Medora: A Zombie Novel (23 page)

“Okay, I guess we’re definitely leaving now
,” Clarence said.

“He’s requesting an airstrike? This doesn’t make any sense. I don’t know about you
guys, but I’m getting really sick of Ortega’s non-protocol shit. The guy doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

The unit quickly squeezed into the Humvee with Dave crawling into the back along with the warm, fuel tank. He peered into the front of the car as Ortega took off the headset and Jeremy dropped into his seat after the slamming the door.

“Alright,” Ortega leaned over to Jeremy, “you have six minutes to get us to greater than a ten mile radius of this shit show town.”

Jeremy started the engine and turned the wheel, making the Humvee skid sideways and
leap forward down the street, fishtailing as it evened out on the road. He quickly accelerated, carrying them away from the main street, leaving the plane wreckage behind. A few of the sick were in the middle of the road and Jeremy began to veer towards one of them.

“Hey! What the hell are you doing? You want to flip this thing as we’re getting out of here? Pull your head out of your ass!” Ortega grabbed the wheel and brought the Humvee out of a direct course of the walking figure in the street.
“Holy shit, Jeremy, what is in your brain?”

Jeremy smiled sheepishly as the Humvee had cleared the limits of the main street of the town, and was now flanked by farmland on both sides.

“Okay, Medora boys, say good bye to Strykersville.”

From his perfect view in the backseat, Dave saw the small buildings of the town as the Humvee was making distance. With the window frame surrounding the back window, it felt like he was looking at a movie screen as three fighter jets seamlessly swooped onto the screen and flew away, leaving a brilliant flash of light and explosion in their wake.

Rambert finally remembered the year: 1814. It had been some time since freshman U.S. History but he was sure it was that year. August 12, 1814, was the only time since the revolutionary war that a foreign power had captured and occupied the United States Capital. The British came back for apparent revenge during a war with the French. Whatever the circumstances, Rambert remembered that the British burned down the White House. As a young college student, he now recalled the awe he felt that something with so much permanence and authority as the White House could have been burned down at one some point during history. For him, at that time, it was something incomprehensible. Even earlier that day, the White House was untouchable as a symbol and as a permanent and fixed building. Every terrorist in the world would have loved to achieve what the country’s own citizens were already doing.

This was a bad idea, he thought, a real bad idea. Most ideas that day had been bad ones. Maybe there’s some sort of requisite of having bad ideas to get a good one
finally, he thought. How many bad ideas does it take? Fifty? Does it take one hundred bad ideas to finally get a good idea from someone somewhere? If the ratio was one hundred to one of good to bad ideas, they should’ve had at least a dozen good ideas already but Rambert was positive that he hadn’t heard one all day.

All he had was a couple
of half-baked ideas about a killer virus from an unknown researcher that he dug up from Chicago who was probably dead by now. For most of his career, he had relied on his own hunches. Hunches about people, policies, lobbyists, and even about the President. Some of his hunches he wouldn’t share with anyone because they would cost his job, but the majority of them had been very reliable to him throughout the years.

He had a hunch about Stark that had now turned into an utter disaster. Stark had seemed so promising. He was the only one with experience with a similar disease in Europe and he must’ve been brilliant with all
his multiple degrees in electromagnetism and medicine. Stark was a one of a kind. He figured Beckfield, the world’s expert in virology would serve as a backup to Stark, but now the son of a bitch was nowhere to be found.

Rambert’s
mind was winding around, circulating the same thoughts, starting with Stark, then going to New York and coming back to the President with whom he had just had a heated conversation. Each thought spun around again and again for him to experience once more. He had long relied on his ability to be flexible, adapt and to stay rational during his career. The stability that was always there had started to crumble but he didn’t believe that he was showing it yet.

The President was a boy, he thought, just a little, first-term forty-four-year-old boy who got elected on rhetoric alone.
Rambert concluded that the man had no idea what he was doing. He kept trying to think about his daughter but he was interrupted.

“Larry?” The President said across the cramped table.

“Yes, Mr. President?” Rambert realized that he must have appeared lackadaisical from the way he was staring at the wallpaper.

“The only reason you’re being included in this conversation is because half my cabinet is probably dead.”

“I’m sure they’re not dead… communications everywhere are down.”

“Look, I know your objections
. They are the same objections I also have.”

“I understand.”

“We’ve exhausted our resources and we’re all… terrified. I’m terrified.”

“I know, we all are.”
Rambert pinched the bridge of his nose and rubbed his eyelids. “I know.”

“I’m under pressure not just from almost every Governor in the country but the entire developed world. We have a responsibility to everyone to take care of this disease and stop it here. Do you know who just called me?”

“Who?”

“Angela Merkel.”

“I can guess what she had to say.”

“She said Germany, France, Japan, England, China
, and Norway are flooding the Atlantic with naval ships.”

Rambert
sighed through pursed lips.

“She was explicit with me that if we don’t take care of the infection, she and the European
Union will. And who even knows about what other countries are doing that aren’t even trying to communicate with us. China could be anywhere right now. We are losing control of the situation. We’re losing the country. Do you realize this?”

Rambert
snorted a small, sardonic snicker and just stared back at the President.

“Do you want my job, Larry? Because I would give it to you in a heartbeat if I could.” The President sat behind a small wooden table in the corner of a dining room, lit by an overhead chandelier emitting a warm yellow glow. He wore a wrinkled white button up shirt, untucked from a pair of dark blue slacks with a pair of tennis shoes sticking out from under the table. There was a small window, awkwardly placed at the far end of the room where two walls met. Three men in full body armor stood around the window looking out.

“Larry, this isn’t funny.”

“You’re being bullied, and so easily I might add.”
Rambert stood up and looked down at the President.

“Screw you, Larry,” the President said, staring at
Rambert from beneath the shadows cast by the chandelier light. “They will bomb American soil! Or worse, just come right on in and set up shop. We couldn’t possibly mobilize our naval defense fast enough right now to stop them. Two thirds of our Navy is around Iran right now!”

“
So, let me understand. You’re just going to kill everyone for them?”

“They’re already dead. They’re walking around but they’re dead.”

“There are probably hundreds of thousands of non-infected survivors in the New York City area.”

“Don’t you see that I get it? I already understand every rebuttal, every argument that you’re going to come up with. I know that we may end up killing many people but this virus is not an epidemic, it’s a war. It will take this entire country in a matter of days. Hell, go look out the window right now!” The President gestured toward the small window in the corner of the room. The three men looking out turned,
looked at the President and looked back out the window. “You’d be doing the exact same thing as me if you were in my place.”

“I can guarantee you that I would not.”

“What would you do then? Huh, right now?”

“Wait.”

“Wait for what? You can’t just wait, Larry. Wait…?” He scoffed and looked away at the wall.

“I don’t know, but we wait. I think we continue to do pinpoint bombings like we’ve been doing to focus on the high infectious zones. We can slow the spread without eradicating the city.”

“It will be too slow.”

These damn Presidents,
Rambert thought, always worried about their legacy. They were constantly looking in a rearview mirror from fifty years in the future considering what the world would think about what they did. It was impossible for them to make decisions from the perspective of a person living in the present moment.

Rambert
had been leaning against the wall, pressing his palms onto the wallpaper behind his back. He bounced himself off the wall and moved to the small square window that kept the three men so occupied at 2 am. Looking out, he saw the beginning of the end laid out in front of the White House lawn. A heavily fortified barricade of tanks, SWAT vans and police cruisers were tightly surrounding the inner perimeter of the lawn. Outside of this barricade was another barricade; an impromptu ten-foot high wall of cement blocks with barbed wire with a security patrol of greatly armored men. Just beyond them, a horde was gathering; not quite an ocean of heads, but a loose cluster of the infected bumping and falling, biting and decaying, disturbed by a steady stream of traffic that wound up sidewalks and alleys. The traffic was slow and Rambert could see that the people of D.C. were prepared for their exodus of the city. They used crowbars, bats, golf clubs or any other long objects to fight off the horde from their cars as they slowly weaved through. The lawn, however, was completely clear of anyone for the time being.

“The order is going
out in three hours. I’d do it now, but I’m still waiting to hear from Robert.”

“
When was the last time you heard from him?”

“It’s been at least five hours
. He went to try to arrange for a quick evacuation of his family. I think he was having trouble, apparently even being Vice President doesn’t have much pull during the apocalypse.”

“You think this is the apocalypse?”

“Closest thing I’ve seen to it, yes.”

“You drop that nuclear warhead, and then you’ll have an apocalypse.”
Rambert walked out of the room.

*****

It had become obvious rather quickly that Stark would be confined to the basement lab for quite a while longer. No SWAT team showed up to break down the doors and no men with hazmat suits magically appeared to quarantine the facility. The only people that showed up in the hallway were the infected. One of them figured out that Stark was in there, possibly from all the equipment running, and he had slowly attracted the attention of others as they all corralled about the door that Stark had secured with a long deli case refrigerator full of bottles and chemicals. He would periodically look out the small rectangular window at them and was reminded of Brownian motion where flower pollen, when dropped on a water surface, will bounce around at random with no discernable pattern of movement. They flowed through the hallway in random flux, clumsily falling or bumping into walls. They wandered, waiting for some sort of stimulus to jolt them into a more organized motion and to draw them in with their intact instinctual reflexes.

For this reason, Stark worked around in the lab swiftly yet silently, taking extreme care not to clink glassware together or lean back in the squeaky lab chair. He could only wonder what the streets
must look like by now if the infection had made it out of the building, something in which he had no doubt at this point.

Through all his caution and hours of work, he had made little progress other than the small fact that he discovered he probably had cancer. He had been trying to compare his white blood cells with those of Danny in some off chance that he could find a connection with a specific protein that they somehow shared which offered him immunity to the virus. However, he essentially had no idea what was going on
. The bite on his finger showed no signs of infection and overall he felt well other than exhaustion. Repeatedly, he played the scene out when he was bitten. He ran to the door, tried to call for someone and fell to the ground. Beckfield came in and stood above him, looking at him briefly with a blank expression. Stark was bewildered by Beckfield’s countenance, his lack of concern or empathy. He had looked down at him with the condescension of a parent knowing better than their child does, yet he appeared aloof at the same time. Then, Beckfield just walked away, out of his sight as Stark slipped away from consciousness.

Stark wanted to talk to
Rambert, and apologize for everything, but he knew that would be wrong, because the only thing he felt himself culpable was being bitten by Danny. Stark hadn’t let him out. He hadn’t even left the lab to infect anyone. He had reasoned through these things again and again, trying to convince himself out of the guilt, he was feeling intermittently for the current D.C. outbreak that was undoubtedly happening outside the walls of the lab. His mind was also cycling thoughts of his ex-wife who lived in Brooklyn. He wondered where she was and if she was able to escape. He realized that the only reason that he kept trying to do work was to keep his mind off everything else that was going on in the outside world. He lacked any genuine motivation to try to actually figure out what the virus really was.

The lab that he found himself confined to was quite
large. There was an adjacent kitchen with plenty of pantry food, and left over lunches from employees that probably wouldn’t be reclaimed at this point. The power or lighting had not gone out yet and the air was cool in the basement.

Currently, Stark was eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and wondering about a sound. There were soft silent sounds all over the
lab, but cutting through was a surreptitious clunking sound originating from somewhere beyond the walls. He had tried in vain to figure out the direction of the sound, but it seemed to emanate from everywhere at once. It was a soft clunk in the distance with almost a rhythmic pulse and he couldn’t tell if it was getting louder or if he was just becoming more aware.

Brushing the sound off, he returned to the kitchen area and cleaned the dish he was using in the sink. Sighing deeply, he watched the soap in the sink swirl around as it sunk down the drain. He leaned on the counter and continued staring into the black drain as the rest of the soap washed away. The sense of purpose that his hurried lab work had been giving him was fading now. Without the resources, staff and
time, he silently admitted that there was no reason to keep working right now. A thought then struck him. Is this the time that I need to start contemplating my life? He always figured that as a person got older and was close to death that at some time they had to sit back and think about all the memories of their life. A person needed to stream the living memories of high school, college, marriage, career and personal relationships into a beautiful film in their minds before they died. He never thought that he had to figure out some sort of life purpose at the end, but he always thought a person should recollect the sum of their life.