The Lazarus Impact (11 page)

“We can leave him,” she says to Willy. He shakes his head no. He knows she needs closure. She needs to face him head on and confront him.

“We have to be quick about it. The rest of ‘em are gonna come at us,” he says, motioning to the gun in his hand. Sheryl nods.

Willy fires the shotgun at waist level, pumps it to reload, and blasts off another shot before kicking the door in with his boot. The door is riddled with buckshot holes and nearly falls apart after he kicks it. Sheryl’s naked husband stumbles back and falls into the tub, taking down the shower curtain, a piece of crappy wall art, and some scented potpourri jars with him. A gaping chasm in his stomach pours blood, and his dick is completely missing, as if bitten off. Sheryl steps in and points his own pistol at him. She squeezes the trigger and hears a whiz past her ear. She missed, and the bullet hit the tub, ricocheted off the tile and nearly ended her own life.

He scrambles to get up but Sheryl kicks him back into the tub. She steps closer and fires another round. This time it hits right between his yellowed, bloodshot eyes. She stands above his corpse, looking down at the blood as it pours from his head and begins to spiral down into the drain. She belts out a maniacal laugh that makes the hair on Willy’s neck stand on end.

“We gotta go,” he says to her calmly.

Suddenly tears begin to fill Sheryl’s eyes. Thoughts of all they had been through fill her head with confusion. She stares at her dead husband, but as soon as the first tear cools her cheek in the winter breeze she balls the fist of her bad arm in anger. “Why’d you have to do it!” she yells at her dead husband. Willy steps back out of the bathroom. “Why’d you have to fuck it all up!” She growls and screams with rage as she fires shot after shot into her husband, emptying the entire magazine of bullets into his dead body.

Willy waits to speak until she calms down, and even then he’s hesitant.
I’ve seen this kind of emotional break before, on the battlefield
.
Hell, even I’ve felt it
. “Reload,” he says plainly.

Sheryl does as he says. The process takes some special positioning and leaning, since her bad arm isn’t at full capacity yet.
The soreness must mean it’s on the mend
, she thinks. She hears noises through the walls all around them, even above and below. The grunts and growls grow louder from outside the apartment. Just then Sheryl realizes, but it’s too late:
I forgot to close the apartment door behind us
.
They’re inside
.

Willy runs out into the living room, firing at the undead as they enter the dark apartment. Sheryl follows him, waiting for a lull in the swarm to close the apartment door. But she’s grabbed from the side as one of them gets past Willy. She instinctively shoves the grotesque beast away and it topples over the couch. She pulls her gun to eye level and fires a poorly aimed shot into the darkness that grazes the zombie’s shoulder, knocking it back into the entertainment center. The flat screen television shatters and falls to the floor, and the cannibal takes down the rest of the shelving that surrounds it. Sheryl fires again and hits the zombie in the neck. A stream of dark liquid sprays all over the room, coating everything with a layer of blood. The zombie keeps coming.

Suddenly Willy turns, pumps, and fires across the room at the beast, taking its head off and splattering it onto the curtains. Stray buckshot shatters the window behind. Willy kicks the door shut and spins the dead bolt into place, locking out the rest of the corpses.

The wind blows the brainy curtains around, letting light into the living room. It illuminates the dark crimson blood to a bright ruby red. Sheryl’s senses are numbed with adrenaline, but after the deafening ring of gunfire fades from her ears, she can hear Rocky furiously barking in the car outside.

CHAPTER 21

“They can’t patrol every inch of ground,” Amy says.

“Sure they can. They can use those predator drone things. They already use them on the border, don’t they? And who knows where else.” Michael asks.

“We need to find food and water. Something.” Amy looks around at the storefronts. “The grocery store is close, but it is probably overrun with looters and emptied by now.”

“There’s a mom and pop pharmacy. Not one of those chains. Let’s try there.” Michael points to the small store. It’s locked, but the windows are already broken from previous looters. Amazed at what’s left, they grab some water, medicine, lighters, batteries, a flashlight, and dry foods, shoving everything into a few plastic shopping bags from behind the counter. They even grab extra bags from beside the empty register. Amy feels around underneath the counter for something.
These kinds of places always have a weapon back here for protection
. Her fingers find a metal baseball bat. She takes it with her.

The old PATH entrance is boarded up with blue painted plywood and padlocks, but it isn’t secure enough to keep anyone out if they wanted to get in. There are no guards around, not even on the rooftops where they saw some military snipers just a few blocks away. Michael begins to jab his heel at the wood near the bottom. It’s weak and rotted from older water damage. The board begins to flake apart with more and more blows. Amy alternates with swings of her bat, and soon there’s a hole big enough for them both to crawl through.

“Shit!” Amy shouts once she gets through. The stairway down into the old PATH station has barred gates, closed and padlocked at the bottom. Michael tries to squeeze between the two gates, but the chain between them doesn’t allow enough space for him to fit through.

“The lock is rusty,” he says. “Try to break it with the bat.”

Amy slams the bat down over and over, smashing the lock with everything she has. The chain rattles noisily, echoing through the tiled corridor. She hits the chain, the gate itself, and the lock again. Nothing. Michael examines the links closely, looking for a weak one, or one that has more rust than the others. They’re all strong. But the lock is slightly bent. Amy sees it too. She quickly pulls a few lighters from her bag. She sets one on top of the lock and cracks it with the bat, covering the lock with lighter fluid. She ignites it with a second lighter and keeps the flame hot underneath it. Michael joins her with another.

“Keep it going as long as you can,” she instructs him. “Maybe something inside will get weak and pop open if we heat it up enough and hit it some more.”

After several minutes of finger burning agony they pull their calloused thumbs away and begin to hit the lock again and again with the bat. The metal is bending more, but still locked in place. They go at it with the lighters again, this time emptying two in the process, leaving them with only one in their bag. The lock is glowing hot as Amy beats it again with the bat. After a few dozen swings the lock finally pops, hissing with steam as it hits a puddle on the tiled floor beside them. Michael unravels the chain from the gates and they pass through into the darkness.

Amy puts some batteries into the flashlight and they begin their walk. They make an uneasy jump down into the subway tracks against all their better judgment. Dirty, muddy, wet, and foul. Every step requires looking down. You never know what you are stepping on when you’re in the subway tunnels. Once their socks soak with sludge, they decide to tie some bags around their feet so they stay dry, but soon it doesn’t matter. The water is too deep. They climb out of the tracks and onto the narrow ledge on the side of the tunnel. By the time they’re about halfway through the tunnel, the tracks are submerged in waist high shit water.

“The subways are all getting flooded. I read once that in just two days without power the subways will start to flood. I guess it was pretty accurate,” Michael comments. “I hope the other end is clear. What if we get all the way through and it’s closed up better than before?”

“Let’s have some faith,” she says.

They begin to walk slightly uphill in the tunnel, and the water collecting in the tracks is not nearly as deep as before. They’re past the halfway point.

“Hey what’s that up there?” Amy asks.

“What?”

“A light. Flickering up ahead, like a fire,” she explains.

“Yeah I see it. Maybe it’s a bum or something,” Michael says.

As they get closer they can tell it’s across the other side of the track from them. A campfire of some kind, set in a nook along the tunnel wall. Amy turns off the flashlight, cautious of what might be lingering ahead. Soon they hear the gnawing, the profuse eating. One vagrant hunches over another, tearing at his stomach with both hands, biting and ripping at the intestines between his teeth. Amy’s face contorts with disgust, and Michael’s jaw drops open in shock.

“If we’re quiet we can get by without him knowing,” Amy whispers against Michael’s ear. He nods in agreement, and they begin to creep forward. But the pungent odor of the homeless mixed with death assaults their noses through the masks. They hold their breath. In the dancing campfire light, Michael sees the tube-like strings of guts being stretched, snapped, and shoved into the bum’s mouth. He gasps and coughs in his mask, about to fill it with sick. The zombie lifts its bloody face from its meal and turns to face them, its eyes glowing yellow in the blaze. It walks toward them, shambling directly through the fire. Its tattered pants catch flame, and soon its entire body ignites. Michael and Amy break into a sprint past it, staying on the narrow tunnel ledge beside the tracks. The cannibal runs toward them, setting the entire tunnel aglow with fiery horror. The light lurches in all directions, and shadows shift as it chases them up the tracks. It’s gaining on them, and soon it’s just steps behind.

Without warning Amy turns and swings her bat at the beast, cracking its kneecap. It tumbles to the ground but still comes at them, broken leg and all. It feels no pain. It knows nothing but bloodlust. It struggles to get to its feet again, limping in the process. Amy swings again, this time making a meaty connection with its neck. Michael looks around for something to swing as a weapon, but the tracks have nothing to offer him. When he turns around he sees the homeless cannibal’s head tipped sideways with its spine sticking out the skin on its neck. Yet it still stands. It still walks toward them. The flaming beast still reaches out in death for a taste of their flesh. Amy lifts the bat over her head again and slams it down tomahawk style, landing a skull shattering blow to the risen corpse’s head. It falls to the ground in death, but Amy swings at its head again for good measure, casting a thin string of blood and brain into the air.

CHAPTER 22

It wasn’t long after Wolf escaped that Dr. Vogel learned he was gone. He asked Betty, one of the night shift nurses, to check in on Wolf and keep him company while he toyed with Wolf’s samples in the lab. Betty was thrilled. She was a fan, and single, and hot. She prettied herself up beforehand. Put on a fresh coat of makeup, tied the skirt of her uniform a bit higher, let her hair down, and grabbed the push-up bra from her locker to make her tits sit up tall. But when she saw the broken wall through the maintenance room window, she panicked. She ran to Dr. Vogel in the lab to give him the news.

Dr. Vogel tried calling the CDC but the phones were dead. The satellites were damaged by meteor debris, so the cell phones were useless too. And he knew the generators would run out of fuel soon enough, because no one was coming to check on them.
I’m on borrowed time
,
he thought.
I don’t have any clue as to what kind of illness I’m dealing with, but I know it can’t be good
.
I can’t even send Wolf’s fluids out for further tests or get in contact with the labs
.

He was at a loss until he heard the emergency radio broadcast.
Poisonous air
.
There would have to be a military presence at the quarantine border
.
There was one in Rwanda with the Ebola scare, and another more recently in western China, when the ox flu broke out
.
An airborne disease is just too risky to do anything less, especially if it’s on the magnitude that requires an emergency broadcast
.
If there’s one thing I can count on, it’s that the CDC will act according to protocols once they knew how the disease is transferred
.
Wolf is a liability if he’s a carrier
.

The first thing Dr. Vogel did was drive to the police station to report the incident. But the police started questioning him about locking a man up against his will. It didn’t help that the cops were all fans of Extreme Naturalist.
They don’t understand
,
he thought.
If the quarantine was otherwise successful, then Wolf could cause an isolated and contained epidemic to spread into a nationwide or global pandemic
. As a former CDC immunologist, Dr. Vogel felt like that was on him; it was his responsibility to keep Wolf under wraps. But he had gone about it the wrong way. When he saw the hole in the maintenance closet wall where Wolf had escaped, Dr. Vogel immediately knew he handled Wolf all wrong.
Wolf is an uncontainable man
.
I should have known
.
Locking him down against his will was the dumbest thing I could’ve done
.
I should have communicated more with him
. He blamed it on his lack of experience. The years he spent squirreled away in the CDC labs prior to practicing medicine ruined any chances of developing a good bedside manner. But he knew he had to do more. The police didn’t seem to understand how serious this was. They just radioed the rest of their guys to be on the lookout for Wolf.

So Dr. Vogel decided he would drive east to the quarantine zone with the bizarre, unearthly samples. They had already multiplied on the Petrie dish, and when he looked at them under the microscope the structure was like nothing he had ever seen in a life form. They were almost crystalline. Studying them any further would require the full capabilities of the CDC; a lab with equipment far surpassing that of his bare-bones hospital.
Once I’m at the barricade, I’ll try to convince one of the military personnel to give me an air lift down to the CDC, since all the airports are shut down
. He needed something faster than just driving down the traffic-snarled roadways that snaked up and down the east coast in this panic.
It’s a long shot, but it’s my duty to try
.

His wife Joanna wasn’t too happy with the decision. She was always apprehensive about his lab work job, knowing he was constantly surrounded by deadly viruses. On top of that he often had to travel to remote and dangerous places to fabricate and administer vaccines. For 11 years they had a home front just outside of Atlanta to be close to his job at the CDC. When he told her that he wanted to switch to medicine, Joanna was ecstatic. They moved back to her home town to be closer to her parents, and the kids were growing up fast. When he explained what happened, and why he was leaving, Joanna became upset, and the kids were scared. He explained that what he had in his possession could be something vitally important. He kissed them, and told them to wear their gas masks and stay indoors if the plume shifted with the winds. So off he went, driving toward the sun as it rose in the east.

Not too much further now until I reach the Pennsylvania border
. There he imagines he’ll start seeing some government personnel on the roads, possibly some barricades, check points and warning signs. Despite knowing all the CDC protocols, he wasn’t exactly sure how this kind of quarantine would work in the US, so heavily populated.
The roads are vital to food supply, fuel, and everything else that society depends on every day
.
It’s not like rural western China, where the risk of spread was much less serious
.
Here, there’s massive influx to and from regions on a daily and hourly basis, especially the northeast
.
It’s not like the jungles of Rwanda either, where the outbreak was isolated to a remote tribe
.

The highway is jammed in the opposite direction. Everyone is heading the same way; away. But Dr. Vogel is going toward the plume. He can almost make it out; a dispersing and fading dark grey mass hovers up ahead in the distance. He hasn’t seen any other cars on his side of the road for quite some time. Across the highway horns blare, lights flash, and there are accidents everywhere. Soon the cars begin to cross the median and start driving on his side of the road. He sticks to the right lane to be safe, but more and more are coming, and it’s getting too dangerous. They’re speeding.

Dr. Vogel has to pull over in frustration when the road becomes too crowded.  He slowly creeps along the shoulder at about ten miles per hour. But he hears the dragging sound of rubber on the road, a deep, prolonged horn blare, the shattering of glass, and the crunch of steel. A massive pileup is happening. He watches it as if in slow motion. An 18-wheeler jackknifes and a dozen cars get tangled in its wake one by one as it topples onto its side. But that isn’t all. Three more cars screech to a smash, then six more behind it. Soon enough the crash ensnares upwards of 25 cars behind the truck. People are trying to drive around it but there’s no more road to drive on. Even the grassy area between the highway arteries is filled with cars.

Dr. Vogel hears people screaming in pain. He has a medical kit in his trunk. He grips the wheel in contemplation.
The samples
.
I have to get those samples to the CDC, but I can’t just ignore those people out there
.
My real duty now, my sworn oath, is that of a doctor, not a scientist
. He stops, pops the trunk, puts on his elongated, grey, rubber WWI style chemical warfare mask, and gets out to retrieve his kit. He runs out between the parked cars sitting on the highway and makes his way over to the nearest pile of twisted metal. A man is nearly cut in half and hanging out a broken windshield. Blood trickles down from his severed abdomen, finding a convenient home within the cracks of glass as it drips down. He moans in agony, and his eyes roll back into his head.
Too far gone
.
I can’t help the man
.

He hears coughing coming from open windows as he passes between cars. Most of the cars in the accident are just dented up, or have blow outs, but ahead there’s a woman sitting on the asphalt, propped against her car door and bleeding profusely from her arm. It looks bad. Dr. Vogel kneels beside her and opens his medical kit. He soaks up blood from the wound with a towel first to see how serious it is. A deep, ragged rip exposes muscle and bone from her armpit all the way down to her elbow joint.
She must have dragged across something in the accident
.

“It’s gonna be okay. You’ll be alright,” he says to her, but it’s a lie.

“My husband...” she mumbles. “Where is he?”

Dr. Vogel looks around for him. He isn’t in the car. But he sees a hole in their shattered windshield, and then a mangled body a few yards in front of the car. “We’ll find him after we get this bleeding to stop,” he says. But he knows he can’t do it. He looks around to see if there’s anyone else that needs his help.

“I’m a med student. I can help,” a young man says between coughs as he approaches.

Dr. Vogel looks up at him. He can’t be more than 20 years old; probably just started. “Are you infected?”

“What do you mean infected?” the kid asks.

“How long have you been coughing?” Dr. Vogel asks, but a split second later he hears some screaming from behind him. A woman shrieks in terror, running from a man.

“Hey. HEY!” Dr. Vogel yells at the man.

The man turns. His eyes, golden and bloodshot, fix first on Dr. Vogel, and then on the woman with the cut arm. He runs at them, wild and rabid. Dr. Vogel and the medical student back away. Suddenly the wild man is upon the woman, biting and gnawing at the cut on her arm like it’s a turkey leg at a renaissance fair. Blood smears across his face as he buries it into her. She can’t even scream in pain. She’s lost too much blood already. In seconds, it seems, the arm is shed of its meat. The ravenous man then starts to rip open her stomach.

“What the hell is going on?” Dr. Vogel turns and asks the kid. But he is on the ground, twitching and convulsing. A white foam trickles from his mouth. Dr. Vogel attempts to stabilize him, straightening out his body and preventing his head from bashing against the asphalt. But a few moments later the kid stops his fit. He lies motionless. Dr. Vogel checks his pulse.
He’s dead
. Panicked and distraught, Dr. Vogel stands up, wiping the sweat that began to build on his brow above the mask. He hears a groan and a grunt. He looks down as the kid sits up in death. The kid’s eyes are the color of the urine that begins to soak his pants. Dr. Vogel stumbles backward in shock. The hood of a nearby car breaks his fall and he slides off the front end to the ground, all the while his eyes fixed upon the living dead standing before him.
The creature eating the injured woman had the same look in its eyes
.
This debris, this disease, is killing people, but making people come back from the dead afterwards
.

Dr. Vogel runs with all his energy back toward his car. The kid begins to chase him, gaining on Dr. Vogel, two strides to one. The beast tackles Dr. Vogel to the ground and both tumble to a stop. There’s more screaming coming from within the cars. Dr. Vogel can see the bloodbath spraying across the windshields, both inside and out of the frozen traffic. One boy gets out of a car when his mother tries to grab him, running between Dr. Vogel and the deranged medical student. The student turns his attention to the boy instead and chases him down, sinking his teeth into the boy's face. Dr. Vogel watches with shock and disgust as the medical student feasts upon the child. But a moment later the boy begins to twitch and convulse just as the student had earlier. The student stands up and stops his chomping, looking around for someone else to eat. The cannibal turns and sees Dr. Vogel again, and begins to run toward him.

Dr. Vogel makes it to his car and gets back inside, locking the door behind him. He turns the ignition just as the zombie medical student rams his head into the car window, giving it a healthy crack from bottom to top without shattering it. He growls like an animal, scratching at the window and trying to get in. Dr. Vogel cranes his neck to see what has become of the boy whose face was just devoured. He’s back on his feet, and the same crazed look fills his remaining eye. The other is still clenched between the teeth of the medical student as he rams his face into Dr. Vogel’s driver’s side window.

Dr. Vogel slams his foot on the gas and veers onto the grass along the edge of the woods. His car spits up dirt and gravel. He leans left as hard as he can, as if his weight might keep his car from rolling on the steep decline beside the road. A few tense minutes later and he’s beyond most of the wreckage. He gets back onto the highway, but the road ahead is still a minefield of oncoming traffic. There’s even more mayhem in his rearview mirror. Men, women, and children attack each other, eat each other. The dead rise to feast on the living. But he keeps his eyes focused on the dangerous road as cars continue to speed by him in the other direction. His heart pounds out of his chest.

I have to get these samples to the CDC
.
Maybe we can find a cure
.
Wolf
.
Wolf didn’t die
.
Maybe the samples are more valuable than I imagine! Wolf could be immune!
He shakes his head, arguing with himself.
No
.
He might’ve turned into one of those monsters too
.
And to hell with the quarantine
.
They’ve broken through and I’ve got to let someone know! I’ve got to tell them at the barricade!

He lays on his horn and tries to weave around the crazed drivers, but there are too many now to keep his speed up. He slows and tries to pull over to the side of the road again, but no one gives him any space. He’s forced to come to a stop in the center lane as cars whiz by all around him. He waits for his opening, hoping he can jump out between traffic. Then he sees a truck coming right for him in the center lane.
It’s now or never
. He floors the gas and veers right to avoid the truck, but the right lane isn’t empty. He closes his eyes as he crosses over.