Dark Days (Apocalypse Z) (10 page)

“Nice to meet you, Alicia.” I relaxed a bit. “You know my story. Would you mind telling me what the hell has happened in the world?”

“Of course,” said Alicia, a more serious look on her face. “I warn you it’s not a pleasant story. Far from it. The world you knew is gone and now we have… Well, wait till you’ve heard everything.”

For a moment, I thought back, a little amused. Just a few months ago, I’d had a similar conversation on another boat with another “captain,” a conversation that started me on a journey that took me to the brink of death. I hoped this conversation would take me to some place more pleasant.

“At first no one took it seriously.” Alicia poured herself another cup of coffee. “During the first week, there wasn’t any reliable information. Putin let himself be swept away by the predictable Russian paranoia and declared a total blackout on the matter. You probably remember that the news was full of… nothing. Governments around the world were in pretty much the same boat. No one knew a thing. The Russians had a stranglehold on information and Western governments knew more or less the same as CNN.”

“How’s that possible? There’re satellites…”

“Satellites are only machines that take pictures. Humans ‘look’ at those pictures and interpret them. But before you can find something, you first have to know what you’re looking for. Back then, no one was looking for Undead in satellite photos, since almost no one thought they existed. Don’t forget that Dagestan was—
is
—a very remote place. Not much information was getting out at the time. Finally, eight days later, the U.S. government got a full report through a CIA source inside the Kremlin.”

“Eight days? It took longer than that for things to get ugly. Why didn’t someone do something in the meantime?”

“Simple. They didn’t believe the report,” she said staring into her coffee cup. “After 9-11 and the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction
in Iraq, U.S. officials questioned the accuracy of CIA reports. So when someone reported that the dead were rising from their graves and attacking the living, it sounded like a bad B-movie. No one took it seriously. They wasted some very crucial weeks.

“But the Americans knew something was brewing. And not the Ebola or Marburg or West Nile viruses—or any of the excuses the Russians gave that first week. And that
something
was biological. It had the Kremlin scared shitless, so scared they finally allowed a team from the World Health Organization and the CDC into Dagestan. European governments, Japan, and Australia also sent medical teams to control what they thought was an epidemic—”

“I remember it well,” I cut in. “Army medical battalions were supposed to collaborate with the Russians to control the situation.”

“And in the process, snoop around and find out what the hell was going on.” She shook her head, gazing into space. “Of all the bad decisions made back then, that was definitely the worst. Teams of hundreds of people converged upon the area just when the situation was critical. The infection was already out of control. Dagestan was a ‘hot spot.’ Thousands of Undead were swarming all over the place. Looking back, it’s so obvious, but at the time we knew almost none of what we found out later.”

Alicia Pons was silent for a moment, as she mindlessly rifled through the neat stack of papers in my file. Then she continued her story.

“Three or four days after the medical teams arrived, the situation became clear to everyone. Those medical teams quickly realized what they desperately needed in Dagestan was combat troops to kill those vermin. Unfortunately, they realized that after several doctors had been attacked by patients they’d thought were in shock.”

“Undead,” I ventured.

“Yes, that’s right. Teams deployed to the area were ordered to return to their home countries as fast as they could. Of course, they took their wounded with them. The Japanese may have transported a few ‘patients’ back so they could study the virus.”

“Good God,” I whispered running my hands through my hair. “Those medical teams helped spread the chaos.”

“Within forty-eight hours, a number of ‘patients zero’ turned up in virtually every corner of the world. Only isolated places like the Canary
Islands were free of infection. The few cases reported here were quickly dealt with. By then we had a pretty clear idea of what was happening. In all honesty, at first, no one knew what the hell the infection vector was. Unfortunately, it didn’t take long to find out.”

“How’s that possible? Anyone with eyes could see the cause-and-effect relationship between being bitten by an Undead and becoming one of them! What were they thinking, taking infected people back to Europe, Asia, and America?”

“As I said, nobody in his right mind believed the strange account of the dead coming back to life. It was too crazy to be true, like all the other wild theories circulating in those days. That theory turned out to be true, but nobody knew that at the time. Let me show you something.”

Coffee cup in hand, she rummaged through a black folder, took out some papers, and spread them out in front of me. They were pictures taken through a microscope, enlarged several thousand times. The first was of a strange cell culture. The cell walls were dotted with dozens of small volcano-shaped fissures. Part of the cellular material had been projected through those fissures and scattered every which way, while other areas looked charred, as if a tiny torch had scorched them.

She showed me another picture, enlarged to show the inside of those cells that were full, tiny dots. Some of the dots were projected through the same fissures in the cell wall and had impregnated other cells in the culture. In the last picture, enlarged the most, was a small, elongated, innocent-looking tube that was curved on the end. It reminded me of a shepherd’s crook.

“Meet TSJ-Dagestan.” With a flick of her wrist, Alicia spun the photo around till it came to rest in front of me. My gaze was riveted to that harmless-looking stick. How could that little bastard be responsible for taking the human race to the brink of extinction?

“Things started to get really interesting the second week. But before I go on, how about another cup of coffee? There’s so much more to tell.” The captain slowly filled her cup. I noticed she drank her coffee black.

“After two weeks, the situation was totally out of control.” She took a sip, winced, and added some sugar. “Information was erratic, fragmented at best, or it just vanished. Many countries closed their borders. But by then that was useless. It was like closing the castle doors after the enemy has gotten in. No estimates are a hundred percent reliable, but we
believe that seventy-two hours after the medical aid teams returned from Dagestan, the virus was already out of control.”

“How’s that possible? How could it’ve spread so fast?”

“Simple,” Pons patiently replied. “The TSJ virus is a very clever son of a bitch. Whoever designed it had a vast knowledge of virology and knew how to enhance those features that would ensure its ability to spread. Experts say that the TSJ-Dagestan virus started out as a modified strain of the Ebola virus to which part of the genetic load from other viruses was added. According to experts at the CDC in Atlanta, it was the work of a true genius. What do you know about Ebola?”

“Ebola?” I felt like a school kid taking a test. “It’s a hemorrhagic virus from Africa. There’s no cure for it and there are several strains. The press mentioned it a lot in the weeks before the Apocalypse.”

“The Ebola virus is a ruthless killer that’s transmitted through contact with bodily fluids—blood, saliva, semen, or sweat—making it a highly contagious pathogen. Within a few days, the infected person develops a high fever and a terrible headache. Three or four days later, its victim starts bleeding from every orifice as Ebola transforms their internal organs into a puree of dead cells. The blood flowing out their eyes, mouth, ears and anus is actually their organs reduced to a river of putrefaction. Ninety percent of patients die in a matter of days. It’s effective, fast, and lethal.”

“Fuck,” I breathed.

“But that effectiveness is its greatest weakness. Ebola is so lethal and so fast, it doesn’t allow its host to travel any great distance before becoming seriously ill. It originated in the heart of the African jungle, where travel is extremely slow and difficult, so outbreaks of Ebola affected people in a radius of a few kilometers. Ebola is such a perfect assassin, it kills its victims before they have time to spread the infection to new hosts.”

“Let me guess. TSJ doesn’t have that weakness.”

Alicia Pons smiled weakly. “Ebola is a common cold compared to TSJ. It’s transmitted by contact with bodily fluids, like Ebola. Saliva and blood are perfect breeding grounds. Once in a host, it multiplies rapidly and settles in the internal organs, which it starts to devour, like Ebola. At that point, the host is doomed. Within five days, he or she will be dead, turned into something much worse. That’s the moment little TSJ
demonstrates the evil it’s capable of. Unlike all other viruses, TSJ isn’t content to disappear when its host dies. Through a process we’re still trying to understand, TSJ is able to maintain the host’s dead body in a state of suspended animation in which…” She burst into bitter laughter, but stopped when she saw the surprised look on my face. “Why am I telling you this? You know as well as I do what happens next!”

“I think so. But I watched an infected person become Undead in a matter of hours, not five days.” The image of Shafiq, the Pakistani sailor from the
Zaren Kibbish
, flooded my thoughts. He’d been attacked by one of those monsters during our escape through Vigo. Later that night, Prit and I watched him turn into an Undead as we huddled in the back of a small grocery store. So I knew firsthand how grisly the process was. That seemed like a lifetime ago, but it had been less than a few years.

“He must’ve died from other causes. Most Undead reached that state in very little time. We estimate it takes between three and twenty minutes after an infected person dies for him to rise as an Undead.”

“So…”

“So, around fifty percent of people attacked by an Undead die on the spot or within the next hour from the injuries inflicted by their attackers. Twenty minutes later, they rise as Undead, and the diabolical cycle continues when people are scratched by an infected person or come in contact with an infected person’s body fluids. Splashed by someone’s blood or saliva… a thousand different ways. All those aid workers and soldiers returned home, unaware they were already carrying the death sentence for all mankind. Back home, they kissed their husbands, wives, children; shared a drink with friends in a bar… and spread the disease. When cases started to emerge, there wasn’t just one ‘patient zero’—there were thousands all over the world. The pandemic was already up and running before anyone realized it.” She ended in an ominous tone.

My head was spinning. I thought I knew how the virus was transmitted, but hearing an official confirmation of how virulent and easily spread that virus was way too much to process. I’d been extremely careful every time I touched one of those things, but I could’ve unwittingly become an Undead during those chaotic weeks, just like tens of thousands of people. The pieces of that awful puzzle were starting to fit together.

“How long can the damn things last? Is there a vaccine?” My thoughts were racing.

Alicia Pons studied me for a few seconds, debating what to say next. Finally, she clasped her hands on the table and swallowed hard. “From what we know so far, those beings can last indefinitely. The natural process of putrefaction is arrested or slowed way down. They don’t breathe, so their bodies aren’t subjected to oxidation. Their metabolism is so low they don’t seem to need nourishment. Those things could be—”

“Could be what?” An icy fist squeezed my heart. Deep down I knew the answer.

“Eternal,” Pons said in a hollow voice. “Humanity may have to live with them forever, unless we exterminate them… or they exterminate us.”

Her words echoed in my head like a gunshot. If I hadn’t spent a year living on the razor’s edge, constantly fighting those monsters, I’d have thought she was making it all up. I knew she wasn’t exaggerating, yet it all sounded so unbelievable.

“This is so… crazy,” is all I managed to say.

“Of course it is.” Pons stood up and walked over to a refrigerator. “Talking about people rising from the dead and attacking the living is crazy. The fact that they don’t need to eat, breathe, or sleep is also crazy. It’s crazy that they don’t decay or suffer any wear and tear—that they’re still moving around even though they’re dead as a damned doornail. No matter how unbelievable it all sounds, you know as well as I do, everything I’ve said is true.”

Alicia’s voice was muffled as she rummaged around in the refrigerator, clinking bottles together in her search. She scooped up a can of soda from the back of the refrigerator with a triumphant cheer. She stood up, turned around, and walked back to the table holding the can and a glass.

“Drink this,” she said, as she opened the can with a snap and poured half of its contents into the glass. “It’s always a shock to face events that reason and science say can’t be possible—and yet there they are. The reaction worldwide is very similar. And right now, you don’t look so good.”

I gratefully accepted the soda Alicia held out to me. My mouth was horribly dry. After I’d gulped down half the can, I felt a little better. But my head was still spinning.

“I was splashed with the blood and guts of those beings more times than I like to think about, Alicia,” I said hoarsely, trying to calm my
nerves. “If TSJ is transmitted the way you say, why haven’t I gotten infected?”

Alicia stared into the empty glass on the table, her mind far away.

“You know, you shouldn’t have drunk that soda so fast. That stuff is getting scarce, even on the black market. I hear it’s trading at astronomical rates. It may be a long time before you can afford to drink another.”

Her sorrowful eyes came to rest on the half-empty can, then rose to my face again. “If you or your friends had been splashed with blood, saliva, lacrimal fluid, or nasal mucus from an infected being, you’d’ve turned into one of those things. By now you’d have had a fair amount of lead in your brain, my friend,” she said, as she poured a little more soda. “That’s what the quarantine is for, so we can be one hundred percent sure that new people aren’t going to be a…
problem
.”