Chicago Fell First: A Zombie Novel (8 page)

“What we saw must have a logical reason behind it, but maybe there’s a little soul stealing going on in there, too.

“For the sake of talking about it, we started calling it an ‘Ether-virus,’ since it can’t really be detected but it’s obviously there since we could see the effects. Maybe it’s a virus that has the effect of destroying part of the mind, the part that some people might call a soul, the part that makes us think and act like human beings as opposed to animals. But how does it spread? If it needs to destroy or consume the soul, then it would have to find a way to pass from one person to another. So, when it kills the conscience it causes a need, a lust to cannibalize, to consume the flesh or the blood of other humans. This need to feed on flesh delivers the virus to a place where it can fulfill its need to feed on souls. It’s one hell of an effective predator.”

Peterson nodded. “You don’t sound insane to me at all, but I still can’t let you go into Chicago, into a potential combat zone. And while your Ether-virus theory is, as I said, interesting, we don't know if it's the same thing happening in Chicago.”

Trumbull stood up. He took a tentative step toward the door, but Peterson said nothing. Trumbull walked out. As the door closed, the phone on the colonel’s desk began to ring.

Less than thirty minutes later, the choppers were in the air. Captain Trumbull was among the many men and women en route to Chicago. Trumbull faced no problems boarding the helicopter. He simply fell in step with the others. Now that they were in flight, his mind turned to the chaos they were sure to find upon arrival.

The warrior-turned-chaplain knew that what he had seen devour that small African tribe would seem like nothing compared to what could be happening, and probably was happening, if the thing he called the Ether-Virus had taken hold in one of America’s major cities. The virus in Africa had consumed the tribe so quickly and had been snuffed out completely by bullets. Isolation had extinguished that particular fire; it had simply run out of fuel. In Chicago, Trumbull knew, there would be no shortage of tinder for the flames. As he and his comrades travelled through the darkening skies, he wondered if his choice to stow away on this mission would be the last decision he would ever make. The habits he’d picked up since his change in occupation came to the front of his mind and, although he had never truly decided if he believed in its effectiveness, he began to pray.

When the helicopters finally came into Chicago’s airspace, those soldiers with clear views from the windows let out gasps, exclamations of shock, and a few shouts of “Holy shit!” and “Motherfucker!”

The lights of the city were all wrong. It looked like a war zone with large areas dark as if power had been lost while other parts of the city looked like they had been splattered with bright fluorescent paint from the sheer number of emergency vehicles. Fires were visible, too, spots of orange flames among the square city blocks, plumes of smoke flowing up and merging into the night sky like spilled coffee slowly vanishing as it soaks into a black rug.

Terence Trumbull’s heart began to beat faster as the choppers descended into the heart of the world’s newest Hell.

Chapter 7

Doug was snapped out of his deep thoughts by the voice coming through the window of his parked car.

“Hey, you’re not dozing off, are you?”

“Hi,” Doug said as he turned to face Kacey, who smiled as she looked in at him. The white uniform shirt and apron were gone and she wore a black T-shirt with the logo of the band Muse. Doug’s earlier assessment held up; she was attractive in a cute, almost vulnerable way.

“Are you getting out or am I getting in?” Kacey asked. As an unspoken answer, Doug tugged the door handle and climbed out, looking down at the companion he had not expected to meet when he travelled to Bellamy.

“What are we doing?” Doug asked. He felt uneasy. He’d spent so much of his adult life planning things in ways that would help him avoid human contact; this spontaneous evening had thrown him off balance. He had no idea what to expect.

Kacey shrugged. “Let’s just walk for now,” she suggested. “We’ll figure it out.”

They slowly strolled away, heading across the lot of the little shopping center. The sun had gone to bed for the night and the sky was dark, but the street lamps provided enough light to walk by.

“There’s not much to show you,” Kacey admitted. “This town kind of sucks, but I’m sure you noticed that as soon as you got here.”

“It seems okay,” Doug said. “It’s a nice contrast to Chicago. It’s quiet. There’s something innocent about it.” As he spoke those words, Doug wondered if that sense of innocence appealed to him because it seemed to be in such opposition to the guilt he felt over not what he had done, but what he knew he was capable of doing. He hoped he could leave Bellamy as innocent as he had found it.

Kacey nodded. “I guess any change can be interesting. I’d probably feel like that if I was in Chicago right now. The difference is you’d have something to show me.”

“Okay,” Doug said, “if there’s not much to see, there must be something to tell. You’ve lived here your whole life?”

“Yeah,” Kacey nodded, “twenty-one years and counting.”

“Then you must have a lot of memories of Bellamy.”

“Yeah … but they’re all so black and white.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Dull is what I mean. Shit, I feel like Dorothy, you know? I’m stuck in this cardboard Kansas and waiting for a chance to go to Oz. I guess that’s why I saw the idea of a stranger riding into town as so exciting, like you’d maybe bring some of the outside world in with you. Maybe I hoped you’d be my own personal twister and whirl me off to someplace more colorful.”

She stopped talking, laughed a little, like she was suddenly embarrassed. Doug could see her blushing a bit in the limited light. She killed the giggle and tried to backtrack.

“I meant symbolically, of course! I don’t mean I thought I’d run away with you! Geez, you must think I’m crazy. Sorry! I just needed to see somebody different, that’s all. You have to understand, Doug, I see the same people every single day and week and year I’ve seen my whole life, over and over and over again!”

“Then why do you stay?” Doug asked. “Why not leave? What about college? You could have gone away to school, right? You could have gone to Chicago or New York or California or anywhere. You seem smart to me. Why stay here?”

Kacey stopped walking, turned to look up at Doug.

“Because,” she said, “escape is a onetime deal, and I need to know I can win before I make the jump. Does that make sense? When I leave Bellamy, and believe me when I say I will leave this dump someday, I don’t want to come back. I need to know why I’m leaving, what I’m going to do when I do get out and that I can accomplish it without having to turn around and come skulking back to this shithole! When I do get out, I think I’ll feel like I’d rather die than have to come back. Once I break this routine of living here, breathing this stale old black and white air, working that stupid diner with the same stupid people in the same stupid booths night after night, that will be the end of it. The routine will be broken and I will never, ever, ever get sucked into it again! Do you understand? I have to see a place to land before I jump off that cliff.”

She stopped talking, sighed, shoved her hands into her jeans pockets, and looked down at the ground as if suddenly ashamed to have shared such a burst of hope and desperation.

Doug looked at her for a minute, said nothing. He finally took a step closer and spoke, surprised by the firmness in his own voice.

“I do understand,” he told her. “I’ve had moments where I feel hopeless and stuck in the same cycle. I guess I hope for a change sometimes, too; and I worry that I won’t see the opportunity when it arrives. Yes, the idea of things staying the same scares me, and the possibility of things changing scares me too. I guess we just have to keep our eyes open and try to trust our instincts about when to make the choices we have to make.”

Kacey looked up at him. She half smiled. “We’re in the same boat, huh?”

“It seems that way.” 

“So why do you do what you do?” Kacey asked, blatantly trying to turn what had become philosophical into something more like small talk.

“You mean why do I fix video games?”

“Yeah,” she nodded.

“Because it’s something I’m good at,” Doug said. “I’ve always been interested in how things are put together, how the pieces work together to do what they do.”

As Doug spoke, he had to suppress a shudder, for his words held so many layers of meaning it felt intimate. Kacey just nodded in understanding.

Doug felt the other part of him coming to the surface. He felt his shadow-self climb up his spine and sneak into his head and begin to peer out through his eyes to examine the human being who had his attention. Doug’s honesty had activated his inner secret.

His mind went into a mode that felt like split-screen television. The Doug who struggled to be human and act according to society’s expectations looked at Kacey Sherwood and saw eyes that indicated interest in his words and a shape that seemed relaxed, casual and glad to be in his company. The Doug who always lingered beneath the surface and had now come up to share the brain’s impressions saw something else. It saw the machine, a flesh and blood and bones construct, an example of the sort of combination of parts operating together to form one whole that he had just admitted a fascination with.

Time seemed to slow as Doug felt the sharing of his mind begin. Kacey said something, but Doug didn’t get the meaning of it. The sounds reached his ears, but his brain’s interpretation of them, the results of the process of the sounds being recognized as syllables strung together into words, didn’t make it to his consciousness, for his shadow-self was busy appreciating the intricacy of the sounds’ formation. Air entered the machine’s mouth, passed down the windpipe and into the lungs where it was recirculated and expelled back out to act in cooperation with the larynx and vocal chords, the tongue pressed against the teeth in a certain manner which created specific noises that the brain had directed to come out of the mouth that had originally taken in the air. The shadow-Doug embraced the beauty of the process while the other Doug fought to contain the shadow, struggled to make sense of those noises.

“What?” Doug forced his own vocal apparatus to ask Kacey to repeat herself. He wanted to know what she had said. He needed a stimulus to respond to, for activity was the only way to keep his shadow-self from taking control. Doug was afraid, both for Kacey and for him.

“I said that it makes sense,” Kacey told him, “but why did you pick arcade games to fix? Why wasn’t it cars or TVs or dishwashers?”

“Because,” Doug managed to squeeze the words out, “there aren’t many people who still know the technical side of the old gaming machines. There are mechanics everywhere and appliance guys and all that, but not too many like me. Besides, it’s fun getting to fiddle with Pac-Man and Donkey Kong.”

“Cool,” Kacey said with a smile.

Shit, Doug thought. The smile made it worse. It was a sweet, simple smile and it sent his mind reeling back to the smile of the girl in the mall so many years before when Doug had been a teenager and his shadow-self had first made known to him just how strong, how persistent and how integral to the entirety of his being it was. Kacey was shifting even more dramatically now, changing before Doug’s eyes into less of a legitimate, unique human being and more into a machine, a collection of parts fitted together and set into motion by the electrical impulses of the battery that was her brain. He could see the muscles that made her smile and the way those muscles moved the lips that teasingly revealed, in short spurts of visibility, the gleaming white teeth behind them and the little tip of her pink tongue.

Remember, said his shadow-self, the tongue is composed of eight muscles. Four of those muscles control the movements and the other four are anchored to the bones of the jaw, like the roots of a tree in soil. The blood that keeps it warm and alive is delivered by the lingual artery, which branches off from the carotid artery. The tongue is strong, the tongue is sensitive and the tongue is skillful. Primary function: the tasting and consumption of food. Secondary function: the creation of words. Look at it. See how it reveals so little of itself. How can you see how it works, how it’s attached, how ingenious a device it is unless you can see it all? Disassemble it, examine it, and understand. It would be easy. It’s right there. It wants you to feel it all, hold it, turn it over in the palm of your hand,
and see what it’s made of. We must understand the beautiful machine: part by part, piece by piece, fiber by fiber, one aspect at a time. The machine wants me to understand it.

Doug knew what his shadow-self was doing. He heard the tenses in the words it spit into his mind. First it spoke to Doug, then it spoke as if they were partners or friends, and then it spoke to him as his own thoughts would, as if he was it and it was him, and Doug knew that the last permutation of the phrasing was the most accurate, for there was only one true Douglas Clancy—and he wanted to understand the beautiful machine.

“Are you okay?” Kacey asked. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

Doug heard her this time. Her voice cut through the haze inside him. Her words were tinted with a combination of worry and fear. Doug struggled to keep his attention on what she was saying rather than just the sounds being made by that throat, the tongue, and those lips.

“I’m okay,” he managed to say, but he was lying. Moments earlier he had been enjoying her company, feeling more human than he had in a very long time. Now he wanted to keep that feeling going, wanted to keep the conversation bouncing back and forth between them like a tennis ball, but other things were creeping in at the periphery, other ideas and other possibilities. He was trying to be friendly, but his shadow-self was in strategy mode.

The beautiful machine was a small one, petite, fragile, probably not strong enough to easily fight off a man of Doug’s size. He was not huge, but not weak. How many times would that head have to be struck before the struggling ceased? Was there anyone else around who might see a burst of violence in the semi-dark parking lot? What tools of the gaming machine repair trade could be put to use in the process of seeking to understand this beautiful machine? Could spare wire be put to the task of binding it in place, keeping it contained? How easily would the wire shears part the layers of flesh that covered the inner workings of the machine? What implement in the tool kit could be used to harvest the tongue and set it free from the orifice that contained it, in order to facilitate analysis?

Stop! The Doug that did not want the shadows tried to take control. She is not Pac-Man! She’s a human being! If I break the machine … I can’t put it back together in a way that works! If I take out the tongue, it won’t make sounds anymore! Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!

Doug turned away from Kacey, glanced back to where his car sat under the parking lot lights. They hadn’t wandered far. He could reach it in moments. Even dragging her, it wouldn’t take long to get there and throw her in the back seat and drive away to some secluded spot and pick up the tools and get to work. She looked a bit uneasy but not quite afraid. He could strike fast, put her to sleep, carry her away and dissect.

Shut up! He screamed in his mind. She’s treated me like a human being. I will not do it!

The struggle hurt. Doug wrestled inside his mind and knew that he had not spoken in many moments, wondered how long he could stand there in dazed silence before Kacey would grow nervous and feel the fear creep up her spine. If he took a step in her direction, would she scream? Would she flee? Or did she sense anything awry at all? He wondered how what was happening looked from her point of view.

Yes, said his shadow-self, she’s looking at you with her eyes. The eyes: complicated systems of lenses, catching light and attached to the optic nerve which sends signals to the brain for interpretation, exquisite orbs of matter that bring light and information to the brain that controls the machine. How would it feel to hold those orbs and roll them around in our palm like small rubber balls that have been freed from their bone prisons, fragile as newly laid eggs?

Doug could feel the pressure building as if he stood upon the precipice of a dream into which he could dive, like a swimmer entering a warm, soothing pool of joyous liquid through which he had been born to navigate. One step, a few quick movements, and he could possess the machine and bathe in its liquid, separate its parts and rearrange them to his satisfaction like the wires and chips and sections of the games he had so easily learned to take apart and understand.