“That’s nasty,” one of the other women said. “He’s going to need stitches. A lot. You say you got that from the plane crash?”
“More or less,” I said. I looked for Andy and locked eyes. “But I wasn’t bitten.”
“I’m convinced,” Gene said. “Kia, you want to run and grab the sewing kit. It’s right in the desk drawer in the nurse’s office.”
“I can do that.” Kia was taller than me, although I was only 5’8”. She had dark, black skin, big brown eyes and a very infectious smile. She appeared both confident and tough. I liked that. Strong and tough were two qualities that demanded admiration. For some reason, although, she hadn’t proven a thing, right now she had mine.
“While we wait, why don’t we introduce ourselves?” Gene said.
I closed my eyes. Ice breaking games and shit wasn’t what I was in the mood for. I wanted a shower. Late dinner. Cold beer. And, God, how long has it been since I’ve had a cigarette? Far too long. I wasn’t just jonesing, I felt itchy all over from withdrawal symptoms.
“My name is Gene,” he said. “This is my wife, Melissa.”
“Gene. Melissa. Hi. I’m Chase. As much as I want to do this, go around the table and discuss life. I think we need to make sure this place is safe, that those things can’t get in here. That they aren’t already in here making their way towards the cafeteria,” I said.
“Chase. I like that name. It’s different,” Gene said.
“I do, too,” Melissa said.
I hope I closed my eyes before I rolled them again. To say mental red flags were raised might have been an understatement. “Guys? Gene, I’m not kidding around.”
“Oh, we’re safe. Very safe. We cleared this place out. Wasn’t easy. Lost a lot of good people. Damned good people. It was worth the fight though, or so it seemed. All the windows are boarded, doors locked. Generator is running low so we don’t consume all of our resources. We’ve got a lot of dry food, and best of all, running water. There’s a weight room, Olympic sized swimming pool…”
“Gene. Gene. Can I stop you there?” I said, and sat up. I winced and Allison grabbed my arm, assisting. We didn’t want to hear shit about a weight room and swimming pool. Was this guy out of his mind? I could not imagine going for a dip any time soon. I saw Charlene out of the corner of my eye. She was watching them, her hand on the hilt of her sword. “We’re thirsty, I mean, very thirsty.”
Gene nodded and lowered his head. “Forgive me. I’m just, well…after the way we treated you. It wasn’t anything personal. I’ll be the first to admit I was surprised when you returned to help us. Because I’ll be honest, if the situations were reversed, I am not so positive we’d have come back. I’m sorry to admit that. I hate that it is what it is. But, well, I guess it is what it is, you know? Megan, Michelle, you mind getting them some nice glasses of water, please?”
“I’ll help.”
“Thank you, Robert,” Gene said.
Melissa, Megan, Michelle. Great. Kia, Andy, Gene and Robert. I sucked at names. “We appreciate it.”
“I can help, too,” Allison said.
“That’s not necessary,” Gene said.
“No. I want to,” she said, and gave me a little wink. I knew what she thought. I had the same idea. I wanted to drink and enjoy a nice glass of water, not worry something might have been slipped into it. Allison would ensure that at least nothing had been tampered with.
She followed them.
Kia returned, and held a small plastic box. “I have it.”
“We don’t have anything for the pain, I’m afraid,” Gene said. “This wound looks like it’s going to take a bit of sewing. It is probably going to hurt a good deal, but we can repair you. I can’t stress how important it is going to be for you to keep it clean, though. Without any antibiotics, you washing this area good is about all you can do to fight the chances of infection.”
“I understand,” I said. “You’ve done this before?”
He shrugged, cocked his head to the side. “Sort of. YouTube.”
I stared at him.
“I’m fucking with ya,” Gene said. He laughed. Slapped a hand against his thigh, against Kia’s back. “I’ve stitched a few times. Like five. It’s not so tough. Just that…that pushing the needle through someone’s skin is awkward. It’s actually pretty weird.”
Chapter Fourteen
I tried to ignore the hooked needle Gene threaded. As he used a lighter to sterilize the tip, Kia knelt beside me. I smiled or tried to. I took quick shallow breaths in anticipation of the discomfort headed my way.
“I was in my house when all of this started to happen,” she said. Talking to me was meant as a distraction. I thi
nk I preferred being stitched in silence, but wasn’t in a position to argue the point. “My husband and I. We’d had dinner, and were watching television when we heard sirens outside. There were police cars and fire trucks. About seven houses down, the place was going up in flames. Everyone was outside watching. You know how neighbors are. We weren’t any different. Thing was, the bizarre thing was, I didn’t recognize a lot of the people. They were everywhere. They came out of everywhere.”
I felt like a human quilt as Gene slipped the needle through my skin. The area was raw, and it felt more like a dagger being jammed into my side. “There we go,” he said.
“Look at me,” Kia said, and took my hand. I squeezed it tighter than expected when Gene tugged on the thread and pulled it through before dipping the needle into the next part of flesh. “The people were drawn to the flames it seemed. They reminded me of like, I don’t know, fireflies or something. I noticed that some of them just didn’t look right. They had bite marks, and peeled back skin. They looked like they were rotting. Their skin was purplish, and pasty, and that was when they started attacking the firefighters. Just, they just, went right at them. Tackled them. The fire hose dropped. It went wild. It sprayed everywhere with just tremendous force. It pushed back a lot of the…of those things,” she said.
“They don’t seem to like water,” I said.
Gene nodded. “We’ve noticed. Too bad we’re going into winter and not spring.”
“The police had their weapons drawn, but they hesitated. I mean, the idea of shooting people at the fire, it was all surreal, even to the officers on scene there, I guess. And my husband, he tried to help. He went after the fallen firemen, and tried to get those things off of them. He did, too. He got them off, but the guy he’d saved was apparently beyond help. And then they were on him. They got my husband and I just stood there, watching. They bit him and kept biting him, and…”
I pursed my lips as she cried. I didn’t have comforting words. There weren’t really any to share. “How did you get away?”
The needle hurt like a motherfucker. I couldn’t watch the work Gene did. While I didn’t want Kia’s distraction, I found it worked. Only I didn’t like seeing her this upset.
“Got away just barely. When the police started shooting, when they finally realized something was very wrong and opened fire on these things, on the zombies surrounding us--one of them yelled for me to run, to get out of there. I didn’t want to, you know. I wanted to help my husband. I didn’t go to him. I don’t think he was dead. But I ran. I left him. I…”
Now she squeezed my hand. Her shoulders shook in time with her sobbing. “It couldn’t have been easy,” I said. It was the best I could offer.
She tried to smile; fought to regain composure. “It wasn’t. It hasn’t been for any of us. And I’m sure it wasn’t for anyone in your group, either.”
I thought of Cash. I missed him. My heart felt so empty. “No. It hasn’t been.”
“We have water,” Allison said. She stood beside Kia and me, looking back and forth at us. “You guys okay?”
“Just taking his mind off Gene’s needlework.”
“It helped,” I said. “Thank you.”
# # #
“So they learn?” Kia said.
We sat at two tables in the cafeteria. There was indeed a lot of food. We’d prepared a meal of grilled cheese sandwiches and tater-tots. We used napkins and kept the food on trays. The tots were crisp and golden brown, and actually, so were the sandwiches. The flavor was amazing, even brought back childhood memories of similar lunches in similar cafeterias when I had been a teen.
“It’s what I’ve come to learn,” I said, after I’d explained my reasoning behind my assumption. I picked up a tot and drove it through a pond of ketchup and popped it into my mouth. As I wiped my fingers on a napkin, I said, “But I don’t know what that means.”
“Could mean a number of things,” Melissa said. She held a triangle wedge of her sandwich in one hand and a couple of tots on the tines of her plastic fork in the other. “I was thinking about this earlier. What if the vaccinations infected people, but wear off after a certain period of time? You know almost like it is a virus inside the vaccination. So the things out there,” she pointed at a wall with the sandwich wedge, “are, essentially, you know, sick.”
“And then what?” Gene said. “They become normal, human, again? Slowly, but eventually, they get better.”
“I haven’t seen any evidence of anyone getting better,” I said. “Have you? Has anyone?”
No one nodded. Kind of killed the theory; made it useless without something to support the idea, other than mere wishful thinking.
“What about the people they bit, would they become human again, assuming it was a virus?” Allison said.
“I was thinking about why some are fast and some are slow,” Megan said.
“Did you know Megan worked at The Living Dead Museum? It was created not long after George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead was filmed here. Right here in Butler County,” Andy said.
Go figure. “Didn’t know that.”
“I do. I mean, I did. But what I was saying, what I was thinking was, the problem with a zombie is that it’s dead, right? Reanimated flesh. Like what Frankenstein did with his monster. Brought a corpse to life, right?”
I thought it was rhetorical. When Megan didn’t keep talking, I verbally agreed.
“Okay, so what happens to a body the longer it is dead?” she said.
“It decays,” Charlene said, and dropped a tot back onto the paper plate on her tray.
“They do. That’s right. But until they’ve been embalmed, there is all of that blood in them. And if blood isn’t circulating, it’s pooling. So if a dead zombie is chasing people, sure, at first it’s fast. Eventually, that non-circulating blood is going to catch up with it. It’s going to all sit in the thing’s legs, right?”
“Right,” I said.
“So, rigor mortis sets in. It’s what makes them slower,” she said. “But not just slower. It also means they are decaying. Ever wonder why you can stab them in the skull so easily? The bones are far more brittle. If they were healthy, there’s no way I’d of been able to push a pocket knife, or even a hunting knife into the brain as easy as I have.”
“That makes sense,” Allison said. “I mean, that really makes a lot sense.”
I nodded. “It does.”
“But will they turn normal again?”
“I don’t see how they can. They’ve died. They’re dead. A better question might be, will they just eventually stay dead? Maybe the rigor mortis will stop them, and hunger and time will kill them, again, but for good,” Andy said.
“I still don’t understand why there aren’t more survivors, or government action, or military involvement,” Robert said. “I can’t believe that you guys are the last of New York, and we’re the last of Pennsylvania. That’s just, I don’t know, it seems impossible. Improbable. It all happened too fast to wipe out billions of people. Right? Or am I wrong? Am I missing something?”
“I agree,” Michelle said. “So none of us got the flu shot. There’s got to be more like us, people who are against it. Hell, the Appalachian area alone has got to be filled with people who didn’t get the shot.”
“There are probably a good percentage of people who didn’t get the vaccination, but have they survived not getting bitten, too? How many planes have crashed, or trains derailed, or cruise ships sunk, or are floating aimlessly about on the oceans?” Gene said. “Forget the military, they get vaccinated for everything. Those shots probably killed our armed forces in days. Days.”
And the military had a heads up, too. Just not a timely warning, unfortunately. I still suspected there were more military and political groups around, alive. It was a guess, of course, but seemed likely. “We have to assume pockets of people are all that is really left. Maybe pockets per county or town. Maybe only thousands of people per state, but not much more. I don’t know,” I said.
“It is pretty mind blowing.”
“So, I want to get this right,” Gene said. “Your plan--what you guys want to do--is go to…Mexico? That’s what you were saying, what you want? To cross the border because you think it will be safer there?”
I nodded. “It was my initial thought. Poorer countries didn’t vaccinate their people. It’s really all I was going with. I mean, this all came out of nowhere, I heard something on the radio…”
“Radio?” Gene said.
I shook my head. “That was days ago.”
“But they’d still have zombies. Travelers, and people that were vaccinated, and then people who were bitten, too,” Andy said. ”That country isn’t infection free. Or do you think it is?”
“They would have zombies, too. No doubt about it. But less than what’s happened here in our country. And the wall we built to stop illegals from sneaking into the U.S., could now be used to keep infected Americans out. You’ve got the wall and the Rio Grande as a natural border. The things hate water,” I said, but remembered the zombies aimlessly fell from the bridge over the Genesee River when we’d climbed onto the Coast Guard vessel. They didn’t know enough to stay away from the river, despite not appreciating water. If they learned, however, it might not happen again.
“But why leave? Why risk crossing the country to get there, when we have everything we need here?” Andy said. He spread his arms wide and looked around the cafeteria.
“He’s right,” Gene said. “This place is great, but it isn’t going to last. And hiding here, it’s not going to rid the country of the millions of zombies. We’d just be biding time until we eventually ran out of supplies. And we would run out of supplies.”
“We’ve got months’ worth of food,” Robert said.
“Exactly. Months. Then what? Then what do we do? Raids? Visit Costco and Sam’s Club?” Gene shook his head. He reached for his wife’s hand. “Chase has a point.”
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