The Romero Strain (34 page)

David stepped over to me.

“She’s different than the others. Pretty hot, actually. She okay?”

“She took a pretty hard hit, but she could come around in a minute. You may want to step back,” I warned. “Don’t want to freak her out. Not sure how she’s going to react to other people.”

“Hello, hello, can you hear me?” a voice came over the radio.

It was Julie. She was a bit panicked.

“Hello, David, Kermit, anyone? There are UDs coming. Come in, anyone.”

“Yes, yes, Julie we’re here,” Kermit responded. “What about UDs?”

“Kermit, there’s UDs coming. Lots of them and they’re going toward the door.”

I jumped up and without a word we ran. I tried to reload. I was the last in the group, directly behind Sam. I hadn’t noticed earlier that he was wearing a flamethrower. Soon enough I was locked and loaded and ready to engage the enemy.

“What the hell? Is that the rusted piece of crap you scavenged that other day?”

Julie’s voice came over the radio again as Sam replied, “Yeah, but I fixed it.”

“Of course you did,” I said.

“David, David the UDs… they’re… they’ve stopped.”

We were at the outer doors, weapons ready, but Julie was right, they stopped their advance.

“What the hell?” Kermit exclaimed.

There were thirty or forty of them, some bumping into one another, a few falling down and staggering to stand up, but mostly they had just stopped, standing silently, motionless, like cattle sleeping.

“Just like yesterday,” I commented.

Julie’s voice came over the radio again. “David is everyone okay? What’s going on?”

The undead looked in our direction and advanced toward us.

“David,” I said, “tell her to stay in the truck and stay off the radio,” I whispered. The undead abruptly stopped again. “Tell them not to make any noise. Tell them quietly… Kermit.”

“Yes,” he whispered his response.

“Let me have a flash bang.”

“How about I just torch ’em?” Sam said, excitedly.

“Easy, Sam. I wanna see something first. No one shoots unless they charge,” I told everyone.

I pulled the pin and threw it into the air toward the corner of the building at 25
th
Street. It exploded. The undead scrambled toward the blast zone, knocking one another over and stepping on each other to get to where they had heard the noise.

“Kermit, give me one more.”

I threw it toward Baruch College, which was on the eastside of Lexington at the corner of 25
th
Street. Again the undead haphazardly scrambled toward the noise.

“What the hell?” Kermit said again.

“Kermit, you’re repeating yourself,” I told him.

“Yeah. But what the hell?”

“They’re blind,” I said.

“Blind zombies?” Kermit questioned my assessment, as David simultaneously said, “
Tombs of the Blind Dead
. Good flick.”

“Makes sense,” I told the master sergeant. “Technically they’re dead. Ever see a corpse after twenty-four hours? A cadaver’s cornea will flatten and become cloudy due to
endothelial cell loss.”

He replied, “How’s that?”

“The cornea contains no blood vessels; it receives its nutrients from a layer behind the eye called the aqueous humor. If there’s no fluid being produced the inner layer of the eye, the endothelium, starts to die. Cells die; tissue shrinks and discolors… cadaver eyes.”

“Can we stop talking and start killing?”

Sam was anxious and so was Joe.

“Sam, do I interrupt when you’re lecturing me on some weapons system?”

He responded quickly and concisely with, “Yes!” nodding his head up and down in affirmation.

“Okay. In the words of Darth Sidious,” I replied, and then delivered the line about wiping them all out.

David gave me his usual look of disappointment and slight head shaking when I quoted an easy, cheesy line.

We all moved away from the building, toward the 25
th
Street fencing. Sam lit the undead up, rejoicing in his endeavor like a pagan with a bale fire, and Joe shot them like rats in a trashcan.

I had seen things, smelled things, and eaten things that would make an ordinary person projectile vomit. I had eaten durians, coconut grubs and stinky tofu. I had seen victims with their intestines protruding from massive stomach wounds and limbs torn from bodies. I had smelled the foul stench of bile and the rancid smell of gangrenous flesh. But the noxious odor that emanated from the decomposing foulness of burning, undead flesh made me nauseous.

The smell of burnt flesh was very recognizable. I’d never forget it. The scent was nauseating and sweet, putrid and beefy. The smell could be so thick and abounding that it was nearly a taste. Even worse was the smell of a decomposed body set ablaze. Bacteria inside the organs reproduced and released methane byproducts, which gave corpses their distinctive stench. Firefighters called those types of bodies “bloaters,” for the decaying body would grow swollen with foul-smelling gases. Bloaters that caught fire released a horrific, noxious stench.

But the fetid foulness was far worse than any horribly burnt and blackened flesh of the living or the deceased, and I was not the only one who was overwhelmed. I called Sam back. He was disappointed, but everyone agreed it was better to eradicate the remainders with bullets.

We let loose a barrage. They fell silently, and they fell quickly. We nearly finished our task when I expended my last ammo magazine. Having packed more medical supplies than bullets, I let the others continue with the eradication.

“I’m out!” I called out, and then radioed, “Julie, Marisol, open the door, I need more ammo.”

I was standing at the back of the Stryker replenishing my weapon when I saw them. At first there were three, then five or more. They were running toward us from 26
th
Street. The undead were coming, and they were not the blind and feeble undead. They were fresh undead.

“Incoming, incoming!” I shouted.

The others had not finished replacing their expended mags. I released my weapon into the charging pack. Kermit was next to fire as they were nearly upon us. An eruption came from the Stryker’s main machine gun. The remainder of the rampaging horde dropped immediately. The undeads had taken us by surprise and it unnerved us all.

“What the hell was that!?”

“One of the girls,” I responded to Kermit’s anxious question.

“No, the zombies. France said they should be mostly dead,” Kermit clarified.

Marisol and Julie came out of the Stryker.

Julie exclaimed, “Marisol just smoked those UDs!”

“Why don’t you boys just pack it in before I leave tread marks on your face?”

“
What!?
” I responded, never having heard Marisol speak that way.

David chuckled.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I asked her. “And why are you out of the truck?”

“Dude, she just smoked you!” David said.

“
The Fast and the Furious
,” she announced with a smile. Marisol gloated, “I thought you were Mister Movie Quote!?”

“That wasn’t a movie. That was self-indulgent pandering to mindless America.”

“It won an MTV Award!” she informed me.

“So did
Titanic
. But that doesn’t make it a good movie. Now get back in the truck, until I give you the all-clear, both of you! And Max, too!”

I walked away from her and toward the freshly killed UDs.

“I got you and you know it!” she bragged, making sure I heard her as the rear door to the ICV retracted.

I walked over to the closest victim and put a round directly into his brainpan. I wasn’t taking any chances. I had seen too many movies where a character thinks he killed the creature only to find out it wasn’t really dead, and then he gets killed, usually in some horrific manner like evisceration. That was not going to happen to me.

“J.D., that was harsh. You know she’s probably been waiting for months to use that line.”

“I know but… whatever,” I told him.

“You never saw the movie?”

I knelt down over the bloodied corpse and examined its eyes. There was very little discolorization, but its pupils were moderately constricted where they should have been fixed and dilated. I thought at first it was still alive but I had shot it dead in the forehead.

“Yeah, I did. The first sequel really sucked.”

“But you didn’t remember the line?”

“Of course I do. It was Michelle Rodriquez. But she didn’t get the quote right. It threw me off,” I tried to convince him. I was making excuses for being outshined by an amateur.

“Yeah, sure. You stick to that story if it makes you happy.”

The undead was different. It looked different. The face was dotted in red splotches and the skin was slightly grey, but it was also discolored like jaundice. The eye sockets were sunken and the eyes were as large as a transmute’s, but bulging. The eyes were nearly clear, too, but the constriction in the eyes bothered me, especially since the day had become overcast. There was also a ridge running from the start of the supraorbital process that extended down and around the ridge of the Zygomatic bone. The delineation was distinct in detail yet more distorted than a transmute.

I turned to David and asked, “Don’t they look sort of like Demon Ash in
Evil Dead 2?”

“Yeah, but Bruce had that chin thing goin’ for him. They kind of remind me more of a Cardassian… no, actually they remind me of a C.H.U.D.”

“Yeah, but C.H.U.D.s had those nasty Spock ears and those pupiless eyes that glowed.”

David and I moved toward Kermit and Sam who were doing their own examination of a corpse. I repeated the process of making sure they were all
really
dead. They were all identical in features, and newly undead.

I radioed the girls, “All right, it’s clear. You can come out now.”

I had spoken too soon. I had barely finished my sentence when another came bounding toward us. It was angry and monstrous, both in size and attitude. I pushed David away. The force of my nudging was stronger than I anticipated.

David stumbled backwards over a corpse and crash-landed on a dead soldier.

The creature’s charge was so furious and rapid that it was humanly impossible to react in time to ward off the enraged attack. But I was different, and for once I was truly grateful for the difference. The transmute in me had given me hyper-abilities, superior agility, and lightning reflexes, abilities I would later learn to improve upon through my martial arts training.

The transmute targeted David, but when David fell, the beast overcharged and passed us both. It quickly spun around and tried to lunge at the befuddled David, seeing easy prey.

I stepped in front of it, rammed the barrel of the M4 into the soft neck tissue above its thyroid cartilage, and simultaneously pulled the trigger. The creature remained upright, supported by the rifle barrel that had lodged into its throat. I yanked the weapon back. It slumped to the ground.

David stood up and brushed himself off as the others ran to us. Julie threw her arms around him and hugged him tightly, letting him know that he was safe.

David looked down at the creature that had wanted him for breakfast, cleared his throat and asked, “What are we supposed to call them?” He pretended not to be shaken, not wanting the others to see how frightened he was, especially Julie. But he was rattled; I could clearly hear it in his voice.

I put my hand on his shoulder and reassured him, letting him know it was okay to be scared. “Fuck. I think I just shit a Cooper MINI!”

David smiled tentatively, and then corrected me. “MINI Cooper.”

“Yeah, and that too!”

His smile slightly widened. “So? Deadites? C.H.U.D.s? Half-mutes?”

“Half-mutes? Yeah,” I agreed. “Half-mutes.”

The others gathered around as I crouched, examining the last body. “These are not like the others… this is so fucked.”

I wasn’t purposely trying to scare the others, but the words just rolled out of my mouth.

“You’re right.” Sam replied. “Look at this,” he said, as he showed me his NukAlert, “they’re hot!”

David had been correct about the radioactive fallout. The effect of the contamination was like something out of Andre Norton’s novel,
Daybreak 2250 AD
.

“
Great!
Radioactive mutants,” I sighed. “The poor bastards recently turned, which means there might still be survivors.”

Kermit said, “Not if they keep turning into those things.”

“Are they some kind of new transmute?” Marisol asked.

“No, I don’t think so,” I responded. “It appears the doc’s virus has mutated.”

“Are you saying they’re a new kind of UD?”

“Yes,” I said to Julie. “We’re going to have to take one back to the doc. Maybe he’s got an answer. Sam, you and Joe grab that second one over there. It’s less blown apart.”