Medora: A Zombie Novel (32 page)

Standing up from his chair, Stark looked at Dr. Louis. “What is it?” He asked.

“I think I know what to do.” He ran out of the room.

Skipping each step, he was making sloppy calculations in his head, trying to estimate
impact radius and atmospheric effects. He was delirious with the amalgamation of ideas that were racing in his mind. This is it, he thought. I suppose this is the way it is supposed to be. I am here, right now, to figure this one out.

At the top of the
steps, he sprinted down a long corridor towards the patient floor where he kept the satellite phone. Bursting through the double doors, he found the phone and dialed Rambert.

“
Rambert,” Rambert said calmly.

“Detonate the nukes in the sky!” Stark shouted into the phone.

“Why?”

“It was the electrocution of the woman that destroyed the virus in her. The
nano-virus must short circuit when exposed to an electrical current. I just passed a small current through me and the virus is all broken up now in my blood.”

“You’re kidding me?
How?”

“I’m not sure but it might have something to do with the metallic nature of the nanoparticles, making them susceptible to electricity or magnetism.”

“Wait, so what does blowing up a nuclear warhead in the sky have anything to do with this?”

“Because,” he said excitedly, stumbling over his words, “because if we detonate in the sky, about
fifteen miles up from my very rough estimation, the explosion will create a high-altitude electromagnetic pulse!”

“What will that do?”

“A pulse that large could potentially have the same effect as passing an electrical current through all of the infected people. It would be like casting a gigantic net of electromagnetism all over the eastern seaboard. We could disable the virus in all of the infected people with just a couple of nuclear detonations.”

“That’s crazy, what about the fallout?”

“No! That’s the beauty. We will get a large EMP without the destruction or the nuclear radiation from the actual detonation, which could destroy the virus without hurting human tissue. All the radiation will just go out into space.”

“Are you sure about this?”

“Yes, I studied electromagnetism and pulses for ten years. I know this stuff. Everyone else should be safe from the effects of the EMP. And at the same time--”

“We would completely disable all of China’s military equipment
,” Rambert finished his thought. “They’ll be sitting ducks.”

“Exactly!
They would never dream that we would attack them with such a huge EMP because it will destroy all of our own satellites, communications, and cell phone towers and, and… I mean everything will be wiped out. But we are already completely destroyed by the infection so we have nothing to lose.”

“This is… unbelievable. Will this actually work?”

“I have no idea, but the current alternative sounds much worse. Just think of this acting like a massive solar flare, it will be the same effect.”

There was a small pause in the conversation.

“Reg, this might be brilliant.”

“Or it might be really stupid. Either way, it’s up to you to decide.”

“Ellen?” A man’s voice spoke from behind the curtain.

Ellen awoke from a
groggy sleep, unsure if the voice was from a dream. The drugs they gave her had made her sleep for a few hours. “Hello?” She replied.

The curtain moved and a man in military fatigues appeared from behind it. It was Dave
Tripps.

“Dave?” She propped herself up on her elbows.

“Ellen,” he said enthusiastically. “I knew you were here, half the hospital is saying your name.”

“How did you get here? Keith said you died.” Her voice sounded strained as she got out of bed. She stood up and wrapped her arms around him.

“Keith is alive?” He hugged her back. “I thought for sure he had died when he jumped down into that stairwell. How could he have possibly survived? There were hundreds of them down there.”

“He thought the same thing when you stayed behind in the building. How did you survive?” She laughed.

“You honestly wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” He let out a laugh of disbelief. “And I can’t believe you’re here. Where is he? Where is Jayne?”

“I don’t know. He’s out there on the streets right now. Some military people shot him in the leg because he shattered their windshield. Jayne is safe at the children’s hospital, for now anyway.”

“He’s shot?” Dave said with wide eyes.

“Yes, he was trying to get them to bring me here. I was
bitten but I haven’t gotten infected. He thought I was special for a cure or something.”

Dave hurriedly went to the window. “Do you know what street it was?”

“Yes, I looked at the street sign when they were taking me away. It was Haverford. They were supposed to be looking for him, but who knows. No one cares about anyone anymore.” She began to cry. “Everything is just so shitty now. No one cares about anyone else, Dave.”

“Okay, I’m going to get him.
” 

“Really?
What does it look like out there? And how the hell did you get those clothes?”

“It doesn’t look great
,” he said, peering through the blinds. “But I got to go find my buddy.”

She let out a long sob and started to cough. “Everything is so messed up, Dave.”

“I know, and it’s going to stay messed up.” He took a gun from his side holster and checked the ammo clip.

“Where did you get that gun?” She
asked, sitting back down on the bed.

“I got picked up by this unit
. It’s a long story. You just stay here, and I’m going to go find him, okay?”

“Yeah, okay. Thank you so much, Dave. You’re…” She stopped, looking at his stubbly face.

“What?”

“You’re just different.
Totally different. I can’t believe you’re here.”

“Okay, I’m going to go.” He briskly walked out of the room.

“Thank you,” she said again, incredulous that he had come and went so quickly like a dream.

Dave jogged through the hallway and down a stairwell leading to the ground floor of the hospital. He knew what he saw out the window
. It didn’t look quite so bad as New York, but there were a lot of the sick walking around, following cars and trying to corner runners. I know what I’m doing, he thought. I now have more experience than anybody has on the street right now. Just move quickly and don’t hesitate to shoot.

Pushing through the hospital entrance doors, he made his way to the emergency department carport. A parked ambulance was being rocked back and forth by a crowd of infected people. They wriggled their bodies
against one another, trying to squeeze into the back doors to where Dave assumed someone was trapped. More and more of the sick were being drawn in by the commotion, creating a large crowd around the entire hospital entrance.

Dave stopped to think
quickly about his next best move. He wasn’t sure about heading straight through the looser parts of the crowd or trying to sneak around some bushes that were adjacent to the concrete wall of the hospital. Before he could move, a few from the crowd saw him and with a few stragglers, began moving towards him drawing even more attention with their movement.

Moving back towards the
entrance, he hesitated for a moment and then moved straight forward, firing his gun at a few of the infected that were approaching quickly. He smoothly weaved through several bodies but was soon slowed as the crowd began to thicken ahead of him. In a flash, he began to panic, realizing his over confidence. He turned around to make it back to the safety of the hospital doors but found the loose crowd behind him quickly closing in. He felt the first hand loosely clasp his shoulder and quickly shrugged it off. Dumb, dumb, dumb, what did I do? Another hand grabbed his ankle with surprising force, but quickly retracted after he stomped on the wrist.

He shot his gun into the head of a man in front of him and shoved his body into the crowd, knocking over several other people.
However, all the commotion had brought in more of the infected and soon there was nothing but limbs and hair surrounding him. In just a small moment and it was over, he thought. Just like that? Firing off round after round, his gun finally let out the feeble click of an empty cartridge. From his primal instinct, he started beating his fists outward at anyone that came in front of him.

As the bodies fell into him, he only waited now for the piercing pain of a bite. What happened next, Dave couldn’t understand but he saw an expansive flood of golden light surrounding him before everyone around him simultaneously toppled to th
e ground bringing him down.

*****

Two days prior, the hub of humanity teemed with working minds and witty talk; a living city of bustling coffee shops, colored collars and streams of cash. The people moved with deliberate action, independent thought but collaborative engineering. For over a century, it attracted world leaders and famous faces, a constant torrent of the chic and the savvy. Within a few days, the men and women had died by the millions. In haste, their souls had departed, no longer churning the gears of their human minds. Yet, those levers did still move and the cogwheels did not cease to turn. Their bodies remained to writhe and groan, never knowing the cool relief of a physical grave. They marched indefinitely, hungry for that which they had never craved without the capacity to reflect on their own metamorphosis. Kicking and clawing, their tendons began to tear and their teeth began to crack. Their bodies were fueled by the absurdity of science and a few men’s insatiable desire for more than their already wealthy lives. Families feasted on families and most that fled had died. Of hurricanes and earthquakes, world wars and terrorism, nothing could have wrought so much death as much as the trust in the hands of the miracle of science.

The rot of America had brought unwanted guests. Billowing red flags rode smoothly along the coastline of the Chesapeake
Bay, while deployment ships opened their cargo of tanks and military trucks onto the white sand of the beach. Sounds of garbled radio transmissions buzzed in the air while turrets were assembled and sandbags were stacked. An Eastern language was shouted across the sand, claiming to be the cure and next rightful sovereign people. Their ships began their siege of the land; their jets streamed from their carriers with payloads for the scourge. The campaign moved deliberately through the streets, overcoming sections of the city, block by block. With the organization of a prepared army, the sick were easily dispatched. The audacity of the army was only possible because of the paralyzing speed of the infection and the helplessness of a government taken by surprise within their own borders.

World order change is never predicted and thus has no adequate preparation. Only with a swift paradigm shift in how the people perceive their world can regime change happen in an instant, and where other nations
were cautiously helping, the Chinese had taken advantage.

As they flooded D.C. with expert precision, their commanders were delighted to find no American military resistance. They did not know the extent of the devastation of the
infection, but it had apparently completely debilitated American defense. They smiled and joked at the fall of the country, knowing they must put on a more compassionate face in front of the natives. “We are here to help,” they made sure every soldier knew in English.

Their delight, however, turned cold when a golden
swath of light began to color the ground and buildings. It appeared insipid at first, but soon coated everything they saw with a dark gold as if someone had put a pair of aviator sunglasses over their eyes. Looking up, they saw an expansive mass of orange clouds rapidly filling the sky until it spanned the horizons.

Suddenly,
one fighter jet fell from the sky backwards and landed vertically in an apartment building. Another fell diagonally to the ground, crashing into the bay. Soon a barrage of aircraft was littering the sky as dozens of pilots ejected their seats. Radio transmissions instantly ceased and all ground vehicles slowed to a stop. The turrets on their carriers stopped firing and the massive ships went dim from failing generators.

In a scramble, the Chinese snapped into bodied formations in preparation for ground combat with the infected. Yet, they found no resistance, no movement or groans.
The sick lay dormant, collapsed to the ground.

*****

In a flash of gold, they fell to the ground in a single act of unison. From the roof of an apartment building, Keith thought they looked like thousands of marionette puppets all falling down at once with their masters abandoning them. It was a sea of bodies in the streets, smothered over buses and dangling from windows. The entire scene looked like a macabre painting with lifeless bodies captured in still life.

He looked up into the
sky, saw orange and gold shoots of clouds, and fire as they spread across his view. Long arms of whorled gases covered the sun, filtering in a bronze hue that covered the land. Somehow, they had figured it out, he thought. In some way, they figured out how to stop them. He knew it was Ellen. They had gotten hold of her blood and had somehow figured it out. 

Closing his eyes, he
laid on the gravel top of the roof and rested the back of his head on the side of the building with his nose towards the sky. His soul collapsed on itself, decompressing with aching relief and releasing an enormous amount of anxiety that had slowly accumulated during the last two days. The muscles in his body finally relaxed, his belly muscles unlatching their grip on his organs. His nerves slowed down their streaming impulses allowing his mind to free up workspace finally to reflect on what had just happened to the world. Even the pain in his wounded leg had become dulled by the break of the waking hell that had unleashed itself on the country. 

In a brief panic, he looked again over the edge of the building to make sure that what he had previously seen wasn’t a dream. There they were
; a horde of the infected that had stopped in their assault and now lay lifeless in the cluttered street. There was movement inside a few buses and cars, as people began emerging from their hiding places, yelling to one another across the fields of bodies. They timidly rocked the infected bodies with their shoes, daring them to wake back up again, but they remained motionless and finally dead.

A deep silence fell on the streets. Keith hadn’t realized how loud the infected
hordes were until they all dropped dead at once. He only heard a few scattered shouting voices of people who still had their facilities and hadn’t been corrupted by the disease. One voice in particular began to have permanence in the air as he realized that someone was calling out his name in the distance. A man’s voice was repeatedly calling his full name somewhere down the street.

Turning to rest on his knees, Keith looked out again over the street and saw a small man in the distance running between the bodies and climbing over parked cars. He was dressed in military
fatigues and had blond hair. The quality of the man’s voice became clearer to Keith as he approached closer to the building. As he felt how familiar the voice was to him, he realized who the man was.

“Dave!” Keith shouted, waving both arms above his head.
“Dave, over here, man!”

Dave stopped, lifted his hand to his brow, looked up at Keith and smiled. He stood motionless for a moment and then ra
n towards the building, crying, happy to meet his friend.