The Lazarus Impact (6 page)

CHAPTER 11

Is this what I wanted?
Brandon’s tears are still flowing. It might have been cool in comics, in movies, in games, but in reality it terrified him.
I’m one of those people
. There’s always one in every apocalyptic story. The panicked, over-emotional and usually useless person who freezes up or gets everyone killed when the gravity of the apocalypse finally sets in.
But I didn’t freeze
.
I boldly went out to turn the generator on
.
I’m only a kid, after all, and I just found out my parents are dead, or undead
. His confidence builds and the tears stop.
The trick is to stay focused, have a purpose
.
What is my purpose?

Brandon has no luck getting online with the computer. The cell phone is useless too now. But the video game consoles work. He grabs a bag of chips, since the MREs taste like shit, and pops in his favorite zombie themed first person shooter. He’s already finished the game before, but now he’s playing on expert mode. He escapes to a fictional nightmare, convincing himself that he’s training for the real one that awaits him above. Hours go by before his eyes start to blur. He finally pauses the game, taking a break.

He thinks back to before the impact, when news stories about bums getting high on bath salts had everyone joking about the zombie apocalypse. The drug made them so hot that they stripped their clothes off, and the aggressiveness made them try to eat each other’s faces for some reason. It was fun to laugh about it back then, but for Brandon the real thing is much more frightening.
I need to get beyond the fear and into the excitement
.
I need to approach life like it’s a game, otherwise I might not survive it
.
I need to suppress the fear
.
I need to become the guy that I always imagined I would be in the apocalypse
.
No more weak, scrawny nerd
.
No more pasty, awkward target of bullies
.
The meteors hit the reset button for me, and I have a new start
.

While pissing into an empty water bottle, Brandon realizes he pissed half the day away. He turns back to look at the video game screen, studying his array of weapons; a machete, a sniper rifle, a pistol, grenades, and of course a shotgun.
I need real weapons
. The only items he has with him in the bunker are a box cutter, a heavy flashlight, and a pair of foam nunchucks.
Weapons
.
That’s my purpose
. He sorts through his books, looking for the survivalist ones, and then further narrowing the selection to those that discuss makeshift weaponry. But there’s an easier way. His father had hunting gear in the upstairs closet, and there are the tools in the shed.
I need the can opener from the kitchen anyway, if I ever plan to get into those damned beans
.
I can grab some weapons, refill the generator with fuel and clear out mom and dad’s cabinets
.

He suits up with his gas mask and slips on a pair of rubber boots. He pops open the hatch and closes it quickly behind him. The air is still, calm. The woods are silent. There is less dust around.
It must have been kicked up by the winds and blown somewhere else, but I still wouldn’t dare take the mask off or go traipsing though the poisonous soot
. There’s a clear path to his home. He enters the living room though a hole in the side of the house. He fills garbage bags with food from the pantry and grabs the remaining boxes of bottled water from the garage. He brings those down into the bunker first, and then heads back to the house. He goes upstairs to his father’s closet and comes back down with a crossbow and a rifle. There are only a few boxes of bullets and a handful of arrows, but they’ll do. He slings the equipment over his shoulder and heads for the shed, leaving the gear on a clear patch of grass next to the hatch.

He shuts the generator so he can refill it with fuel. There isn’t much left in the gas cans afterward; maybe enough for a few days or even a week if he conserves power. He knows he’ll have to head to town and refill if he plans to stay in the bunker for long.

As Brandon fills the generator with gas, his thoughts soon wander to his computer, and whether there will ever be internet service again. His mind quickly drifts to Apocalypta. He imagines what she might look like. A bit shorter than him. Dark hair in pigtails. Huge, bright green eyes. A short black and pink skirt with knee high fishnet nylons. Tits too big for her age, but on a slim, petite figure.
I’ve been looking at my porn magazines too much
. He adjusts the crotch of his pants. At that moment the fuel starts to overflow out of the generator’s gas spout, sputtering out onto his hands and pants. He fumbles the gas can for a second, and then caps it. He tugs at the starter.

He’s weak. Lanky. It takes a few yanks but the generator finally turns over and runs, and Brandon starts to look over the tools in the shed. A hammer. An axe. A shovel. A pick. A sledge.
These will do
.
Not the chainsaw though; too loud and messy, plus it requires fuel, and I need to ration my fuel
. He reaches up and pulls the tools down off their wall hooks one by one.

The rumbling of the generator drowns out the shuffling noise behind him. Only when the light shifts and changes to shadow does Brandon realize that someone is coming into the shed behind him. He grabs the sledge off the wall and spins to face the intruder in one clumsy motion. The sledge weighs almost as much as he does, rounding him a good half turn past his intended about face.

His father stands before him, wild eyed and bloodied.
He’s been feeding
. A foul stench of body odor, shit, and old cheese lingers with him. Brandon can smell it, even through the gas mask, prompting a fleeting question that darts through his head:
Is the mask even working?
The thought passes faster than it came to him, and his arms go up, struggling to hold the sledge above his head. The handle is thicker than his frail, bony arms, but he manages to drop it down on his father’s head as he lunges at Brandon with a hungry grunt. His father drops to the wood floor with a thud, but he keeps coming. Brandon lifts the sledge up and back down again, smashing it down at his father’s head with nervous adrenaline. He misses, crunching the floor beside his father’s ear. Brandon’s father crawls at him, grabbing Brandon’s leg below the knee and pulling it toward his mouth. His teeth drip with saliva. Once more Brandon heaves the sledgehammer over his head and brings it back down with rage. The fat of it meets the back of his father’s head with a meaty thud. His father instantly flattens on the floor, and blood gobs out of his skull.

Brandon stares at his father in shock. He killed his first zombie, but he didn’t like it one bit.
It wasn’t like the video games, where seeing their brains explode out the back of their heads made me laugh
. But he was surprised at himself; he was able to detach.
I didn’t pause because it was Dad
. He read enough cosmic dust zombie comics in his day to know it was no longer his father. He’s seen enough horror movies to know that hesitation is what gets you eaten. It wasn’t his father; it was a monster.

In a zombie situation, you almost have to try to enjoy killing them, because it’ll be an everyday part of survival
.
If you can’t do it, then you’ll die
.
And you might as well enjoy what you have to do to make it through the day
. Perhaps he would have enjoyed it if it was a stranger. But it was still messy and dangerous. He looks down at the sledge, covered in bits of brain. He grabs a rag and rubs the meat off of it. But it was too heavy, and it left him vulnerable with every swing.
I won’t use this again
.
If there were two or three zombies, I would have been overtaken
.
The other weapons are lighter, faster
. He leaves the sledge and gathers the others.

He opens the hatch and begins to drop the tools down into the bunker when he sees her from the corner of his eye, near the edge of the woods. His mother. She races toward him, attracted by the noise of the generator and the metal weapons clanging on the floor of the shelter below. Brandon arms himself with his father’s rifle. Aside from video games, he’s never fired a gun before, but he’s seen it done a million times. He fumbles the box of bullets, but manages to get one loaded in the chamber, pointy end forward. His mother has closed the distance though, and in seconds she’s on him. Brandon backpedals blindly as he struggles to cock the old bolt action style rifle and take the safety off. But he keeps his eyes on his mother. Her soiled and wet muumuu clings to her lower half, where it seems she has pissed and shit herself, and worse. She’s easily three or four times Brandon’s weight, so Brandon can’t let her get on top of him or else he’d be stuck. He feels the bolt click, locking the bullet into place. He swiftly lifts the gun up to her face, point blank, and fires. A red mist sprays out the back of her head and she collapses to the ground.

He knew it was a risk to try the rifle.
What good is life without having to overcome any challenges?
He felt like Lee Harvey Oswald, loading and getting off a shot in fractioned seconds. There was no anger in the kill. All those times he was mad at his mother for taking his comics away or banning him from the computer as punishment for stupid crap like not eating vegetables didn’t even cross his mind. He didn’t see the creature as his mother.
I think maybe I enjoyed that one
.
That’s a good sign
. He forces a smile as he descends back into his hole, but not before grabbing a six pack of beer from his parents’ fridge.
There’s no age limit for drinking in the apocalypse
.

CHAPTER 12

The alarm is still raging but the sounds of panic are gone. Willy’s symptoms have subsided. No more piercing headache, no more cold sweats, no more ringing in his ears. He steps out of his office into the eerie hallway leading to the ER. Despite the blaring alarm bell, he hears some commotion coming from the far end. But there are no sounds of words or talking; only an occasional grunt or low growls. Willy knows what happened.
The patients changed into those man eating beasts
. He begins to stalk up the hallway to strike them down one by one. Most of them are occupied with feasting on the dead, or strapped down to their beds, so they are easy prey. He makes sure he sees their glowing eyes before swinging, just to be safe. But all the blood and gore makes his mind wander again to the brutal memories of war. Memories like his brothers collecting the ears of enemies they killed in battle, like trophies, as a way to dehumanize them and cope with the mental anguish of war. Memories like having to quietly sink a blade into his dying friend’s skull because his whimpers were too loud in the night and would give up their platoon’s position to the enemy. Memories like cutting off the fingers of a captured village woman one by one, until she gave up the locations of her VC command’s hidden bunkers.
That was different
.
These things are beasts, not men
.
But in war, any man can become a beast if they lose their sense of morals, their sense of duty, their sense of honor
.
God knows I did
.

When he gets to the end of the hall, there are three creatures rummaging around in one of the patient rooms. Two of them come out into the hallway when they hear his footsteps. He runs up and splits the first one’s head open with his fire axe. The diseased corpse falls to the floor right there in the doorway to the patient room. He knew the man by sight but not by name.
One of the ER doctors
. But Willy now saw the man as an enemy, a beast, not a coworker.

Willy steps back, spins and buries his axe so deep into the head of the second one that it gets stuck in the base of her neck.
This one was a nurse
. He knew her by sight too. The third one comes out of the patient room and gets his hands on Willy as he tries to free the axe from the dead nurse’s neck. It’s a naked old man, at least 20 years Willy’s senior. The same one he saw devouring a doctor earlier.
A patient
. His grip is abnormally strong for a frail old bag of bones. He yanks Willy’s bicep close to his face and bites into his skin. Willy panics as he feels the warm, gummy mouth squeeze down. He shoves the old man off, frees his axe from the nurse’s neck, and clubs the old man with the blunt side. A gaping hole opens on the old man’s head, and he falls to the floor in death.

Shit!
Willy examines his arm for any damage. He saw how people changed once they were bitten. He wipes the stringy, blood fouled saliva away to see that there is no harm done; there is no wound. Confused, he looks down at the old man to see an empty mouth, completely void of teeth. Willy looks upward with a sigh of relief. After taking a few steps back toward his office he sees a broken set of dentures lying next to the body of an orderly. This person he knew well.
It’s John D’Avanti
.
The poor bastard
. But the old man’s furious biting must have dislodged the dentures from his mouth, rendering him, for the most part, harmless.

After that, Willy steps outside to dispatch some more that are wandering around the outside of the hospital. There’s so much blood covering his body he barely breathes in an attempt to avoid getting any of the filth into his mouth. He takes breaks, shutting himself away in his office every so often to wipe his face down with rags and catch his breath. It helps keep the flashbacks at bay as well.

During one break the power shuts down. The alarm stops, and everything is strangely silent. He goes back out to check on things. It’s almost nightfall, so he treads carefully to avoid making noise. Without the alarms blaring everything else becomes loud, every step.
The generators up on the roof must be out of fuel
. They’re supposed to have a three day supply, but Willy remembers an outage a few weeks back that lasted half a day or more, so some of the fuel must have been used up and not replaced. He pokes around trying to get them to restart, making a racket of noise in the process, but it’s no use. The generators hadn’t been properly maintained or checked by the technicians. They burned through the oil too, and that seized the engines. Even if he had fuel they wouldn’t start back up without some serious dismantling and labor.

On the way back down to his office he hears the distinct sounds of a struggle from out near the ambulance bay.
Could be those cannibals I locked away in the ambulance figured a way out
. But when he investigates he sees a man pulling and yanking at a woman’s foot as she tries to shut herself inside a car. He gnaws at her sneaker, trying to bite through it. More zombies have drawn closer from around the outside of the hospital now, and they’re running toward Willy.
The sound of my tinkering on the roof attracted them back to the building, and now they’re out for my flesh
. He makes a run toward the car, axe in hand. It’s his only way out. There are too many coming for him to fight them all off.