Cities of the Dead: Stories From The Zombie Apocalypse (9 page)

“Biting them on the neck? That’s vampires, babe,” Charles said on the other end, his voice light, trying to find a way to disarm the situation, to calm her down.

“Oh, god, not vampires, Charles, zombies,” Brooke said.

“Did you call the police?”

“No, but they’re already on the way,” Brooke said. “Can you come get me and take me home?”

There was a pause on Charles' end. He was at work and his shift wouldn't end until midnight.

“What about your car?”

“I don’t want to go back that way,” Brooke said, turning her head to look up the street at where she had just been. “I’ll get it tomorrow. Besides, I peed my pants getting away from them, so I don't really want to walk around in public.”

She was sure she could hear the sigh on the other end of the phone, although she knew from fourteen years of marriage that Charles was good at masking his emotions and playing the person you needed him to be. He had come to LA years ago to be a screen writer, but she always thought he should’ve been an actor. Either way, he’d still be working retail, trying to break in. But that was all she had, now, and she felt an intense sadness knowing that it would be all she would ever get: just a normal life with a 9-5 job, an ordinary nobody for a husband, three demanding kids, and a DIY fixer-upper house in the suburbs. Dinner, laundry, daycare drop-offs and pick-ups, housework, and grocery shopping all suddenly re-materialized as weekly negotiations to be continued with her husband. Life had just been about to get exciting.

She hung her head in her lap. “Please, just hurry.”

The Lazarus Question

Atlanta, Georgia – Day 11

Geoffrey Haversill stared at the monitors showing Hristo Gruev and wondered what the hell was keeping the man alive. He had had nothing to eat or drink since being brought to the Centers for Disease Control’s headquarters a week ago, and the man had not died. Hristo Gruev wasn’t alive, either, not in any sense of the word that Haversill was familiar. But there Gruev was, on camera, swaying from side to side as if he were a blind man passing time listening to the rhythm of the world. Haversill paused as he thought that line, wondering what the musician’s name was … Steve? Stephen? Stevie? Not Stevie Ray Vaughan, though, that was the dude from Springsteen’s band.

Or was that Van Zandt?

Haversill drummed his fingers and stared at the man on the monitor, the dead man walking. There was no way for him to be alive. But, still, there he was, alive and kicking.

Haversill riffled through the paperwork on the desk, hoping something unusual or obvious would suddenly jump off a page, signaling to him what it was he was looking for. They had tried to subdue Gruev and get samples from him, but Gruev had fought them the entire time, injuring one of the medical technicians: Gruev was significantly stronger than a normal man given Gruev’s slim build and had nearly overwhelmed the team. The few samples they had managed to obtain had so far had yielded nothing.

So they had just locked Gruev in the room until someone higher up the chain defined the procedures to be used to examine him.

Haversill had been watching Gruev now for six days, and nothing about Gruev indicated the man was alive other than the fact he was alive. Confined in the small containment cell on the other end of the CCTV deep in the bowels of the building, Gruev never complained. Never asked for anything. Made only the most superficial efforts to try to get out. Gruev only reacted to stimuli when one of the technician’s would change his meal tray, but Gruev didn’t eat. He didn’t drink. He didn’t sleep. He just was.

“Got anything?” Sarah Purcell said as she entered the room.

“Nope.”

“The guy’s wife has gone to the Bulgarian embassy for help,” Purcell said, sitting down and tapping through menus on a laptop computer. “It’s only a matter of time until we have to release him.”

Haversill frowned. “I don’t know about that. He killed that morgue technician so he’ll go to jail in California before he goes back to Bulgaria.”

That jarred a memory awake. “The other tech and the coroner from the LA incident have both disappeared.”

“They disappeared?” Sarah asked.

“Yeah, it’s in today’s morning update,” Haversill said, motioning to a tablet computer on the desk. “The tech and coroner were both discharged later the day of the incident and the dead tech’s body had already been transferred to a funeral home. None of them have been seen since that day. They just vanished. And the dead morgue tech’s body was lost at the funeral home somehow. The LA people aren’t telling anyone this, yet, because they also can’t find any of the people Mr. Gruev barfed on while he was on the airplane.”

Purcell had an astonished look on her face. “So, everyone this guy’s come in contact with in the last, what, eleven days has disappeared?”

Haversill smiled. “Well, you and I are still here.”

A dull moan came over the speakers attached to the laptop, a plaintive, primitive call that caused Haversill and Purcell to look at each other.

“I swear it sounds like he’s saying ‘brains,’” Purcell said.

Haversill rolled his eyes. The entire facility was abuzz with the notion they had a zombie in custody. “Bowersox says that, too.”

The door behind them opened and in walked Carl Bowersox, the team leader for the group studying Hristo Gruev. He was holding a clipboard and flipping through a series of papers and photographs on it. He paused and let the door shut behind him, waiting for the sound of the latch to click before he looked up from the paperwork.

“Well, we still don’t know what he has, if he has anything,” Bowersox made a head move to indicate to the others that they all knew Gruev had something, it was just nobody knew what, “but one of the nuclear med guys ran a skin sample through a spectral analysis and found that the mitochondria in them all glow yellow.”

Haversill let out the smallest laugh while Purcell just furrowed her brows.

“Glow?” Haversill asked. “I don’t remember anything about them glowing, unless you put a laser on one.”

Bowersox pulled the pages from his clipboard and set them down on the table. He fanned the pictures out for the other two to see.

“Well, they don’t glow, Geoff, which is the strange thing about it,” Bowersox said. “Or should I say, the most recent strange thing about Gruev. But I’m willing to bet that whatever’s causing the glow is what’s causing our problems here with Gruev.”

Bowersox looked up at the two as Haversill and Purcell quickly exchanged a WTF? glance between them. Bowersox smiled.

“I’ve been here eleven years, Carl, and never once have I had to figure out why something was glowing,” Purcell said, tucking her hair behind her ears. “Not only that, nobody has ever had to figure out why something was glowing, and I’m pretty sure we have nothing – no equipment, no tests, no procedures, nada – that could be used to even start figuring out why Gruev’s mitochondria are glowing, much less come up with a reason for why they’re glowing yellow.”

Carl shrugged. “Yeah, I know, but I’m going to ask you to find a way to figure it out anyway. And we need to work fast. Everyone who’s come in contact with this guy in California has gone missing, and the locals are starting to panic big time. We should have something on this by now, but we’ve got nothing.”

Haversill tabbed through a series of folders on the laptop, scanned them, and looked up at Bowersox.

“He doesn’t eat. He doesn’t sleep. And he’s unresponsive to most stimuli. He tests positive for nothing, and now you’re telling us his mitochondria glow yellow,” Haversill said, running the back of his right hand across his brow. “But the big problem is going to be actually running tests on him. We barely got anything the last time we tried, and nobody wants to go in and try again. Have you seen the guy’s teeth?”

Bowersox nodded and shrugged. “Well, then we need to think outside the box and maybe venture into the realm of science fiction.”

Haversill shook his head. “Horror, you mean.”

“No, Geoff, I mean science fiction. Hristo Gruev is a real person suffering from something real that science can figure out. It might seem like horror, and let’s hope it doesn’t get to that, but right now we have science. And in this building we have some of the best scientists the U.S. government has. We need to figure this out.”

“So, we’re going to actually go down this road and figure out if he’s a zombie?” Haversill asked. “I mean, okay, so we put out that joke position paper on the Internet letting everyone know we’d know what we would be doing in the event of a zombie outbreak, but I thought that was just because we wanted the CDC to seem hip and cool while telling the public to have emergency kits in their houses and plans to deal with real-life possibilities. But zombies?”

Purcell tented her fingers. “Well, there’s no shortage of historical similarities to what Gruev is suffering from. It’s in just about every cultural history there is. In Europe they had what they called revenants, which were undead that walked and attacked the living. The Arabs had ghouls, often appearing as women who lived in the desert and seduced men into the dunes with their siren-like calls, and when the man would show up, they’d change form and devour them. Even the Chinese had a version of this, which established the death rite culture of binding the dead with ropes before burying them. It’s why we have locks on caskets.

“Pretty much almost any culture with a written history has a version of an undead person in it. A lot of it is just rooted in burial practices and a fear of the supernatural, that a dead person might come back to life for some reason if not interred properly, but there might be something more to it. It might make sense that there’s a contagion of some sort we aren't familiar with that mimics death but which we haven’t seen in a long time because of,” Purcell said and paused, her eyes flitted through the corners of the room as she thought, “... I don’t know, better diets or hygiene or who-knows-what. But there is a historical record to it.”

Haversill looked at her and tilted his head. “Really? And there’s a historical record of Minotaurs and Bigfoot and dragons - hell, every culture, especially the Chinese, have stories about dragons - and yet, no Minotaurs, no Bigfoot and no dragons. This is nonsense. If there were any real agent that both killed and reanimated a human body, we’d know about it.”

Bowersox chuckled. “Geoff, we’ve only had ‘modern medicine’ for about half-a-century, and the more we learn about it, the more we realize there is to learn. Don’t confuse the fact we have computers and diagnostic equipment that can peer into the human body in real-time, or our capability to create complex compounds to treat diseases, or the fact we can transplant organs from the recently dead into the living with the assumption that we know everything. We still can’t even cure the common cold.

“And, we have a man in containment in the sub-basement that has been documented to have died, but is now alive. There are only two other people in human history that can make that claim.”

“Two?” Haversill said, scratching his chin. “Jesus, okay, that’s one. Who’s the other?”

“Lazarus.”

Haversill made a “Duh, I shoulda known that” roll of his eyes.

“And I have no doubt that if we spent some time looking into it, we’d find similar stories in other cultures. So, it is entirely credible that there is at least a slim possibility that there is something out there capable of reanimating a dead body, and we need to figure out what that something is.”

Haversill looked at the monitor at the swaying figure of Gruev. His skin was gray. His eyes were blank. He looked almost angry. Haversill started in his chair.

“Shit, Carl, Gruev bit one of our guys that first day we were trying to get him pacified for samples. Do we know what happened to him?”

Bowersox shrugged. “If I recall, he was treated and released. It was a rather minor bite wound.”

“We need to find him. He’s the only guy we know of for sure who’s been potentially exposed to whatever Gruev has. If this is zombie-plague-whatever, then we need to test him. If he’s okay, then we’re on to something else.”

Bowersox sat in his office staring out the window at the Centers for Disease Control campus, pondering the complexity of the modern world. Various forms of plague had spread the globe in the past, and there had never been anything mankind could do about it. Infected fleas traveling on rats in the holds of ships or the backs of beasts of burden moving along the ancient trade routes had spread The Black Death across the planet, killing scores of millions. It was impossible to know, but estimates ranged from thirty to sixty percent of the world’s population had died as a result. In modern times, somewhere close to 100 million people died during the Spanish Flu outbreak in the early 20th Century, almost five percent of the world’s population, and roughly a half-a-billion people had been infected at one point or another – a quarter of the planet’s population.

He and his compatriots in the field of disease control knew more now about pathogens and their spread, but he was nowhere near confident that the knowledge was useful in containing the world’s bugs. Mankind had grown much more mobile since then, and there was still no way to detect or stop the unspeakable horrors gestating the in the gut of a flea, or the nasal mucus of a traveling salesman. Who could know the devastation of a biological agent spread through the malfeasance of even a few determined actors? For all he or anybody knew, Gruev’s trip from Bulgaria to America had been a deliberate way to infect a certain segment of the modern world with whatever it was Gruev had.

And now, Bowersox had a real problem on top of that. Morgan Stanhope had been bitten by Gruev the day they tried to restrain him for medical testing, and Stanhope was now off the grid. An emergency response team had gone to his house just hours ago and discovered blood and bodily fluids on his bed, indications of something traumatic, but it would be a while before the samples yielded anything. The data all pointed one way: pandemic.

The authorities in Los Angeles had been warned to expect an outbreak and prepare for containment once it was identified, but everyone in-the-know was certain that any action would come too late, and that a horde of Patient Ones were likely already out in the world.

The only good thing was that the disease didn’t actually seem to kill the subject, or at least not for long, so there was the possibility that whatever the agent did to a person could be undone. But where to begin to figure that out? It had taken six men in special protective clothing to restrain Gruev long enough to get a bite shield over his mouth. None of the tranquilizing agents they had shot into him through the slot in the door ha
d had any effect, and tasering him worked only so long as the charge was active. Studying him was going to be difficult, at best, if he were going to be kept alive. Or, rather, undead.

Not that anybody had argued for killing Gruev, since he was clearly a victim of something. They were there to figure out what he had, find a way to keep it from spreading to the general public, and then come up with either a cure or a quarantine plan to deal with the infected. But if they couldn’t do what they needed before then with a living undead version of Gruev, it would only be a matter of time before someone advocated killing him and dissecting him. The ethical implications of this possibility boggled Bowersox’s mind.

Bowersox thought about what they knew so far of the situation. They had a contagion that could kill a person and revive them inside a twenty-four to ninety-six hour window. Gruev had been feeling slightly ill for several days before he got on the plane, but once he had, the symptoms had overcome him, and in the flights from Bulgaria to America he had become delirious and died. About twelve hours after that, he had risen from the dead. Now, he was undead.

Bowersox thought of Lazarus, of what it must have been like to be dead, his body lying still in its tomb, and then to have had life placed back inside of him. What is life if it can be taken from the body and then returned to it? What is ‘life’ as a zombie? Haversill said Gruev seemed angry, and Bowersox had remembered a conversation he’d had with his daughter a decade earlier while they had been watching an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in which Buffy had been resurrected. Maybe the dead didn’t want to come back to life. Buffy hadn’t. Maybe whatever came after this existence was worth the wait of going through it, no matter how long or short the stay on Planet Earth had been.

Maybe coming back from the dead would make you angry; you might just want to eat the living, make them pay. Jesus Christ had called Lazarus back to life from the grave, and Bowersox realized he had no idea what Lazarus had done after his grave clothes had been removed; it was all supposed to be evidence of the promise of life after death. It had never occurred to him that Lazarus would have had to return to all the hardships and drudgeries of life. Bowersox had always assumed it was allegory, not reality. He was going to have to look into his Bible and maybe call Pastor Tom after he got off work: why would Jesus call back to life on Earth a man who had died and was living in Heaven?

He drummed his fingers on his desk and gazed out on the city through his windows, acutely aware of the many errors of the past week-and-a-half. “We’re going to have to figure out what yellow means.”

Gold Gu
ns Girls

Moscow, Russia – Day 269

Fyodor Volkov had everything in the world he had ever wanted, and it meant absolutely nothing. It was worth nothing, too. Mostly, anyway. He had spent twenty years climbing to the top of his ... field ... and now that success was rendered moot. He was busy surviving from day to day just like everyone else, foraging for food and water, avoiding military patrols and killing zombies.

He opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling in the darkness of the bedroom. Fyodor had no idea what time it was. The clocks on the various pieces of electronics had stopped working when the electricity had died months ago and he had never been one to wear a watch. He moved his hand and felt Natalie’s bare ass beneath the sheets. He glanced over and saw the river of blonde hair cascading over her naked shoulders and across the sheets pulled up over the small of her back. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever made love to.

Scratch that. She was the most beautiful blonde he had ever had sex with. Fyodor Volkov had never known love, not romantic love, anyway, and had learned over the years to stuff the desire for such a connection into a small recess in his mind near the spot where his skull met his spine. Sex was easy for him, made almost simple by the fact he had become rich in his twenties, was good-looking and had figured out how to talk women into bed before he had money or status. He had game, and he knew it.

He squeezed Natalie’s ass between his fingers and thumb, a quick pulse that might have made it through to her deep-sleep sub-consciousness as a sign of affection, slipped out of bed and walked into the living room. He pulled up a bottle of Stoli from an end table and tilted it into his mouth, letting the vodka slip in over his tongue and fill his cheeks.

And now here he was: thirty-eight years old, two bastard children – probably dead, along with their mothers, but whom he loved (the children, not the mothers) – apartments in Paris, Rio de Janeiro and Dallas, a custom-built Ferrari, a Sports Illustrated swim-suit model from Texas sleeping in his bed and everything he wanted whenever he wanted, and it might as well have been nothing.

He tapped a cigarette out of a pack and flamed it to life with a gold-plated lighter Natalie had given him last Christmas. He inhaled deeply and held the smoke in his lungs, noting the sensation of fullness that was only slightly different from a lungful of air, and then blew the smoke out in a stream. He stared at the cloud of smoke as it twirled in the currents of the room, thinning out and fracturing as it dissipated.

“Hey, Vasily, wake up,” Fyodor said, kicking his drunk friend lightly on the bottom of a foot protruding from a blanket where Vasily lay on the couch.

“What?” Vasily asked. He hadn’t been asleep, either.

“Do you think zombies can die of lung cancer?”

Vasily opened his eyes at this. “What?”

“Lung cancer,” Fyodor made a demonstration move with his cigarette, lifting it in the air for Vasily to observe, then took a drag from it. “If you had lung cancer before you turned into a zombie, would the cancer keep eating away at you after you were a zombie?”