Drink in case of Emergency (20 page)

“I don’t know, okay? I don’t know why the fuck any of us are still alive. What was so different about us. I don’t know if it’s some dumb luck or our blood type or the fact that we all got chicken pox when we were kids or what it is. I just know that the world ended, and we’re still here.”

“That’s not good enough for me.” Amy pressed the barrel of the gun into Tyler’s forehead, Tyler winced in fear. The barrel was hot. Not hot enough to singe his skin, but warm enough to remind him that she had just shot a little boy and his dad in the head. “What did you do differently?” Tyler’s mind drew a blank, and for a moment he was a little depressed by the fact that his life wasn’t really flashing before his eyes. The only thing he could think was that he wished he could have had pancakes one last time. Tyler then felt stupid that this final wish might be his last thought. Tyler could see Amy’s finger beginning to squeeze the rifle’s trigger, when a noise stopped her.

The noise started deep, a heavy rumble, then moved up and it took Tyler a few seconds to realize that the noise was coming from Chris. Chris had doubled over in pain. Tyler panicked, as he thought that this was basically the worst possible time for Chris to turn into a zombie. It took a few hours for the virus to affect him, but he’s turning and going to start moaning like those monsters.

As Tyler was resigning his life with these thoughts, Chris continued making the noise, causing Jessica and Justin, who were standing closest, to back away slowly. The noise eventually evolved into the deep laughter that everyone had long associated with Chris. The laughter caught Amy off guard, and she lowered her rifle away from Tyler for a moment, but never turned her head far enough to lose him from her peripheral vision.

Between heaving breaths and laughter, Chris was finally able to choke out a few words. “Oh god...so damn funny.”

It wasn’t pain then? He wasn’t turning? It was just laughter?

Understanding dawned on her, and Amy shouted with anger. “You figured it out?” But the laughter spasms had taken him over again, and he wasn’t able to speak, only to nod his head. Over the next minute his laughter finally began to die away, and he lay face up on the ground, chest heaving for breath.

“Oh shit.” Chris let out a long sigh before going on. “You’re all going to want a drink before I tell you.”

****

“Okay. Do you want to know why we’re still here, or how I figured it out?” Chris was sipping from a tumbler of whiskey that looked far too classy for a picnic. The six friends were sitting around a picnic table in the park.  He had been serious that everyone should have a drink in their hands before he explained. Amy was the only who really put up a fight with this, but she eventually agreed to have a bottle of tequila available to her, although it was sitting on the table, sealed.

“They’re not one in the same?” she said angrily, the rifle still clutched between her small hands, aimed in the general direction of Tyler.

“Okay, explanation first.” Chris said, a note of excitement in his voice. “The four of us have no recollection of what may have happened the night that this all started because we were blacked out drunk.” Chris started chuckling again, but when he saw the look on Amy’s face, he cut his laughter short. “Scott and I have been talking for a while, and there’s a few rules to epidemics I learned from a Discovery channel special. Virus based epidemics spread slowly, following the roads and other major forms of transportation over time, because people are the carriers typically. Mosquito and other pest based usually follow a fanning out pattern, because they don’t follow the same rules of transportation as people.

“So you don’t think it’s a virus, or some kind of bug bite. I could have told you that. Viruses don’t kill everyone in the same night, and bugs don’t spread this fast.” Jessica was starting to get annoyed as well, she had barely touched the beer that Scott had conscientiously placed in front of her.

“Well fine, I still haven’t figured out exactly where it came from, or what it is, but I know why we don’t have it.” Chris stated, clarifying.

“Why were we left alone?” Amy asked, frustration and urgency in her voice. Chris didn’t respond, he simply toasted her with his tumbler of whiskey and winked.

There was a long pause of uncomfortable confusion, and Scott suddenly made a loud groaning noise.

“Egggghhhhhhhhhhh. Are you fucking kidding me!?” Scott shouted, his face lighting up. Before saying another word, he grabbed the craft beer in front of him and slammed the entire thing. He threw the glass bottle over his shoulder and started laughing. The bottle bounced harmlessly through the grass, and Chris joined him in another good round of laughter.

“You guys mind actually explaining what the fuck is so funny?” Amy’s patience was wearing thin. She looked angrily from Justin to Tyler, both looked as confused as she felt. After another few seconds of laughter, it was Scott who began explaining.

“The one thing that all six of us, or eight if we count our recently lost companions, have in common, is that we were drinking alcohol the night that this all started.” Scott let the statement hang in the air, waiting to see if it was enough of an explanation. Jessica broke the silence.

“No. Paul and Irene didn’t say anything about drinking when they told us what happened.”

“Okay, with them it’s an assumption. But they line up a babysitter to spend the night while they’re at a dinner party within walking distance to their hotel. I think it’s fair to assume they had at least a few glasses of wine with their meal.” Chris clarified.

It was starting to click for Amy. “So we didn’t change because we were drunk. Emily didn’t change either, but Adam had changed and was already killing her by the time we found them. What about what just happened here. If Paul didn’t change before, why’d he change now?”

“Because he got bit.” Tyler answered this question, with recognition dawning in his voice. “That’s what happens when you get bit by a zombie, you turn.” He said a silent prayer to himself before taking a pull from the bottle in front of him.

“And what Tyler is leaving out, is that he didn’t change because he has been snookered since before his boxing match with Charlie this morning.” Chris paused for a moment. “Probably a damn good thing you got drunk for that fight too, no telling what might have happened if you hadn’t.”

“Your question is what really clicked it for me. When you asked what Tyler did differently when he was bit. It just clicked. Tyler was shitfaced. When I got bit yesterday, I had just finished off a bottle of vodka. Paul didn’t touch the beer we offered him, and so he turned when his creepy ass zombie kid bit him.”

“So we don’t know what caused this all in the first place,” Scott surmised. “But we know that being drunk somehow protected us, and seems to still protect us when we get bit now...”

With Scott’s final explanation, Amy looked from Tyler to Scott to Chris. Then, she finally set the rifle down on the picnic table, spun the cap off of the tequila in front of her and took a long, hard pull from the bottle.

“This is some weird fucking shit.” Amy winced at the familiar burn of the tequila warming her belly. She looked around at her party of survivors before continuing. “I think I’m going to like it.”

****

Over the next two hours, the group of friends continued their picnic, focusing more on alcohol as opposed to the food they had brought. A loud shot rang out from Amy’s rifle as Jessica finished off the second bottle of tequila they had brought with.

“We better find a liquor store and grab some more, booze is gonna be like the new condoms, ya’know?” Scott really did know, even in spite of the fact that Jessica slurred the last two words together. “Hey Ames, why do you keep shooting them? There’s more zombies than bullets in that gun. And you can’t reuse bullets. If they were arrows and you were Robin Hood, then you could. But you’re no ‘hood’.” Jessica’s sentences were becoming less and less intelligible. Scott would be frustrated by this, if he hadn’t been going shot by shot with her and feeling as drunk.

He and Jessica were still sitting at the picnic table. Amy was about twenty yards away, on a small hill in the center of the park, next to a tall oak tree. She had been firing shots consistently, about one every minute or so, for the last half hour. Chris, Tyler, and Justin had said they were going to scavange for more food. A few moments after they had left, Justin ran back to let them know that the power was out in the few stores they had broken into. With a sense of urgency, Scott had urged them to all go find as much ice cream as possible. Justin had taken off with a run.

“Why do you...how you know these guys anyway?” Scott could see that Jessica was having trouble focusing on him, her eyes were watered over and a little vacant, she would need to sleep soon. Which means they would need to get back to the office. Another gunshot ripped through the afternoon air.

             
“I grew up with Tyler and Justin. Chris, I met through them. I think he and Justin had some intro class together in college.”

None of this is actually sinking in, she’s too drunk to possibly remember any of this.  She has such beautiful eyes though.

             
“Howza handsome boy like you manage to keep yourself all innocent like? You’re not just trying to pull a fast one over on a sweet girl, are you?” Jessica shook a finger as menacingly as she could manage in her current state. “Because I’ll have you know, that I’m much more capable than I let on. You’ve simply caught me in a bit of a novel situation, which has led to a bit of a reserved state for me.”

             
“You don’t normally drink a dangerous amount of tequila?” Scott had to chuckle a little bit at her initial statement.

             
“Heaven’s no.” Jessica shook her head aggressively. “I’m usually more of a white wine girl myself. Organic, if it’s on the menu.”

             
“Oh, I love organic. There’s just so much more to it.” Scott said, not entirely sure if he was being sarcastic or not. Amy’s rifle popped off another round, the sound echoing off the nearby storefronts.

             
“What are you even shooting?” Jessica shouted, her voice had a note of anger in it.

             
“Zombies, mostly. And some street signs.” Amy had a wry smile on her face. Jessica and Scott hadn’t seen it previously, but if they had, they would have noticed that it was the same smile Tyler had seen two hours ago, just before young Max Steger received a bullet to the brain.

             
“Why on earth would you shoot the street signs?” Scott felt his inner need for order and discipline trying to break through the tequila smog that was clouding his head.

             
“On the serious side of things, I’m pretty sure that we’re all going to need some practice with these things.” Amy held up her rifle as she was walking down the hill to the picnic table. “And on the lighter side of things, guns are really fun to shoot.”

             
Scott had never been a big fan of guns. He loved first person shooter video games and had been playing them since then original Doom came out when he was a kid. The real things though, simply seemed unnecessary to him. “Fun? And you’re just shooting zombies willy-nilly?” Scott could feel his responsible side burning away the tequila smog with each serious statement. “Number one, every time you fire that gun, more zombies are going to come running toward the sound. Number two, if you want to practice, try doing it when we aren’t in the middle of a park and could be easily surrounded.” Scott was holding up two fingers in his left hand, he was about to continue before he was cut off by Amy.

             
“Number three, you’re a vagina face who just wants the world to be a safe placey wacey again so you can grow organic cotton to make tampons and diapers for your vegan babies that the two of you will have made with your hipster sex.” Amy finished the statement while glaring at Scott, who glared right back. “But we should get going back to the office. If the lights are out now, we should make sure we have a plan in place for tonight.”

PART 3 - How would you react to the end of the world?

             
Later that evening, Justin and Tyler were preparing to create what would be one of the last dinners of surf and turf that anyone in the world would have in a long time. While they prepared the meal, Amy and Chris double checked the security of their ground floor barricades.

Despite her initial icy demeanor, Chris had decided that he liked Amy a lot more than Jessica. She was decisive, intelligent, and could fire a gun, three skills that were very important for the end of the world. Jessica was with Scott, sleeping off their afternoon of day drinking in the room that had become the sleeping quarters since the girls moved upstairs.

             
The four and eventually six friends sat down for a candlelit dinner around the large boardroom table and devoured an irresponsible amount of perfectly prepared filet mignon and buttered lobster tail, along with a crispy fresh salad. Justin had also put out a few hundred dollar bottles of wine, however nobody was really able to tell the difference between this and the cheap stuff. The dinner was one of the finest that any of them had ever had, and after dinner, the conversation went back to “the bucket list.”

             
“Well now that it seems as though we’re going to be sticking together as one larger group...” Tyler started, but he was promptly cut off by Amy.

             
“For the time being.”

             
“For the time being,” Tyler continued, “I think that it’s only fair that we do something that you put on the list next.” Tyler looked at his friends around the table and noticed mostly nods in agreement. Scott looked away, and Jessica just looked hungover and exhausted.

             
“What about finding survivors?” Chris heard himself ask, even though he didn’t want to.

             
“Clearly, we don’t need to try very hard, it’s pretty evident that we’ve found someone someone two days in a row. I mean, it seems pretty obvious that alcohol had something to do with protecting us, and there’s gotta be a decent number of people who were drinking that night. Maybe not the majority, but a decent number.” Tyler responded.

             
“And then they just have had to survive the last two days, too.” Scott said, with a note of hungover sass in his voice.

             
Scott and his shitty attitude.

Chris knew that if he called out Scott on it that it would just make him even more shitty, so he tried to take another angle.

             
“I forget, what did you add to the list, Scott? I think we should do one of your items next.”

“But we were going to do one of the girl’s things first.” Tyler interrupted, only to have Amy interrupt him.

             
“Yeah, I’m curious what the brains of the group wants to do. I know Jessica was saying that she wanted to know too. Isn’t that right, Jess?” Jessica moaned something in response that may have been “Yes” or it may have been “Kill me.”

             
“That list was stupid when we made it. I can’t believe we’re even still talking about it. It’s not like anything on there is actually doable.” Scott wined, and with that little statement, Chris knew that he had Scott hooked.

             
“Okay, so you want something that seems doable. So hot air balloon shark fishing might be logistically challenging at the moment.” Chris traced his finger down the page, pointing more for show than actually needing to read it. He picked what he thought was the simplest one that involved the greatest amount of travel. “What about this one?”
             

“Piss off the Willis Tower.” Amy read aloud. “That sounds pretty doable. All we have to do is go to Chicago, right?” By this point, Tyler joined in, not entirely sure where the conversation was headed, but trusting that Chris knew what he was doing.

             
“Yeah, I could sure go for a piss from up there too. And I’m sure there’d be lots of survivors in Chicago. People drink there every day of the week.”

Chris winced a little at this statement. Lots of people would also mean lots of zombies. Millions of them, most likely. Part of him hoped that Scott would catch onto this fact too and talk them out of it right now, but that wasn’t the case. Scott was just frustrated and wanted to do something that would get them moving.

             
“Fine. Let’s do that. I’m going to piss off the Willis Tower.” And with that somewhat novel sentence, Scott set the stage for their next adventure.

Father O’Connell spent only two days cleaning up his hometown. In this time he was able to send nearly one hundred people to join God. At the start, it was easy, as people were drawn to the first sign of another normal human being. Toward the end, he had to hunt nearly all of them down.

Somehow they just knew that he wasn’t there to help them, and so they struggled or ran. No matter, they wouldn’t need those bodies where they were going anyway, and God certainly wasn’t going to begrudge him for some bullet wounds or broken legs if the soul got to him.

             
After two days of exhausting work, he couldn’t really find anyone left to send on to heaven, so he waited. Waited and prayed. Waited, drank sacramental wine, and prayed. He had assumed that after he had completed his work, that he would move on, that God would come to retrieve him as well. A day later, he was still alive.

             
Is my work not done yet?

             
What else does God need me to do?

             
God wasn’t going to take him yet, because there was still work left to do. Surely there were souls in nearby towns that were still bound to this world. He wondered for a moment if all men of faith were kept here on earth to fulfill the same shepard role he was serving in. If this was the case, then surely they would be sending souls in their own communities.

             
To test this theory, he climbed in his 1994 Toyota Corolla and traveled to Tawnyhill, the closest community with a Roman Catholic church as well. He and Father Niles, the local priest, had been friends for nearly a decade, and he expected to find his friend in the same state he found himself. Instead, he found that Father Niles had already moved on, he had already changed, and left his body behind.

             
This left Father O’Connell in a bit of an existential pickle. He had already served his flock, he had sent as many as he could onto the next world. In the Tawnyhill church, he prayed for guidance.

             
On his knees, in the front pew of the church, he bowed his head. After a few minutes, he felt a sharp stiffness in his shoulders and lower back. Bringing so many people to God’s light was hard work on his old body. To help alleviate the stiffness, he readjusted, giving up the kneeling for a seated position in the front pew.

             
As he sat and prayed, the answer came to him. Not through the voice of God, but in another way. Eyes closed in prayer, Father O’Connell heard the heavy doors at the back of the church creak open, and then a meek voice speak, “Hello?”

Father O’Connell turned and looked at the intruder. The man was dirty, wearing jeans and a tshirt that were both torn and disheveled, covered in wrinkles and stains. The man was clearly distraught at all that he had seen over the last few days, and Father O’Connell couldn’t blame him. Even those who don’t follow the faith benefit from God’s love through all of their neighbors who follow God’s teachings. The acts of violence that were left in the world were evidence that God’s love was leaving this place. His people were with Him now. Father O’Connell greeted the man with all the warmth and kindness he would greet any lost soul.

The man’s name was Eric, and he explained that he had met up with a few survivors, six in all, and that he needed guidance to keep the group safe. As the oldest member of the group (a fact which surprised Father O’Connell, as the man couldn’t have been a day over forty), they had nominated him to be the leader, something he had never done in his life.

Father O’Connell knew what he had to do. He prayed with the man, listened to his words and built a relationship of trust with him. He had difficulty understanding how this man, clearly a man of faith, would be left here when so many others were taken.

The Lord works in mysterious ways, this is true. Perhaps by leaving this one soul to struggle on earth, God was able to guide five more souls to join him. Father O’Connell was going to make sure this man did not struggle in vain.

Father subtly suggested that the man and his friends could stay with him for now, in the priest’s quarters. Father Niles had kept a modest two bedroom home next to the church. The man complied, graciously accepting a safe roof overhead for himself and his companions.

He left to retrieve the other lost sheep, and Father O’Connell went to work. It wasn’t hard to find five or six of the changed ones and lead them into the small house. Darkness was approaching, and this would help immensely, now that the electricity was gone.

Shortly after dusk, two small cars pulled up to the church, and Father O’Connell greeted them kindly. They all looked exhausted and scared, but they wouldn’t have to be scared for much longer.

He showed them into the small house. After ushering them through the front door, he closed and locked it. He held the key in the locked position, as well as held his weight against the door. It wasn’t a complete barricade, but it would last as long as it needed to.

The six people were set free from this world over the course of the next ten minutes. The screams still made him a little uncomfortable, but such was the Lord’s work.

This was the work he still had to do, there were other souls left to free from this world. This experience had given him the answer. He knew where he must go next. The closest, largest city where he could save the most people, Chicago.