Medora: A Zombie Novel (8 page)

“They're out there! They're coming! We have to go, go,
go!” A woman was shrilling into his ear. Yelling at everyone around him, shouting at a missing conductor and screaming at some unseen observer who could deliver them from the plight. One man began to pry the doors open on the other side of the subway but was having trouble fitting his fingers into the rubber sidings of the doors. Others began to help and almost got it open when they could see a lone man walk up to the door from the tracks below and place a bloody hand on the glass of the door. They stopped and watched him. He brought his face in and they could discern a deep cavity that had formed on the left side of his face in which his nose had sunk into. One eye had disappeared in the abyss of the hole and his other eye darted around in its socket, not seeming to focus on any one object. He was the first of many of the infected people who had made their way around to the other side of the train. They began to encapsulate the entire end of the train.

One of the men trying to pry the door open stood and turned to the train, “Let's get off this train! We can just fight through them and run down the tunnels. They're slow and weak-- th
ey break apart easy, they're all rotting from the inside anyway. They’re all squishy.” Another voice interjected, “No, we can't go out there. Some people here are very old, so they can't run. If we wait here, they won't get in. We’ll wait for the police, they're not just going to let all these people walk around attacking everyone.” A man from the back of the train shouted out, “One of them out there
is
the police!” He pointed out the window to a sickly man crawling on his knees with a police jacket on and torn black pants exposing yellow colored thighs.

Keith was about to speak
up, but he realized that he had no idea what to do. He could only think about how they had toppled the bus over above on the street. He thought that it would only take time before they could lean into the train long enough to tip the end of it over or crush the walls in. It only took weight, pressure and time and they would be crawling in on them. He looked out and saw the platform full of bodies, their faces pressed up against the glass. Some of them breathed heavily against the glass filling it with fog, while others slammed their arms at the walls of the train. Some of them seemed confused at the intrinsic qualities of the glass and how they couldn't put their arms through what they perceived as transparent air.

Keith glared at them until his mind slowed to a halt, frozen in a lethargic, comatose state of denial.
Then the train shuddered under the weight of all the passengers, squeaked on the tracks and started to move. It picked up speed and swiftly left the sick behind, falling on the tracks where the train had been. Keith stared in disbelief through the eagle on the window at lights that flashed by him in the subway tunnel. The gears of his mind quickly snapped to functioning capacity as he realized yet again that he had hope of leaving the city. The people on the train cheered and jumped up and down, rescued from the immediate danger. The train soared past all the stops along its route. All Keith could discern through the window were crowds of people waving their hands at the train to stop, hitting the windows as it streaked by, and leaving them behind in an imploding inner city.

Chapter
eight

“Good morning, ladies and gentleman, we're sorry for the slight delay this morning in boarding. We are unfortunately running a little behind due to congestion on the tarmac, which is well underway to being resolved. We are about fifth in line to take off and we are anticipating about a forty-minute delay. We apologize for this inconvenience and are doing everything we can to ensure a safe and punctual flight, thanks.”

*****

Ellen stood in the backyard of the modest patch of grass considered by the real estate agent to be a lawn. She plugged the opening of the garden hose with her thumb and shot water over the grass, which showed signs of the yellow and withering of neglect. Water seeped down the length of her feet into her purple sandals. The skin of her exposed thighs began to vibrate with the sun striking her creamy flesh, giving her a tingling sensation climbing up her legs. She threw the hose down in the grass and watched the water spurt out with low pressure, gushing into the grass profusely like an open artery. It started to pool in one spot and slowly flooded the immediate patchwork of yellow and brown. She wiped her eyebrows and looked through the tiny slits of the neighboring houses into the city. The sun was sinking between buildings and sparkled off incandescent reflective surfaces in the distance. The clouds had been playing with the sun all day, creeping and crawling across the sky, making taunting threats of rain and then receding to a warm glow of a pinkish lazy sunset.

A barrage of sirens filled the stillness of the streets around her home, waking her dista
nt stare. She turned off the hose and shut the sliding door to the backyard. The house was silent except for spontaneous rhythmic hammering that sprang from the basement from the Winsor carpet workers. Ellen, feeling the monotony of attending to the bland housekeeping tasks of the afternoon, decided to make sandwiches for the men downstairs. She pushed the button on the archaic miniature television perched on the ledge of the kitchen counter and started to produce bread and cheese from the refrigerator.

“
It has become necessary and vital for the safety and morale of the citizens of our city to reinforce police efforts in the inner city, request the assistance of our neighboring states and to insist that all individuals, regardless of their health status remain at home for at least the next twenty four hours. We strongly discourage attempts to leave the city or the state as this will cause massive delays in the traffic systems that are vital to ensuring prompt delivery of medical personnel and supplies.”

Ellen twirled her body around with
the knife in her hand that she was using to cut tomatoes. She stared intently at the screen, watching the Mayor speak with a tone of a eulogy. “We are reporting extremely high volumes of patients at every available hospital and clinic in the city. We have reached an unsustainable limit to the healthcare that we can provide. Our office here has coordinated with the President and his cabinet to facilitate all necessary needs to the citizens of this great city. It has become evident that a particularly new strain of flu has caused the high patient volumes in our hospitals. We are well aware of the virus and the strain and are in the process, as I speak, of delivering the vaccine to every person in this city. We ask that you not be alarmed at the increased levels of law enforcement and military personnel that you might see in our city. I assure you that these measures are only precautions to help minimize any potential risks involved in administering the help to those who need it...”

Ellen forgot about sandwiches and grabbed her cell phone from her purse. She called Oak Brook elementary. A secretary came on the line.

“Hi, this is Ellen Sanders, Jayne Sander’s mom. Is the school going to close early today? I would like to come to pick up my daughter. Is everything okay there?” Ellen could feel herself running out of breath as she spoke in a hurried yet controlled frenzy.

“
Yes, Mrs. Sanders, we are calling all parents right now in light of the early flu season.” Ellen was alarmed at the discrepancy between the mayor speaking of the flu in terms of the military and the secretary speaking of it as a seasonal cold. “It would be good to come and get your daughter as soon as possible.”

“I'll be right there.” She snapped her phone shut and reopened it to call Keith. The call rang and then dropped. She called again with the same result. When she couldn't get hold of him with the third
try, she began to feel a sliver of paranoia inching its way into the back rooms of her mind. Creeping in slowly with inevitable force, which grew with the silence of the phone line. She stopped and closed her eyes, slowing her breathing to smooth and controlled bursts of air between her pursed lips.

She swiftly fitted her purse strap
across her shoulders, swiped her car keys off a pig shaped hook on the wall of the kitchen and opened the door to the basement.

She yelled down the stairs, “Hey guys? I think it might be a good idea to call it quits for today. I think there's a city-wide emergency going on with the flu,
so you should probably get going home.” She waited for a response with her weight tilted to her foot that was resting on the first step down the staircase. She bent her neck to see around the blind corner that turned down into the opening of the basement floor. With no response, she purposely stomped down the unfinished basement stairs to resonate her impatience with her footsteps and turned the blind corner, but couldn't see either one of them. There was a half rolled carpet lying in the middle of the room. She came down the steps and looked around between the thin, two by four wood planks with no sheetrock covering. As she swiveled around to view the entire basement through the transparency of the wooden walls, a heavy mass slammed into her back from behind, knocking her to the concrete floor. She braced the impact with the heels of her hands but still felt a sickening thud crush into her ribcage. The person who had attacked her fell on top of her body, and completely pinned her thin frame to the ground. She felt entirely enveloped within the dense weight of a man pressing the weight of his body into her back. Her lungs had become immediately compressed, restricting her breathing. Scratchy wheezing escaped from her mouth with attempts to breathe.

The only sound in the room was the muffled struggle of a small
woman gasping for air. She began to flail her arms and legs repeatedly striking blows, bringing both her heels down into the attacker’s back. As racing thoughts flooded her mind with both panic and stratagem, she could feel involuntary convulsions fluttering through her body, consuming all energy to free herself from the person who held her and was twisting her face into the concrete, wrenching her neck sideways under the weight of his chest. A dull yet distinctly exquisite pain then sunk into her shoulder. She could hear his heavy breathing immediately adjacent to her ear and knew that he bit her. He had sunk his teeth into her shoulder muscle and was working his jaws into the meat of her flesh. She felt a crunching of her own skin in his teeth and swooned in pain as her flesh rolled back and forth under the chewing of his teeth. Warmness then sunk down the length of her arm making her coo in exasperated torture.

With no
alternatives, she thrust her head upward into the side of his face, knocking his clenched teeth from her shoulder. She heard him grunt in frustration and thrust her head again. This time, she felt his teeth cut into her scalp, not because of him biting, but from where she had struck him. She could feel the man's weight slightly shift to the side, allowing her more room to breathe and to land another blow with her bleeding head. A small stream of blood started to drip down her forehead from her wounded scalp. Unaware of the cut in her scalp, she continued a battery of head thrusts and slammed her heels into his shoulder blades. With a momentary lapse of pressure from the attacker, Ellen could feel just enough slack in his weight to kick and crawl from underneath him.

Without looking back at the
man, she swiftly leaped up the stairs, with her purse still hanging from her shoulder. As she climbed the steps, she could see the body of one of the carpet workers through the holes between the wood planks of the steps. She couldn't discern much, only the deep crimson color of blood ensconcing his body and matting his hair. Her mind raced and panicked with the horrifying fact that there was a dead man lying on her basement floor.

She stumbled to the main floor and slammed the door shut. Clutching her shoulder, she saw blood slowly seeping down the sleeve of her t-shirt and dripping from the tip of her elbow. With only the natural impulse to flee, she ran to the front door and flung it open to find Hank Jackson, her next-door neighbor, leaning along the rail of the porch. He had ballooned puffs of skin protruding from his eyelids only leaving small slits of space that his eyes could see from. His nostrils were sagging downwards and were being stretched open by an exaggerated drooping of his upper lip, which swung downward from his face. His face appeared as a distorted image in a circus mirror. She only knew it was
he from the dingy tank top and long black socks he wore that crept up his varicose veins.

“Hank
, I need help! I'm being attacked. Please, call the police.” She paused for a moment. “Are you okay? We need to call the police!” As she stammered with her speech, she realized that Jackson wasn't aware of a word she was saying. Slowly, and with uncoordinated footsteps, he walked up the steps to the door, advancing towards her.

Dave was not dead, but was close. He wasn't dead but he was thinking about death. When he saw Keith jump downward into a pit of mutant human beings who were clawing to get at him, he thought that was the last that he was going to see of his friend. It wasn't the last time, however, that he would see the monsters. He knew he wasn't looking at the faces of his neighbors, colleagues, friends or even strangers. Dave had ample time to observe them and hate them. He saw a robotic detachment of ethos in everything they did: their movements, their investigations of the environment and the interactions among them. They followed each other. When one moved in a direction, they would all follow suit, with some imperceptible communication among them signifying a change in direction like a flock of birds turning in the sky. Except there was no leader. When one moved quicker than the others did, they would take notice and move in that direction. It was more like a single pebble making a ripple in a pond, creating a cascade of activity as it moved outward until it settled down and became static. Sometimes, when a flurry of movement arose in the crowd, they would fight with one another, biting and kicking until the crowd would lose energy, and the fight dissipated. There were no talking, only guttural sounds from their throats. He felt like he was at the zoo.

Dave had gone up where Keith had gone down
, and while they both regretted the decision that each had made, Dave was probably right. He was perched high in the sky now. He didn't think about his hair anymore. He didn't even think about his girlfriend. He had reached an almost euphoric trance of accepting his fate as it was presented to him at the moment. He felt relaxed as he watched them, lucid and complacent like a Buddhist monk meditating on a ledge of a mountain high in the sky, no longer distinguishing himself from his surroundings. His panic had somehow transformed how he viewed his own existence.

After Keith had
taken the leap of death, Dave moved passed the sick in the stairwell and ran up ten levels of the building, found a nice locked room to hide in and a computer where he could check news updates. He saw aerial helicopter shots of Manhattan with crowds of people accumulating around a few city blocks. There were police barriers and army vehicles moving in between the crowds. This was the last update he saw after the power in the building went out. Axillary lights dimly lit the hall outside the office with a tinge of an orange glow. The building was starting to get hot and Dave was starting to get tired. Feeling a pang of hunger, he ran into an adjacent kitchen and found someone's half turkey wrap in the fridge. Returning to the office, he chewed the food quickly, wondering and chewing. Wondering where the police were to stop the crowd of monsters down below. He wondered about the other employees that had panicked and stuffed themselves into a room ten floors below. A dull sense of doom was curling up inside of him and robbing the rest of his thoughts, a very real and tangible harbinger of doom that was coming up at him. He chewed and could only hear his own jaws munching the food up and down in the silent, dimly lit office. Then he heard the dull thuds of hands smacking on the doors at the stairwell, and he knew it was time to move again.

They were arriving at his doorstep and he moved up the stairs past them, up more flights of stairs to higher and higher levels of the building. He was now only thinking in the one dimensional of the vertical plane of the building. There was only moving up, up and up to the sky above. When he reached somewhere near the thirtieth
floor, he thought this might dissuade them from pursuing him, but they continued to snake upward, never abating. He realized that it wasn't that they were chasing him; they were just moving in the path that had the least resistance, upwards where there were fewer crowds than below. They weren't using any cognitive facilities, only the raw movements of nature that dictated motion like the attraction of molecules or the flow of a stream down a mountainside. And skyward they went, slobbering and clutching their way up the stairs like an oozing slug wriggling upward through dirt.

On the fifty-
third floor, he cried. He cried inaudibly in a silent office room. Tears sat on the brim of his eyelids and cusped the bottom of his eyes. He was crying because of his life, which he would miss. Then he wiped his eyes and ate a Snickers bar, which he took from a vending machine that he smashed with a chair. His pockets were lined with Fritos bags and candy bars. He couldn't believe all the floors were empty, not a single person was left behind. He thought with scorn of his fat boss that he hated who had made him wait behind while the entire city escaped this plague without him. His mind became intoxicated with his hate for Janice, eating his thoughts and stalling his motivation to escape the building. It gave him a sickening pleasure to curse her in life and in death. It was then he realized that he was going through all the steps of grief. He was currently undergoing the anger step, and what he was grieving for was the immediate loss of his own life.

On the
fifty-fifth floor, he started to build a barrier of a heavy office desk that he dragged and leaned on the doors of all the stairwells. He piled filing cabinets and office chairs around the doors creating a semi circular dam surrounding them. Once he realized that the barrier was failing to stop them from slowly pushing through and was actually preventing him from going up to the next levels once they breached the floor, he stopped trying the blockades.

He heard them clamoring at the stairwell and got to his feet again, ready for the next couple flight of stairs. When he got to the sixtieth floor, he realized that the building had eighty floors and he was close to judgment day. He would have never guessed that he could gauge the timing of his death by the number of floors of a building. Each floor was passing with the
equivalent of a year of his life and he would die at the ripe age of eighty. He began to think of his life's regrets and much to his surprise regretted never getting married or having kids. He also regretted never having written a book. When he wrote a short story in college about a woman and her ten-year-old daughter who simultaneously were diagnosed with terminal cancer, he thought he could become a writer, never for a career but as a hobby. With sadness, he thought on the wasted potential of his abilities. Then he became depressed with the wasted potential of his life. He was now in the guilt phase. He hated that all he had done was work at an advertising firm and never found a career that he enjoyed.

On the seventy-
third floor, he was consumed with exhaustion and fell asleep under a table, no longer caring if they burst in and killed him in his sleep. Was indifference a step? When he awoke, he heard nothing and then realized that he was probably only asleep for a few minutes. His hips ached from hiking the stairs and his heart ached from contemplating his life. He had reached a mental and physical barrier where he thought in only the sheer mechanics of moving his body with the lowest amount of energy to provide just enough mobility to climb the stairs. He thought that the monsters would kill him by exhaustion long before they ever reached him alive.

By the
time, he was at the eightieth floor he didn't think anymore. His being had degenerated into nothing but the primal and automated instinct to survive. They opened the doors and began to flood the office floor and cubicles. Dave knew that the last stairwell would lead to the roof and he liked the idea more of dying by his own accord and not being torn apart by the sick. He slowly limped up the last stairwell, down death row to the open air.

Sunlight burst into his eyes and his skin flashed beneath the bright light. The sky was still and the air was warm. He stepped up a small metal staircase that led to the main roof of the building and looked around feeling
as if he was on the site of the lunar landing. Satellites dishes, antennas, large metal boxes and ventilation cones sprouted from the gravel-rubber top of the building. He shuffled in between the various obstacles of equipment scattered about in front of him, and looked around for any moveable object to block the door. Clutching to the side of a square shaped vent, he fell over and stared at the gravel. That’s all there was now: grey and white pebbles lying lifeless without concern. He thought how he would be like them soon: still, complacent and aloof. He groped to think of nothing as he looked down at the rocks, detaching himself.

Only finding cigarette butts and soda cans, he knew there wouldn't be anything to block the d
oor and so he stared at the end of the roof with his eyes fixed on the stern black line of the edge cutting into his mind and silencing all other thoughts. He stared and waited. Waited to hear just a single click of the roof door from below; a click of the latch turning and unleashing hell at his feet. He never knew his mind could be so vacant and so still as it was then. The only sounds were a slight wind humming in his ears and the shallow clicking of his throat swallowing. It wasn't until that moment that he knew it was the random clutter of thoughts of his daily life that had choked out the pristine serenity that he had now reached from the utter absence of thought. He felt his soul open up and clap at the sky in preparation for his leap from the edge of the building. He felt steady and ready to go. Just one click of the door, he thought.

The door clicked and he instantly cowered from the edge. He receded backwards, gaining a revitalizing boost of self-preservation after hearing the click. The click, like a shotgun firing within him had aroused every muscle and nerve in his body, ready to stand and fight rather than fall and die. He could see them bubbling up from below the metal staircase on the other side of the building. They emerged as one mass building upward, carrying bodies in a wake of arms and legs. They diffused slowly around the top, stumbling over wires and falling into antennas. One toppled over into the bowl of a satellite dish, exploding the flesh and bones of her face outwards. When she stood back up there was nothing but a gaping crater sinking into her head. By random
motion, they made their way to Dave.

At twenty feet away, he backed up to the edge of the building and peered over. It looked like a long race road track fading to a vanishing point at the street. He never could have possibly imagined such a height. He looked back at
them, rested his arm on the base of a massive antenna next to him, and then realized that it was the very last place he could escape. Climbing up the crude metal pegs of the antenna that formed a ladder, he reached the last peg at the top.

They swarmed around the base, fifteen feet below.
Now, here he was, perched high in the sky, the Buddhist monk, the Enlightened One. He watched them and observed them.

The s
ick soon covered the entire roof of the building, a sea of heads bobbing up and down, crawling and stepping on one another. Some would get on top of others and wriggle across their heads and shoulders, crowd surfing amongst the wave of bodies. The roof was flooded, but Dave could still see others slowly emerging from the staircase and with each inlet of the sick from below, a few on the edges of the building were forced off, falling limply to the streets like a tree falling after being cut at its base. There began to be a rhythmic pulse in the crowd as more came from below creating a cascade of movement towards the edges of the building, forcing more to slip off the edge. One ripple after another would cause bodies to fall from all edges. The top of the building was like a gigantic popcorn maker, but filling up with bodies that overflowed over the rim. Dave watched as they dropped, falling without resistance, completely oblivious to the danger of the height. They were forced off at predictable intervals as more came from below. Every few minutes, there would be a surge of people toppling over the edge.

Some of the s
ick took notice of Dave above them and started to climb the rungs of the metal ladder, clutching at the bars. When they came close to his feet, he kicked down at them, breaking their grasp of the antenna ladder and making them fall to the crowd below. One fell directly on top of a man's head, snapping his neck backwards, making his head swing limply down his back, jaw gaping open.

Dave looked out and saw the puffed, cauliflower head of Janice milling around amidst the crowd. She was finally with her own, he thought. She looked like a farm
animal, moving casually between people, going from one grazing spot to another. He could see that her other arm was now missing leaving two black gaping holes at her shoulders, illuminating the sickly white color of the rest of her body. The bulbous boils of skin had grown over most of her scalp, leaving her with little hair. They were all being led outward to the edges of the building like cows being dumbly taken to a slaughterhouse.

More moved up the ladder and Dave kicked. Every time he kicked, he seemed to attract the attention of the entire crowd around him, agitating them into more movement towards him. They knocked against the antenna, making it rock back and forth. After a
while, he felt like it would rock back and forth more with each blow. They leaned into the antenna trying to climb up some bodies piling up around the base, giving others an extra boost to get higher and higher up the ladder. He started to clutch the rungs of the ladder with his hands and kicked down with both feet at once, knocking more of them down to the crowd. He could see a human pyramid building up towards him, their weight pushing at the antenna.

The antenna started to sway outward towards the edge of the building. With each
hit, it swung towards the edge and rebounded back to original position. He was soon precariously swinging back and forth on the antenna and could see his legs dangle in open space as the antenna swung over the edge of the building. Dave closed his eyes as he swung, waiting for the antenna base to snap. He shut his eyes tightly and could faintly hear the whir of helicopters close by. He imagined a swift rescue from one of them above, dropping a rope ladder and carrying him up, away from the sick. However, it didn't come; no helicopter came for him although they probably saw him, holding on only a few feet above to a radio antenna while hundreds of people clutched at him from the edge of a skyscraper in the middle of Manhattan. He knew they could see him from above, probably broadcasting the image all over the country.