The Most Uncommon Cold I - Life in the Time of Zombies (3 page)

     My
rational mind managed to explain away the movement as simple muscle spasms, and that explanation satisfied me until she tried to get up. 

     The young woman moved from side to side and raised her head.  Her neck was still bent awkwardly to the left.  I was struggling to make sense of what I was seeing when she spoke.

     “Wha…what…hap… happened t…to me?” She stuttered and slurred, but her words could be understood.  Her eyes were still glassy as she slowly turned her head to look at me. 

     I took me a few seconds to
respond. Replying to someone who was just a moment earlier to all appearances dead has a way of taking your breath away. Eventually, I managed to say, “Well, I don’t really know, I...uh...came in and there was a man in...airport coveralls named James and...”

  
  “I f-feel cold,” she muttered slowly as if she had not heard me. Sluggishly and with difficulty, she raised herself at the waist.  She looked down at her bloody body surveying the damage.  Until this point, I had not noticed that her right shoulder looked as if a bite had torn away a chunk of the flesh and her left cheek had four parallel deep scratches as if fingernails had ripped down the side of her face. I couldn’t see other wounds, but blood covered most of her light green uniform making it look black.

     “You shouldn
’t move!” I yelled. “Don’t move!  I’ll go find a doctor!” 

     I was standing a few feet from her, but somehow she managed to
twist around a reach my leg.  I felt her hand grab hard into the skin of my calf. 

     “No, s-s-stay here,” she hissed as I yanked my leg free and backed away.

     “You need a doctor!”  I cried out as I spun around to leave. 

     When I reached the doorway, I looked back at her.  She was still struggling to
stand even as she slid her body toward me.  A trail of smeared blood stayed on the white tile floor behind her. “Stay,” she hissed again, but I was already out the door.

Chapter 2

     Once out from behind the counter of the coffee shop, I began to question what I had just seen. The waitress was dead. I was sure of that.  But if the waitress was dead, how could she be moving?  I shook my head at the ridiculous mental flips I was performing.  The fact was that the waitress was talking and moving.  I am certainly no doctor, but those seem like pretty clear indications of life.  And the more time I wasted by playing games with myself, the less chance she had of remaining alive. With my new dedication, I hurried out of the coffee shop in search of some medical assistance.

     Unfortunately, my enthusiasm was not going to make people
appear out of thin air, and that is what was needed. I had thought the airport was slow beforehand, but it was nothing in comparison to what I now saw.  The place was absolutely deserted.  Even the few stragglers stumbling through the terminal on their way to catch a flight were gone. There was not even an announcement of an arriving, departing, or delayed flight.  It was silent, and this lack of sound was incredibly unnerving.

     Almost in a panic, I ran over to the airline ticketing counters sure that someone would be found there. The
emptiness of the counter area hit me in the stomach. I have never had what others refer to as a panic attack.  In fact, I have always been less than sympathetic when I have heard men describe their response to stress as shortness of breath, a racing pulse, and inability to think rationally. My sensitive response has usually been something along the lines of
pansy
or
mama’s boy
.  But now I was faced with my own symptoms of a pounding heart and difficulty catching my breath. 

   From the ticket counters, I ran mindlessly along the wall to the customs area. 
None of the agents I had seen earlier was in sight. No one was in sight for that matter.  As I spun around the way I had come, something outside the massive glass wall overlooking the tarmac caught my eye. 

    
In front of a wide open door in an enormous dark blue metal hangar about a hundred yards away, a large truck with a dark green canvas canopy over the bed screeched to a stop.  I stopped and watched for a    moment until as expected ten or fifteen soldiers piled out the back. Without having been conscious of it, I had moved forward and was now almost pressed against the glass. As the soldiers stepped into formation behind the truck, I forgot everything else and began tapping on the glass trying to get their attention.  Of course at such a distance, there was little chance of making enough noise for them to notice, but that did not stop me from pounding harder and harder on the thick glass. Finally, the pain caused by the glass brought me back to reality and an awareness of things around me. 

    
The first thing I noticed was something on the floor far down the terminal from me.  As I watched, it became clear that it was the young waitress still dragging her limp legs behind her and leaving that hideous snail trail of red.  Whether it was from curiosity or admiration of her determination, I was transfixed. It may have been my imagination, but I thought she was hissing “stay” over and over.

    
I might still be staring like an idiot except for the ear-splitting wail of an alarm that suddenly began.  It was some sort of fire alarm most likely.  All I know for sure is that the blaring rattled me to the bone and made the situation even more disorienting. 

     I looked back to the hangar to
find that the soldiers were no longer in sight.

     Where had the soldiers
gone?  Why were the soldiers here?  How can I get to the soldiers?  These were the questions that pushed through the fog of my mental, emotional, and physical turmoil.  And it was then that I felt someone behind me.

     I spun around to find a
short, stocky man in a dark suit creeping up on me. 

     “There
’s nothin’ tuh be ascared about, my son,” he said as he continued to move slowly toward me.

     I suddenly realized that the man must be some sort of preacher.  But he certainly wasn
’t offering anything of which I wanted a part.

    
I glanced around the empty airport looking for anyone to help me or the waitress or... Without thinking, I began running. Panic had again overtaken me.  Fight or flight, and I was in no mood to fight.  Somewhere in the back of my mind was the idea of finding some way out to the tarmac and to the safety of the soldiers.

      I never looked back, but I heard no
sound to make me think the preacher tried to catch me. 

     I ran straight through the
abandoned metal detector to the boarding area and smacked my shoulder hard on the machine.  The gates out to the tarmac were deserted like everywhere else inside the place.  I am not sure why Gate 12 struck me as better than any of the other gates, but it did. I trotted through the narrow tunnel to the door that would normally be attached to a departing plane.  Now, however, the door led only to emptiness.

     With some effort, I managed to pull the door open and felt the
immediate rush of chilly San Francisco air.  I looked out over the tarmac from the open door about two stories above the ground.  There was a narrow metal ladder attached to the platform just under the door, and I managed to climb down without killing myself.

     Once on the solid surface of the tarmac, I began feeling like myself again.  The question now was how to approach the
area where I had seen the soldiers without getting shot. Just as I had seen other reporters do when covering dangerous stories in war zones, I got my press ID out of my pocket and held it above my head.

     The hangar where I had seen the soldiers
was about two hundred yards away.  I was shrewd enough to realize that I had a better chance of not getting shot by staying out in the open and moving slowly.  This is why I stepped out from under the platform into the clear area.  With my hands above my head, I walked slowly toward the blue metal building.  After a few steps, I began loudly saying, “I am a reporter with
The Marin Gazette
. My name is Kevin Turner. I am a reporter with
The Marin Gazette
.  My name is Kevin Turner.”  I continued to repeat my words as I walked slowly forward.

     A few more steps and I felt some presence behind me.  I turned to
confirm the feeling and found three machine guns pointed directly at my head.  A voice boomed from the other direction, “Get on your knees!” I turned toward the sound and saw four other weapons pointing at me.  With my hands still above my head holding my press card, I dropped to my knees. A hard shove from behind forced my
head
all the way to the pavement. The impact brought spots in front of my eyes and nearly caused me to blackout.  As I was considering whether to get up or not, pressure on the side of my neck ended the consideration. I managed to twist just enough to see that the force came from the butt of a rifle being pushed by a young, scared-looking soldier.

     “I am a reporter for
The Marin Gazette
.  My name is Kevin Turner.” 

     “Shut the fuck up!” 
A short, muscular, older soldier with a shiny bald head wearing mirrored sunglasses shouted.  “Larson!  Check him!” 

    
A muscular soldier with skin so dark it was almost blue stepped forward.  He handed his automatic weapon to another and kneeled down near my head.  From his shirt pocket, he took out a blue plastic square thing about the size of a pack of cigarettes. He looked at me for a moment as if judging whether I was a threat and then slowly touched my cheek with the plastic thing. After about three seconds, he pulled it back and announced, “Ninety-eight point six!” A moment later, I felt my wallet being pulled from my back pocket, and then the ID was yanked from my hand.

    
After a moment, the rifle butt was removed from my neck.  I stood slowly feeling a bit dizzy.  I reached up to scratch my forehead and pulled back a hand covered with blood.

     The same
soldier who had ordered a check of my temperature said, “Wilbur, see to the man’s head injury!  Bring him inside once his wound has been dressed.” He spun around with military precision and marched inside the hangar.  The other soldiers followed after a moment.

     A
nervous soldier with a small green duffle bag appeared next to me.  “Wilbur, T” was stamped in clean, white block lettering on his uniform.

     “I need to have you sit over here so I can dress that wound,” the young soldier said obviously trying to sound more confident than he felt.

     Wilbur led me over to an old metal bench at the side of the building. I sat down.  The young soldier knelt in front of me, pulled the duffle bag next to him, and opened it.  As he rummaged through the contents looking for something, it was clear that the young man was uneasy. 

     “So, Wilbur, you
’re kind of new at this, aren’t you?”  I said trying to put him at ease with my most earnest smile.

     Young Wilbur looked up at me
quickly to gauge my sincerity, but one glimpse of my smile convinced him.  “So it’s that obvious, hunh?”

     “Well, I have the trained eye of a journalist,” I answered.  “Just some
tape and a gauze pad should do it.  Oh, and some sort of antiseptic might help.”  I flashed my heartfelt smile once more.

     “Yeah, no problem,” Wilbur answered a little sheepishly. “That
’s what I was trying to find.”

     When he finally found the right supplies, Wilbur began cleaning my
bloody forehead.  “It’s not as bad as it looks,” he offered more to calm himself than to put me at ease.

     “Yeah, it doesn
’t feel too bad.”  I watched the young soldier for a minute before asking, “So what’s going on here anyway?”

     Wilbur looked back at me as if trying to decide whether or not to say anything. 
After a few seconds, the words rushed out of the young soldier, “You don’t know?  There’s some weird stuff happening.  Some freaks in the airport just went off and started biting people.  Didn’t you see anything inside?”

     “Not really,” I answered trying not to think about the
waitress dragging her body across the floor. “So why is the army here instead of the cops?”

     Eager to have a chance to talk about what he had seen, Wilbur spoke like someone on speed, “Hell, I don
’t know all that much, but it’s pretty clear that this is something bigger than just a couple of psychos or druggies.  I mean, people had their stomachs torn open and one guy I saw had half his face eaten off!  This woman looked like someone bit a chunk out of her neck.  You could see all the way into her throat. I’ve never seen anything like that!”  Wilbur’s voice grew louder and more frantic.

     “Wilbur!” I used my most
assertive voice to bring the young soldier back to reality.  “I’m sure that these guys know what they’re doing.  Now, you ought to take me inside.” 

     I wasn
’t sure if he had heard me or not as he continued to stare into the distance for nearly a minute.  Just as I was about to say something else, Wilbur nodded his head slowly, closed up the duffle bag, and stood.  I stood as well, and he led me into the hangar.