The Zombie Letters (19 page)

             
You know how to make a compass, Ryan? Take a magnet or piece of silk and touch the south pole of your needle with it. Float a leaf in a puddle of water and place the needle on it. The leaf will turn the needle exactly north and south. That’s why I always have sewing needles on me, and why I only wanted to buy silk scarves in the winter-time. Cool, huh?

              But when do you ever really need to use it, Daddy?

              You never know, son.

             
Ain’t that the truth.

              Once while driving home alone from a late meeting at his primary employer’s building in the city, Dennis found his way into a snowstorm. The forecast said that the arctic-level, high-wind storm would blow past western Kentucky completely. Weathermen wrong as always. Dennis should have known better than to listen to them. He had a homemade barometer in his trunk that would be more accurate than anything on the news. Dennis ended up sliding on the back country road and high-centered the car into a deep ditch. The wind chill outside was in the negative double-digits. It was actually one of the worst storms in Kentucky’s history. Cracking a window as to not suffocate in the car, Dennis braved that storm for fifty-three hours. Most people would attempt to leave the car. They would end up freezing to death in less than thirty minutes. Actually, a few people did during that storm. The trick is to stay in the damn car. Dennis always had a trunk loaded with blankets, pillows, warm changes of clothes, a flashlight, a lighter, a cigarette-lighter phone charger, an ice scraper, jumper cables and a five-gallon tank of gasoline. Never run the heater, either. Heat uses up all the oxygen in tiny spaces. It also sucks gas from the car like crazy. Countless people have died by simply running their heaters. Plus, the bottom half of the car was submerged in snow. Another danger. Not too many people know, but if an engine runs with a submerged or blocked tailpipe, carbon monoxide seeps up the pipe and into the car. It is enough to kill a human being in fifteen minutes. Even with a window cracked. After rationing an already half-eaten cheeseburger, small fries, a diet coke and a snickers bar for over two days, Dennis was rescued by a snow plow.

              The stuff
did
come in handy. Being an Eagle coupled with his brother’s knowledge of firearms made a man like Dennis formidable in a world like it had become. Even the zombie-hunting games the family would play to encourage and teach Ryan were valuable lessons to learn. Even now. But when it all came down to it . . . any family’s survival is pure luck. No one is invincible. No one can fend off a million of the walking dead. Not everyone had a house out in the sticks surrounded by a moat of flooded lake water six months out of the year. The only way to the house was the small, one-car driveway . . . and it was littered with land mines.

              Dennis heard something metallic fall behind him. He held his breath to keep from screaming and placed the gas mask on as quickly as he could react. Dennis Jackson . . . Eagle Scout and former IT Technician for Brandt Systems, Incorporated turned around, facing the empty tomb behind him. The tomb was once an indoor farmer’s market. Now it was a dank, rotten-smelling abattoir of what was once naturally edible. Raising the machete over his head, Dennis walked inside. He immediately saw what made the noise. A badly-shredded man . . . the bones on his upper thighs crudely peeled from his extremities and face, was standing on top of a nearly full skeleton that lie face-first on the floor. The victim and this creature’s new welcome mat had been stripped completely of all meat. The bones were dyed nearly black with the settled dust in the room. Tiny bits of fat and muscle still clung to the person’s ribs. The resident in the room didn’t notice Dennis right away. He was just standing over his victim, staring down at him and breathing heavily. As Dennis neared the back wall where the solitary infected was, it whirled around and looked up . . . but not at Dennis. It was looking at something
behind
him.

              Dennis turned around just as the large group of the infected still in their military uniforms shoved their way into the open door. Every one of them was dressed in those camouflage BDU uniforms. No doubt they were from the Army base that fell in Mayfield shortly after the invasion. All of the men and women were half-eaten and walking groggily as if their legs were made of lead. Most of their skull caps were broken o
pen or missing, exposing
chunks of brain. Their insides were hollowed out or ripped open to display their putrid, glistening guts. They moaned like starving men as they pushed past each other into the doorway.

              The only doorway.

              “Dennis, you dumb-ass! Why did you come
in
here?” he yelled to himself. He raised the machete and hacked the head off of the one that managed to get behind him. The head fell to earth and Dennis kicked it as hard as he could. The body fell limp and the head flew to the ceiling, where it hit one of the hanging light fixtures and stayed there. For a second, Dennis saw its eyes still blinking. Its mouth was moving, as if trying to roll itself to the new source of food.

              They were coming. The building was only about fifty yards long and thank god they weren’t runners. If they ran, Dennis would be dead. Either that, or they somehow knew that they didn’t
need
to run. Their prey was boxed in. Dennis yanked the spare chemical heater from his pocket and the half-full canteen strapped to his belt. It was a good habit to keep those items on him at all times. It had gotten him out of some close scrapes before. Dennis dropped the heater inside. The canteen immediately began to expand. The bits of razor blades, screws and carpenter nails rattled violently inside as the thick, hard plastic swelled by the second. Dennis didn’t toss it until every last walker was halfway inside. He’d timed it well.

              Dennis leapt behind one of the large, wooden pallet-shippers that lined the perimeter walls. He was a pretty tall guy . . . 6’1 and he barely fit behind the pallet when he propped it up as a makeshift shield. When the canteen exploded, it seemed to suck the air out of his lungs. Even with the gas mask on and fingers in his ears, they were still ringing. Dennis ducked as a leg, blown off at the knee, flew toward his face. Black, putrid-looking blood seemed to rain down from the ceiling as ribbons of flesh, disjoined organs and other material sprayed over him like confetti. No less than fifty of them were inside before it went off. The sound would bring more to join what had only been knocked to the ground or stunned by the blast. Dennis sprang to his feet. A jolt of pain announced itself at the back of his neck as he stood up. He reached to the back of his neck and pulled out a nearly whole razorblade. It hadn’t gone all the way through, but far enough to stick. He could feel the warm blood trickle down his back and under his shirt. Despite the swiminess in his head, he stood up. The bomb had nearly created a split in the pack. Body parts were everywhere and the walkers were blown back against the side walls. They lay there in a daze . . . some missing arms, legs and chunks of flesh. On gummy-legs, Dennis ran towards the door, hacking off the head of a zed at his feet that was struggling to get up. Its arms hung by only gristle and its lower jaw was on the floor at its feet. It was badly decayed . . . a woman in a black, formal burial dress. Her clothing suggested that she had been buried sometime in the 1800’s. Swinging the machete like a helicopter blade in front of him, Dennis hit his knees when his feet found the exit. The dead . . . hundreds of them . . . were running down the steep hills that surrounded the market and guard base on three sides. The road was the only way out and Dennis hoped he was far enough away from them to escape. They were cresting the hill about a mile from him. They were running kind of strange. Not as all-out as they usually do. It seemed more reactionary to the sound than him. They hadn’t seen him yet.

              An hour later, Dennis stopped his bike at the end of the gravel driveway in front of his home. As much as it hurt like hell, he lifted the bicycle as high as he could and walked the path home. He had the placement of the mines memorized, but in his dazed state, he feared he would stumble. The back of his shirt was soaked in his blood and the wound made his whole skull ache. He feared for a moment that the razor had hit something else first. That it was infected. If that were the case, he’d already be one of them. Amanda rushed to the end of the porch . . . her face frozen in wide-eyed dread.

              “Amanda?” Dennis said. He reached the porch steps and collapsed into the dirt.

II

              Darin Miles woke up the sound of birds chirping. They sounded so free. So untouched.
Something
in the world stayed the same. The sounds of early-morning birds were louder now. There were no other sounds to drown them out. No hissing of air-brakes. No horns honking. No lifelike mass of pedestrians on foot. No mo murmur of people as they scurried on their way. Nothing now. Just the birds. Mankind and all of his achievements have been silenced.

              They were only twenty miles outside of the nation’s capital now. They’d stopped at an empty Holiday Inn Express that was crawling with the infected. They had dissipated completely by the fourth floor guest suites . . . where Victoria Rains lay curled up on the other bed with a blanket completely over her. If she wasn’t snoring, Doctor Miles wouldn’t be able to tell that there was an actual human being under there. She just looked like a lump of blanket. Archie sat in the bathroom sink under a heat lamp that he stole from a hardware store. The flowers that formed a little skirt around the bottom of the bulb were blooming beautifully. Archie had to be placed in a new pot three days ago. He was growing. In just two to five years, it will re-grow the stalks and be nearly seven feet tall. Thank god they were careful lancing the extract from it for such a long time. It not only continued to work, but Archie was perfectly healthy.

              Darin and his rescued companion spent their time travelling around, trying to find other people to help. When they got to DC three months ago, the main Locke facility was trashed and all of the bulbs missing. As discouraging as that was, it gave them both a ray of hope. Someone . . . perhaps a former Locke employee or someone in the government survived and took the Archies. It was the only explanation that seemed plausible. Somewhere, if they were still alive, someone was using the plants to work on a cure. They could have been simply stored, while whoever took them went looking for someone that could continue on with Nathaniel’s research. There were four Locke laboratories across the country. The one in DC, the one at Iowa State, one in Dayton, Ohio and one was built into the basement at Keiser Medical in Orlando, Florida. The Ohio facility was burned to the ground and the one in Orlando had been bombed during an early attempt to contain the outbreak. Darin heard about it on the radio before it stopped broadcasting. What Darin didn’t know, was that about a half-mile away from the building in Florida, a crashed bomber was lying in a field. It looked to those that found it like it had been shot down.

              The bomber was sent from Japan, as evident by the uniforms on two of the bodies inside. It was now more than likely sent while other countries attempted to defeat the outbreak in America. Nearly every country in the world sent planes to bomb major coastal cities. The United States Military more than likely shut it down. There were no more facilities Darin knew of that had the equipment needed to do the work. That meant that whoever took the plants transported them to a place off the books or a place re-purposed for another use. No one else would know what the fuck the plants were, anyway. No one would take
all
of them. Doctor Miles’ speculation was solidified when he and Victoria visited the Locke in Ohio. Only the bulbs and specialized equipment were taken. It was obvious. So much of the place was destroyed. Someone someplace was working on a cure or locking the Archies away. Darin needed to find out
who.
He needed to be there . . . trying to right the wrongs he caused. He could never live with himself if he didn’t find out where the Archies were. Over the past months, he and Vic scoured the country, looking for signs of American military presence. They chased down every rumored research base the government was known to have. They even checked the crazy conspiracy-theorist places that were known to exist. They searched the base that was apparently built under the town of Dulce, New Mexico . . . the one built into the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains . . . an apparent hidden base of military operations hidden in the basements of the Old Town missions in San Diego. Doctor Darin Miles and Victoria Rains never found anything. Not even fellow survivors. Victoria said that she felt like they were aimlessly wandering now. That their ideas and resources were tapped out. Now, they were scouring the scorched earth for the remainder of their lives . . . looking for a place that may have been long gone.

              Still, they had to try. If they never found shit and saved only one survivor, just one family, it would all be worth it. Archie was still alive and could be re-planted. The bulbs contained more seeds than a fucking pomegranate. If the plants in Japan that survived prehistory brought anything to the table, they at least proved to Darin that in the right conditions, Archie could very well outlive human beings.