Plague of the Undead (24 page)

“I’m Lester Brooks, from the
Newton
. We saw the explosion. We’ve been surveying this area ever since, trying to determine the degree of environmental impact. It’s lucky for you the wind was blowing south during the explosion. If it had been blowing north, we’d be up in Jacksonville instead of down here. We’d have never found you.”

“I’m glad you did,” she said.

“I bet. It’s been a long time, Chelsea. Are you ready to go home?”

“Yes,” she said. “More than you could ever imagine.”

“Who are your friends?”

Again, that thoughtful, measured pause before she answered. “That’s Kelly Banis, and that’s Jacob Carlton. They’re from Arbella.”

“Arbella?” Brooks asked. He looked to Kelly, and then to Jacob.

Jacob was in so much pain he could barely stand. He tried to speak, but managed only to mutter.

Kelly said, “It’s on the maps as New Madrid.”

“Ah,” Brooks said. “Yes. Yours is a very successful community. We’ve been watching you.”

“You have?”

“Yes, for several years now. Yours is one of about twenty successful outposts east of the Rocky Mountains, and one of the largest.”

“Twenty others?” Kelly asked, stunned.

“Twenty-two, actually,” Brooks said. “Most are smaller than Arbella.”

“You say you’ve been watching us? Why haven’t you made contact with us? With all the things you can do, we could have learned so much from you.”

“You still can, now that you’ve contacted us. That’s our way, Ms. Banis. Our law. We don’t force ourselves on others, but once another society reaches out to us, we offer what we know freely. If you and your friend want to come with us, we will share all we know with you.”

For Jacob, it was too much. His head had become a soupy mess, and the world around him started to swirl. He grew dizzy and fell over. He woke with his head in Kelly’s lap. Chelsea was next to her. Lester Brooks was pressing a series of white tabs onto his face and arms and chest. Jacob could feel electricity move over his skin, prickling at his hair.

Brooks was looking at a flat black device that looked like a small TV. “Left arm is broken in four places. Two broken ribs. Internal bleeding. Brain swelling. Massive infection from the injuries on his arms.” He put the device down. “Your friend is in some serious pain. We’ll need to get his fever down right away.”

“You can help him?” Kelly asked.

“Oh, yes. He’ll be in bed for a while, but we can patch him, no problem.” He touched the device on his throat. “Brooks 390, requesting extraction. We’ve picked up three packages. Have a medic and a quarantine team standing by for our arrival.”

A few moments later a dust cloud appeared on the road. Jacob rallied enough to sit up and stare in amazement at the gigantic ten-wheeled armored vehicle that rolled through the ruins, crushing the zombies in its path before finally pulling up next to them.

Brooks opened the back door to the vehicle and helped them inside one after another. When Jacob was seated and buckled in, Brooks said, “We’ll get that arm fixed up for you in a bit.”

Jacob nodded. “Thanks.”

“Hang on,” Brooks told them. “It gets a little bumpy out here.”

He closed the door and the vehicle took off.

Jacob leaned his head against the window and watched the ruins of Little Rock slip into the distance. The armored vehicle trundled through the abandoned city, causing Jacob to sway in his seat. In places, the streets were black rivers seething with bodies. In others, ivy climbed the sides of buildings, creating green canyons through the past glory of man.

And what of glory?

It made him think of Sheriff Taylor, the man who had meant so much to him, and so much to Arbella, gone now, dead and rotting in the sun on some nameless street in a small town a million miles away.

He thought, too, of Bree. She’d been so young and so devastatingly gorgeous, yet the only image of her he could hold in his mind was of her slipping to the grass under a hail of bullets. She had, in his memory at least, seemed almost grateful to receive them.

But mostly he thought of Nick.

He watched a solitary zombie lumber down the road, reaching for their vehicle even though it was much too far away to put its hands on them, and he thought of the time he’d had with his dearest friend. He felt heartsick at all that had happened. He had loved Nick as a brother. For all the tension that had run under the surface of their friendship since that fight twenty years earlier, they had been the best of friends, and Jacob couldn’t shake the memory of the tears running down Nick’s face right before he pulled the trigger. What had he cried for? Was it out of remorse? Or for what had happened to their friendship? Or was it simply for his own life?

Jacob looked across the darkened cabin of the armored transport. Chelsea had her eyes closed, a blanket pulled up under her chin. It didn’t look to Jacob like she was sleeping, more like she was trying to forcibly push the memory of the last seven years from her mind.

Beyond her, Kelly was looking out the window, and the tears were rolling down her cheeks.

Jacob looked away. Though this journey of theirs was really just beginning, in so many ways, it marked the end of the man he’d thought himself to be.

Four Tales from the First Days of the Living Dead

State of the Union

I know when I’m being lied to. It’s not hard to figure out, even when you’re a stranger in a country halfway around the world and you don’t speak the language. Bullshit smells the same, no matter how it sounds. And that’s what our Chinese hosts were trying to shovel down our throats.

Bullshit.

Pure unadulterated bullshit.

Our group went down for dinner at eight p.m. We stepped off the elevator, but barely made it into the hotel’s lobby before a couple of blue-shirted cops started yelling at us to go back upstairs.

“What’s this all about?” asked Brad Owens. He was our leader, a Young Democrat from Columbia University. Tall, slender, and dignified, Brad stood an easy six inches taller than the cops, but it didn’t seem to impress them at all.

“You go back upstairs,” one of the cops said. “Go now.”

“But I want to know what’s going on,” Brad insisted. He pointed to the reception hall. “They’re supposed to be throwing us a party.”

“No party for you. Party over. You go now. Go upstairs.”

While Brad was busy arguing with the Chinese cops, I was looking through the glass doors of our hotel. Outside, Beijing was in the middle of a riot. I heard screams overlapping screams. I saw people running for their lives, others throwing rocks. A small crowd knocked down an injured man right outside the front doors and swarmed over top of him, like they were trying to pull him apart.

“But why do we have to go upstairs?” Brad asked.

The concierge came over. He looked utterly frazzled, and more than a little distracted, but he kept his tone level and his smile bright when he talked to us.

“Please,” he said with a slight bow. His accent was good, even if the syntax was off. “Please, you and your friends to go upstairs please. We have the flu outside.”

“The flu?” Brad said.

I looked out across the Beijing skyline and saw buildings on fire in the distance.

“People don’t riot because of the flu,” said Jim Bowman, our Young Republican representative.

The concierge’s smile wavered for a moment. “You to go upstairs to your rooms now,” he said, and then muttered something to the cops in Chinese.

The next moment we were being hustled upstairs and forced back into our rooms.

I tried the door, but it was locked from the outside.

I beat on it with my fists and got no reply.

I looked out the peephole and saw the cops pacing the hallway. They looked scared and anxious and I didn’t like it. One of them kept swallowing, his Adam’s apple pumping up and down in his throat, looking to his partner for some clue as to what they were supposed to do.

I gave up on the door and sat down on the foot of the bed and tried to get online. Nothing worked. E-mail; Livejournal; Twitter; Facebook; even Google was down. I put my iPad down and tried my iPhone. Same thing. I had been sending e-mails all that day. I had even sent my latest article to my editor at
The Crimson
right before I took my shower and got dressed for dinner. But now, nothing. Just a network connection error message.

That’s when it really hit me. Not only was I a stranger in a strange land, but the Chinese government had somehow managed to shut down the Internet. My one umbilical cord back to the real world had just been cut.

It hadn’t seemed real, standing down in the lobby and watching Beijing tear itself apart, but once I found out the Internet was down . . . well, that was the clincher.

We were being lied to.

And like the old Bob Dylan song goes: “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

 

 

Okay, so what do you need to know?

Introductions first, I guess.

My name is Mark Wellerman—though I suppose you already know that, my name being what it is. These days, I run a small farm in Georgia. It’s not much, but I grow all my own food, raise my own livestock, make my own bullets. I can take care of myself. That’s a far cry from the plans I had growing up, but don’t think for a minute that I’m a failure. Like I said, this farm makes all the food a man could ever need, and there is no fortune greater than that.

Believe me. I know that better than anyone.

I’m twenty-four now, but I was twenty-two when this story I’m about to tell you happened. I was a senior at Harvard, majoring in journalism. I had the world by the balls, every door ahead standing wide open. And that’s how I landed in Beijing that summer. I was one of two dozen college students from across the United States selected to take part in an exchange program to China called Our Best, Your Best.

Our group was called the Young Americans. We were supposed to represent the best and brightest of America’s up-and-coming generation. We were a cross-section of this once great country, our own mini melting pot. We had Brad Owens, our Young Democrat from Columbia; Jim Bowman, a Young Republican from the University of Texas at Austin; and Sandra Palmer, a junior Tea Party Patriot from the University of Nebraska; all three of them were intent on becoming president one day. But we had a lot more than politics going for us. We had a cop from a junior college in Texas, a West Point cadet, a teacher’s assistant working on her master’s degree at Florida State, a UAW assembly lineman from Michigan doing an online graduate degree in pension fund management, computer programmers, rich kids, poor kids . . . we had it all. Hell, we even had a guy who was attending UC Berkley illegally, but got to go with us anyway because of the DREAM Act. Between the twenty-four of us, we were America.

For better or for worse.

Most of the trip up to that last night in the hotel was mindless arguing, everybody talking and nobody listening. I had plenty to write about, but it still wore me down. I remember feeling irritable every time Brad or Jim or Sandra opened their mouths. The bickering just seemed so pointless.

But all that changed later that night. I hadn’t taken off my clothes. I was standing at my window, looking across downtown Beijing twenty stories below, every now and then catching the wail of a siren or the muffled sound of a nearby scream, when the Chinese cops burst through the door. One of them went for me, the other for my luggage. As I watched, the cop tossed my iPhone, my iPad, even my headphones into the trash. Then he crammed some clothes into my backpack and threw it at me.

“But, my phone . . .” I said.

He said something in Chinese and pointed to his partner, who pushed me outside.

Everyone else was already standing there, trying to get somebody to tell them what was going on. Jim Bowman was yelling, and it wasn’t hard to see why. The cops had pulled him and Sandra out of bed without even giving Sandra a chance to put on her pants. She was standing behind him, tugging her jeans over her hips and looking embarrassed as hell.

Those of us who could speak a little Chinese tried to get answers out of the cops, but they weren’t talking. They hustled us downstairs and out the back door.

As soon as the doors to the parking lot opened, we could hear the sound of screams and gunshots and sirens in the distance. I saw what looked like military helicopters sprinting overhead. I watched them race over the heart of the city, and when I looked back down to street level, I saw a group of burned and bleeding people limping toward us. One of them was so badly burned I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. The poor devil was black as charcoal, and still trailing wisps of smoke. The others behind were less burned, but each of them were terribly wounded and their clothes dark with coagulated blood.

One of the girls in our group let out a scream and the cops hurried her onto the bus. Then, while the rest of us watched in horror, one of the cops went over to the crowd and shot those wounded people one by one with deliberate head shots. I couldn’t believe it. The cop never even gave them a chance to run away. He just shot them. And weirder still, not a single one of that crowd bothered to so much as flinch, even with a rifle pointed at their faces. It was like they didn’t know what was happening.

The next moment, we were on the bus. Our driver, a thin, terrified-looking man in shabby clothes, turned the bus toward the street with a lurch and built up speed. The shooting we’d just witnessed had left us all stunned and silent. Cowed, I guess you’d say. We sat in our seats, staring out the windows at the destruction and the insane crowds banging on the sides of the bus, and I don’t think any of us even thought to ask where we were being taken.

Just like I don’t think any of us thought to use the word
zombie
.

At least at that point.

 

 

From our hotel they drove us to the Beijing West Railway Station. Let me say this first and foremost on the behalf of the Chinese.

They took care of us.

They never once forgot that we were their guests. They could have left us in that hotel to die along with everyone else. I’m pretty sure, if this was the US, that’s probably what would have happened. But the Chinese had a sense of obligation that was so strong, so ingrained, that even in the face of a zombie apocalypse, they took real pains to get us out of harm’s way. They had no idea the hell they were condemning us to, and I cannot fault them for what came afterwards.

They tried to be good hosts.

They really did.

 

 

The railway station was a mad, screaming hive of humanity. Hundreds of thousands of people were surging toward the platforms, trying to board the trains. We lost Virginia Wilder, our professor from Florida, and Wade Mallum, our UAW representative, somewhere in that mad scramble to the trains. I don’t know how it happened, but I saw Jim and Sandra running away from where Virginia and Wade went down.

“Those crazy yellow bastards are eating each other,” Sandra said.

“What?” I said. I had only known Sandra for a few weeks at that point, but I was already well aware of her ability to say things that defied the logic used by sane people.

“They got Virginia and Wade,” Jim said. “We couldn’t save them.”

“What do you mean?”

“They were deadweight slowing us down.” He was winded, but he managed to turn to Sandra and smile. “We’re okay.”

I just stared at him, dumbfounded. Amid the deafening roar of hundreds of thousands of panicking people, after watching two of our group get trampled and possibly eaten, he had the audacity to call them deadweight.

But I didn’t get the chance to call him on his words, for at that moment our escorts managed to zipper open a path through the crowd and get us onto a train. It was a fairly new, fairly clean commuter car. No frills, no special compartments. Just three rows of seats on either side of a center aisle, like a small jet airliner.

And we had the car to ourselves.

I dropped down into a window seat and looked out across the crowded platform. I found it hard to believe we’d ended up the only ones in our car. As we pulled away from the platform, I saw people screaming for a chance to get on. Mothers held up their babies, begging us to take them. Hundreds jumped onto the outside of the train and held on as long as they could. It was a sorry, sad sight, and as Jim and Sandra and Brad began to scream at each other about whose fault all this was, I slipped farther down into my seat and pressed my hands over my ears and tried to block out the screams of all those poor people falling away behind us.

 

 

We did not make it very far.

As soon as we cleared the gates I saw people surging against the sides of the train. I heard their bodies thudding against metal and felt the train lurch as they collapsed onto tracks and were run over.

I looked to one side and saw our entire group with their faces pressed against the windows, none of them speaking, but all of them wearing stunned, horrified expressions on their faces.

“My God,” I heard someone say. “Look at all of them. There’s so many.”

And there were, too.

Hundreds of thousands of them.

I looked out the window and all I could see were faces closing in around us. They were pressing against the train, swarming over the top of it.

Suddenly, the train lurched and came to a violent, shuddering halt. All of us were thrown from our seats. For a moment, I felt like I was getting pushed forward, like I was on the crest of a wave. And then, just as suddenly, I hit the deck and banged my head against the bottom of a seat.

I blacked out for a second.

When I came to, I was groggy, disoriented. I stood up and looked around. My hair felt wet. I touched it and came away with blood on my fingers. Sandra Palmer had her hand over her forehead, a runner of blood oozing out from between her fingers. Her mouth was twisted, like she was about to scream, or cry, but couldn’t decide which. Brad Owens had landed in a heap against the forward door. Jim Bowman was right next to him. His arm looked broken.

“They’ve knocked us off the rails,” somebody said.

“Impossible,” someone else said.

“Take a look if you don’t believe me.”

Several of us went to the window, and I could tell at a glance he was right. From where I stood I could see the half-dozen cars ahead of us, and the lead car was jackknifed across the tracks.

“How is that possible?” the girl next to me asked.

I shook my head. But I knew. I think we all knew. We’d run over so many bodies the wheels had just skipped the tracks.

And now, an army hundreds of thousands strong was surging against our train car, banging on the side panels. The combined roar of their moans and screams and their fists pounding on the sides of the train was deafening. The girl next to me, a culinary arts major from SMU, was in tears.

For a moment I wanted to take her in my arms and hold her. But before I got the chance, Jake Arguello, our Texas cop, started hollering from the rear of the car.