by Beth Hersant
In The Zombie Survival Guide, Max Brooks lists six things that could indicate an impending zombie outbreak. These include murders, disappearances, cases of “violent insanity,” riots, and the spread of disease. While Louella had never read the book, she gravitated toward these topics and it was amazing what her internet search revealed. The first article to come up when she typed in “Cannibalistic Attacks” was by Christopher Ingraham of the Washington Post. The headline read: “Americans bite each other literally all the time, data shows.” It noted that in 2012 there were 42,000 assaults in which one person bit another.
“Holy smoke,” Louella muttered.
The article broke it down: that equates to approximately 114 bites per day or one every twelve minutes. To put it into perspective though, in a nation of roughly 350 million people, biting attacks made up just 0.03 percent of all ER admissions. The statistics seemed to suggest that, while uncommon, the attack at Monroeville had simply been part of an established pattern. However, the article went on to mention that most bites (86% of them) were inflicted during bar fights. “Late night alcohol-fueled aggression,” particularly over the weekend or on public holidays, accounted for most of the injuries.
That wasn’t what happened at Monroeville — a weekday lunchtime attack. And, come to think of it, that’s not what happened in the case of Lance Jessop, who was out one afternoon working in his garden when Otis Hudson took a chunk out of his arm. And so she refined her search still further, looking for atypical attacks that involved bites. She began to find multiple examples of these clustered around certain areas. In Miami Eugene Redford, aka the “Causeway Cannibal,” ripped a man’s cheek open with his teeth. Was it another example to be placed in the same category as Monroeville and New Orleans? Maybe, maybe not. Redford could have been on angel dust or PCP — who knows? BUT his victim went on to bite a nurse at the hospital. She was missing and shortly after her disappearance, an elderly couple were attacked outside their home in a Miami suburb. Both sustained multiple injuries including bites.
Then there was Reading, England. Claire Milne entered the flat of her fifty-nine-year-old mother, Victoria Reinland. Finding her in the bath, she proceeded to attack her mom, biting her repeatedly on the legs and hand. During the altercation, she managed to sever Victoria’s thumb and was seen to chew and swallow the appendage. The following day police in the Reading area were called to a primary school to break up a mass brawl among the children. An article entitled, “School children beat up cops” outlined how thirty youngsters in school uniforms attacked the officers, seriously injuring two of them and leaving four others with minor injuries that included bites to their faces and hands. There were similar outbreaks of violence in Latvia, Ontario, Germany, China, Kenya and Brazil. A rabies outbreak was followed by another cannibalistic attack on the Caribbean island of Cáscara. And a Qantas flight from Berlin to Sydney descended into chaos when a man reportedly “ran amok” in the cabin, biting fellow passengers. In every case the violence seemed to be preceded or accompanied by an outbreak of the flu. The CDC or World Health Organization had been dispatched to all of these incidents. That was the most frightening thing. Those organizations did not involve themselves in trifles. So what exactly was this ‘flu’ and how was it linked to such outrageous violence?
Next she pulled up The Monroeville News website and was shocked to learn that the security guard, Jonathan Herridge, victim of a brutal assault at the mall, had died — an apparent suicide. The article cited his long battle with depression and friends speculated that the attack had been the “last straw.” The paper then recapped the details of the incident and noted that several of his colleagues had been treated at Forbes Hospital for bites and other injuries. It was an attack, the reporter noted, “that Romero himself would have filmed at the mall.” Another item, much smaller and further down on the website, reported on a local flu outbreak and urged the elderly to get their shots.
She printed out each of these articles. She saw them as beads on an abacus and slid one over with the addition of each new fact. She did not like what it was adding up to. And there was more. Within the affected areas, the local newspapers recorded an abnormal number of animal attacks. They were bizarre: a chihuahua savaged a coyote, a deer crashed through a family’s picture window and bit a man who’d just been sitting on his couch watching TV. And a pack of dogs — most with collars and tags — rampaged through a zoo biting the animals caged there.
Louella totted up all the beads on her mental abacus and had only one thing to say. “Shit.”
A woman seated nearby cleared her throat and when Lou glanced up, she was met with a disapproving look. Louella was surprised — not because someone objected to her swearing loudly in a library, but because there was anyone present to be offended. She glanced at her watch, it was past noon. She’d been at it for three hours. But those three hours had been enough to convince her that she was right: a storm really was coming.
That night she called a family meeting. “Family” in Louella’s mind was a broad term. It encompassed kin and close friends alike and so a small group of people crowded around her kitchen table. There was Peg and her husband Alec (their daughter Mae watched Scooby Doo in the living room). There was Sam, the grandchild she’d raised after her son and his wife died in a car accident. Her brother-in-law, Levi, was there (although his daughter Patience — the town sheriff — was on duty. His son Wyn was looking after his mother who couldn’t yet manage on her own since the stroke). And Fletcher came, of course, as well as Arnold and Bib Grissinger and Effie Dietz.
“You guys know what happened at the mall before Christmas. It’s just that …” Louella wasn’t sure how best to state her case. “I don’t think it was an isolated event. In fact, I think we’re going to see a lot more of it before too long.”
“What do you mean?” Arnold asked.
Louella produced the stack of articles she printed out at the library. She enumerated each one and passed them around.
“The same pattern seems to be repeating itself all over the world. There are vicious, unprovoked assaults. There is also an increase in animal attacks from both pets and local wildlife. And it’s all accompanied by the outbreak of some flu-like illness. Each of these locations represents a ‘cluster’ and,” she’d saved the article on Jonathan Herridge until last, “I think we have a new cluster brewing just up the road.”
She fell silent then and listened to the rustle of papers as they read through the articles. They’re going to think I’m stupid … or crazy, she thought glumly. Hell, she was starting to think that herself. She chewed on a thumbnail.
Fletcher Landis read carefully through it all and then looked at her appraisingly. He and Louella had been friends for going on sixty years (since kindergarten class at Midwood Combined Elementary and Senior High School) and he probably knew her better than anyone. She was, in the words of Kerouac, “my girl and my kind of girlsoul” — soft and maternal, but surprisingly tough. And she was smart. He was a writer often praised for his imagination and the meticulous research that went into his novels. Yet there were times when that woman, with her high school diploma, a baby on her hip and cow shit on her boots, made him feel like an idiot child by comparison. And that is why he knew that trouble was coming to Midwood.
“So on the basis of this, you …” He left the sentence open-ended and waited for her reply.
“I want to start stocking the farm up with supplies. And you all might want to consider coming out here to stay for a while.”
Effie spoke up. “I’m sorry, honey, but this is ridiculous.”
Louella had expected that response and was ready to challenge it. “Why?”
“Because … it is! This is Midwood! And you’re worried about things that are happening in Nairobi?”
“It happened in Monroeville,” Louella said quietly.
Levi’s voice was the next one heard. “I know that was rough, Lou. But it
’s a helluva jump from that to ‘let’s barricade ourselves in at the farm.’”
Louella nodded. “I know. I know we’re not in trouble yet. But I think before too long we will be and this time is our grace period — the only time to really prepare before …”
“Before what?” Bib asked.
“Before you all get an eyeful of what I saw at the mall.”
Effie rose with an exasperated sigh. “Sorry, Lou, but I’ve got more important things to worry about than made-up crap.”
“I’m not making this up! I didn’t write these articles.”
“No, but you are interpreting them to suggest that armageddon is right around the corner and I don’t buy it. Look,” Effie softened her tone because she really didn’t want to hurt her friend’s feelings, “you’re upset about what you saw. Anyone would be. Just give yourself some time to get over it before you start ordering MREs from Amazon.”
“Yeah,” Louella nodded, trying not to let her face betray the fact that she had cleaned Amazon out of their supply and had 144 Meals Ready-to-Eat winging their way to the farm as they spoke.
Effie leaned in, kissed her friend on the cheek and left.
“I know you all think I’m nuts,” Louella said quietly.
“No,” Peg shook her head and gestured toward the stack of papers. “It’s a compelling argument…”
“…but?”
Peg sighed. “But it sounds like a movie.”
“I know that too. I am also well aware of the fact that we’re all going to look pretty stupid if I’m wrong. It would be embarrassing to buy into the ramblings of an old kook.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“No, but that’s what other people will say,” Louella said gently.
Fletch interrupted mother and daughter. “So then surely the solution is that we prepare, but we don’t broadcast the fact. We quietly stock up, we keep an eye out for any sign of a growing … cluster in Monroeville and plan to meet out here if there’s trouble. If you are being overcautious, Lou, then nobody needs to know about it, do they?”
“It’s not a bad plan,” Peg nodded.
“If you’re wrong,” Fletch continued, “then what’s the worst that can happen? We all end up with well-stocked larders. It’s not exactly a hardship.”
This was met with silence as each of them thought it over. Louella felt appraising eyes on her and rose to empty the dishwasher. Seven people watched her stack dinner plates in the cupboard. She was smart, no doubt about that, and she was tough. She’d lost a son and a husband and had soldiered on to run the farm and raise Sam on her own. It took more than trifles to rattle her and she was rattled. That much was clear. But to buy into all this… Peg was right, it sounded like something out of a movie. You’d have to be crazy or stupid to …
In the end, Louella came away with assurances of support — made, not because they were convinced by her theory, but simply because they were a close-knit group used to backing each other up. As Ann Landers once said, “Love is friendship that has caught fire. It’s loyalty.”
Later that evening, with Mae finally in bed, Peg sat in her daughter’s room, rocking in the old chair and mulling things over. She had her mother’s logical mind and hence was doing some mental arithmetic of her own. First off, she trusted her mom implicitly. This was the woman who had always been there for her and who loved her without condition. This was the woman who gave her sound advice and comforting hugs and financial help — the undisputed matriarch of the family. And she loved her so much.
But then there was her theory: the idea that Midwood would be hit, well let’s just say it, by something akin to a zombie plague. It scared her, and not because she expected to see blood-soaked neighbors shambling down Main Street. It scared her because it called her mother’s mind into question. Was this a sign of dementia? Or was it just paranoia born of a hard life? After losing dad and Eben, she’d understandably be afraid of any more loss in the family. Maybe that’s why her mom was seeing the world as a Romero flick.
But what about all those printouts? They weren’t the product of Louella’s mind, that was stuff taken straight off the internet. While the net wasn’t always reliable, those articles had been gleaned from reputable sources like the BBC, The New York Times, Canada’s Globe and Mail. The facts in those reports were indisputable. The only remaining question was one of interpretation. Effie clearly believed that each of the incidents represented some of the random crazy of this world. With 7.2 billion people on the planet, of course there was going to be lunacy… But there would also be pandemics. It wasn’t that long ago that the Chief Medical Correspondent for CNN predicted that “The big one is coming, and it’s going to be a flu pandemic.” Wasn’t flu one of the elements that mom identified within each of those clusters?
“Oh balls,” she sighed.
“Honey,” Alec was a darker shadow in the dim outline of the doorway. “I think you’d better see this.”
The TV in the living room was on. Alec turned up the volume just as they played a video clip — an arial shot of what appeared to be a riot. People were running around, tackling each other to the ground as more and more people came piling in. It was, and this thought brought Peg up short, just like something out of a movie.
The scene then cut to a tanned reporter who explained, “These are the only images we were able to obtain from the island of Cáscara.”
“Cáscara — wasn’t that one of the places your mom…”
“Shh,” Peg cut him off.
The reporter was saying: “It would appear that an outbreak of sporadic, yet terrible violence has swept the island with many here in neighboring Puerto Rico fearful that the chaos will spread.”
An anchorman in the studio asked, “What do local authorities have to say, Jeff?”
“The police and local government here have no further information at this time. We do know, however, that the CDC sent a team to Cáscara to deal with a flu epidemic on December twenty-ninth and that the island was subsequently placed under quarantine by the U.S. Navy.”
“Is there any link between the flu outbreak and the violence we’re seeing?”
“The CDC has not commented on that. They did, however, issue a statement earlier today announcing that they were pulling their doctors out of the affected area.”
“Actually, Jeff, we have that clip in the studio now.”
The scene shifted to a press conference. A spokesman for the CDC, a Dr. Ellis Cheever, stood at the podium. He explained that, after the outbreak of a novel virus, the island was under strict quarantine and that all recent visitors to Cáscara had now been traced.
“Have any of them been exposed to the disease?” a voice off-camera was asking.
“Unfortunately, yes. We have identified isolated pockets of the infection at several different locations around the world. Each of these is now under the management of either the CDC or the World Health Organization.”
“And what about the outbreak of violence on Cáscara?” another reporter asked. “Is that hampering your efforts in dealing with the flu?”
“Local violence has effectively brought our efforts to a halt and today we’ve taken the decision to evacuate our personnel. It is, sadly, one of the hazards we face in trying to tackle global infections. We’ve seen it before — in the Congo in 2018. In that instance, we had to pull our Ebola experts out of the worst hit areas due to fighting between local factions.”
“Dr. Cheever!” A woman with a press badge waved at him for his attention. “Here’s the big question: how worried should we be?”
“About the spread of the infection? Right now, all of the facts indicate that we can contain the disease to the affected areas.”
“Have you found a cure?”
“Not yet. But we are working on the development of a vaccine.”
With the press conference over, it was
back to the anchorman. “In other news tonight, riots in New Orleans. After the shooting of Nicholas Durand, the second unarmed black man to die in police custody in twenty-four hours, there have been mass demonstrations throughout the city. We go now to Nikki Ford reporting from New Orleans. Nikki, I understand that one of the protests turned into a riot …”
A pretty blond reporter spoke earnestly into the camera. “That’s right, Steven. I’m standing in Jackson Square where a protest is currently in progress.” The camera swept over the crowd with their Black Lives Matter signs held aloft. “As you can see, things here are peaceful and orderly. But at seven o’clock this evening, a riot broke out at a public dock on Lake Pontchartrain. Local authorities are still trying to get the situation under control, but early reports confirm multiple casualties.”
Alec said quietly, “And New Orleans …”
“…was another cluster,” Peg nodded as she switched off the TV. They looked at each other for a long moment. Finally Peg broke the silence, “We’ll let Mae sleep here one more night and tomorrow we’ll move her out to the farm.”
By the time Levi got home, Ginny was already curled up in bed. And he was glad. He didn’t want to tell her about Louella’s theory. His wife’s recovery from the stroke had been slow and painful and she didn’t need any further upset. What was he going to say to her? That Midwood would soon turn into the Night of the Living Dead? What the hell was Lou thinking?
She’d always been so sensible — someone you could count on. Like after Ginny’s stroke: Louella had sat vigil at the hospital; she’d come in every week to clean the house and had stocked the fridge with enough food to feed an army. And he’d loved her for it. Which was why, of course, he hadn’t given her any grief tonight. All that shit at the mall had clearly upset her and, if by agreeing to stock up on canned goods and pasta, he could set her mind to rest, then so be it. But he couldn’t buy into it.
