The Coalition: Part 1 The State of Extinction (Zombie Series)

Looking down at the streets
,
he thought about the things all of those old end-of-the-world movies got wrong.

More than
anything,
it was the vegetation. None of those crazy old movies ever got that part right or even mentioned it. It had only been eighteen months since the various arms of the government had stopped working, and he doubted that there was more than a hundred yards of road anywhere in
the state that
a wheeled vehicle
could
navigate
. Within days of the last maintenance crew
,
becoming
either
dead
or  chow
for the Deaders
, most of the streets were impassable. He swatted at a deerfly that had landed on his neck to take a bite. His neck was just about the only exposed surface showing through his clothes, despite the almost 90-degree heat. He glanced at the thermometer
he had
erected under an overhanging ledge just outside his
safe house
and grunted. Ten o’clock in the morning and
it was
85 degrees already. Shit, it was going to be a scorcher.

He scanned the parts of the city that he could see from his perch six floors above the streets. The sun was up, unfiltered by clouds of any sort, and the deads were out in force. Within a two-block
area,
he did a quick head-count of fifty
, and
those were just the ones he could see. If he went down,
he would
have to be exceedingly careful. Of
course,
it was hard to be any more careful
than
he was at any other time of the day or night. Sometimes
,
he was surprised that his heart didn’t burst or his head split
fucking
wide
open just from the stress.

The deads were doing their usual thing
;
just standing around or merely staggering absently from point A to point B. They rarely did anything that made any sense at all. Unless, of course, you thought that standing around doing nothing at all was logical. Hell. Maybe it was.

Maybe they were the only thing
s
that really
made
sense anymore. Sometimes
,
he wondered what good it was just staying alive.

“Shit!”

He swatted at another deerfly that had located the patch of unprotected skin around his collar. Cutter hadn’t really been thinking of going down into the streets and so hadn’t pulled on his full rig. One of the first things
he had
learned when the big shit had hit the giant fan was that you needed to make yourself as hard to bite as possible. Sometimes that meant just adding a couple of layers of durable cloth.
These days, that
was a definite, even if it was going to be 90 degrees and up. Cutter squinted, scanning the local area, trying to see if any of his living neighbors were out and about, or if indeed they were still among the living. Despite everything, despite knowing that too much compassion could get you really dead
,
really fast, he still worried about some of the people he’d come to know as his very strange neighbors. 
Of
course,
that
made him think of the final days of what had once been normal
.

**

When things finally went all to Hell,
Cutter was at work. There were some tiny details during the insanity that came before that crazy stuff
,
which he could not now recall, but that particular day was burned into his mind like a brand.

Looking back, it
was surprising how many people had actually shown up for work that final day. At first, they’d had a full crew
;
a person at every desk. The government
all the way
from the White House down to the local commissioners had been encouraging everyone to try to continue to live as if things were going to get better. When he thought about it now, it almost made his blood boil. The folk who were supposed to look out for society had been more concerned with keeping the economy chugging along than with ensuring a citizen’s safety.
Protect yourself
,
they had
been told.
But don’t panic
.
Don’t shut yourselves away. Go to work. Go shopping. Spend money
.

Right. Spend some money.

On that
final
day,
he had left his apartment after his boss had called him to make sure he was coming in. “I’m calling everyone,”
Linden
had told him,
the
New York
accent coming over the phone. “I’m not picking on you, but I just want to make sure you’ll be in.
That is why
I’m calling everybody,” the man said,
and he was
probably telling the truth.
In fact,
Linden
was a physical ox of a man, liked to think of himself as the alpha male, and seemed to relish lording his power over his subordinates. One of his specialties was threatening employees with their jobs.

“I’ll be there,” Cutter had said, parting the blinds of his bedroom window and peeking out at the driveway, looking to see if any of those shambling wrecks was staggering around, looking for someone to kill and eat. Even at that
point,
everyone was aware of what was going on. Something that had happened started to
making
the recently dead come back to life. Not actual life, but nearly so. They weren’t very smart—not even by American standards—something about a lack of oxygen while the brain was waiting to reactivate.
However,
there were two things about them that almost made up for that lack of smarts; they were freaking mean and they all seemed to wake up very damned hungry for one thing—human flesh.

Almost from the
beginning,
it got out of hand. At first people thought
these newly,
risen folk were just sick. They weren’t really dead, but in a walking coma of some kind. Families locked up their relatives and friends in rooms and figured
they would
come to their senses in time. All that resulted in was ensuring that more people were attacked
,
bitten,
and
some of them eaten up. If everyone who was bitten ended up as a
meal,
it wouldn’t have been so bad. Instead, the bitten got very sick
and
in short order
they
died, and then rose like the undead folk
who had
bitten them. Cutter had seen some guy on TV doing the math, trying to warn
about
how bad things were getting,
and how bad they
were going to get. Nobody listened to that guy, and the story was that he’d been arrested and locked up.

Nevertheless,
the government kept assuring
everyone
that things were going to be all right just as soon as they could get a handle on the nature of the situation. However, that had been the problem. How could you pin down the nature of something that wasn’t at all natural?

During those last
days,
they had
all been pretty much ordered to keep doing things the way everyone was supposed to. “Keep living your lives,” the authorities had told them. He remembered the President and Vice-President making appearances telling one and all to just go about their ways—within reason. “Go to your jobs. Go on your vacations. Go shopping.”

Jesus.

After taking that call from his boss,
he had
called his ex-wife Patsy to tell her one more time to watch out for their daughter Amelia.
He had
been after Patsy for more than a month at that point, trying to get her to let him move back in with her just for the sake of safety. “I’ll take the downstairs bedroom,” he’d offered. “Just let me come home and that way
,
I can keep an eye out for you and Amelia.”
He had
all but begged her. Now, he wished he had begged.

When
it was too late to do anything
,
but regret everything that came before, it was at work that
he had
realized that things had broken completely down. He should have bolted and made a run for his old place,
and
Patsy’s complaints be damned. It would probably have already been too late, but who knows? He might have been able to save them. Likely not, though. These days, he kept himself sane by repeating that last bit of argument. He didn’t like to think of Amelia.
She had
only been eight years old. Whenever her blue
eyes, light brown hair, and smiling face came to mind,
he would
shake his head, blink his eyes, and banish the image as quickly as he could. The world as it turned out was no place for regrets or self-sympathy.

On the way to work that final
day,
he had seen no fewer than a dozen of the dead going about their mindless ways. Well, not quite mindless. When they had the living to
target,
they seemed to concentrate just fine. It was when they didn’t see anyone to hurt that
,
they appeared to be less than the killing machines that they were. Before those days of bloody insanity,
he had
never much given any thought at all to the power of human jaws.
He had
never thought of a person’s teeth as weapons.
Now
he knew that they were quite effective.
It
was especially bad when the thing working those jaws and teeth was infused with any number of infective pathogens ready to invade a victim’s body and send it into septic shock.

Cutter had read the reports and listened to the news bits on what the CDC had been able to discover as society was plummeting into destruction. The cause of the rise of the dead wasn’t ever pinpointed, except that a virus was suspected.
They figured something
like AIDS, or maybe some kind of flu. A mad genius terrorist was also another option
he had
heard about, but when the cops started descending on workplaces to warn people about spreading lies that could create more panic, that story had soon been put to rest in a way the dead could not be.

One report
he had
watched on CNN had conjectured that this had happened before, on
a
smaller scale around the planet down through history
, and that is
where our legends of vampires and ghouls had arisen. 
However,
the outbreaks had been very limited in those days and either faded out or brought quickly under control.

He often mused that maybe
if people were more savage, then things would not have ended up the way they did. Perhaps a man from the Dark Ages was far more likely to cave in the heads of his parents when they became raving fiends instead of loving relatives.
Never having
faced
putting
down the reanimated corpse of a loved one, he couldn’t say now what he might have done in those early days.
Initially
the
practice of treating them
had been as
sick people
and it
had enabled the situation to get completely out of hand. He was convinced of that.

By the time
he had
arrived that last day at his place of employment,
he had
already seen two people attacked and bloodied. The first one had been a man coming out of a convenience store with a bag of food.
Before the man could react, a
shambler had lunged out of the autos parked between the street and the shop. Cutter would have gotten out of his car to help
,
but a police officer arrived and started shooting, so he had given his
Toyota
the gas and fled as quickly as he could. Less than five minutes later, sitting at a red light, another shambler loomed out of a yard to his right. At first
,
he thought that it was coming for his car, but it suddenly veered left and latched on to a woman who’d been standing, waiting for the bus. He shook his head, just thinking of that.
Waiting for a bus
. Christ! Two men standing near her leaped to her aid, but it was too late. The thing had already taken a hunk of meat out of her neck. Blood was everywhere and once more Cutter just floored it, steering around the car in front of him and running the light. That hadn’t been very courageous of him, but the fact that he’d rarely put himself at risk over the intervening months had ensured his survival.