The Zombie Letters (14 page)

VI

              Sheldon Little woke up to the sound of a car crashing. His hearing wasn’t so good anymore, but he opened his sleep-encrusted eyes just to see the flaming debris of the vehicle right outside the alley sail through the air . . . pelting other parked cars and setting off their alarms. Sheldon braced himself up on the cane he’d made from an old shelf display rod he found in the dumpster of a Tank’s Hardware store last year. Walking to the edge of Fourth and Broadway where he called the alley his home, he stopped when a large mass of people ran past the alley . . . screaming. One man had blood all over his face as he ran blindly with a baby in his arms.

              “What’s goin’ on . . .” he mumbled. He shuffled to the end of the alley. The faint smell of smoke wafted into his nostrils. It was the only good sense he had anymore. Even his eyesight was beginning to go. A local shelter hooked him up with a used pair of donated glasses that worked just fine. Thank God for those drop-off bins that people toss their old glasses in. The bastards sat a little crooked and missed a nose piece, but they worked. Beggar’s can’t be choosers. Sheldon got to the end of the alley when a sprinting man ran into him, knocking them both over. Sheldon’s glasses were ripped from his head and landed next to his makeshift steel cane. The out-of-focus man got up and stood over Sheldon. He fumbled for his glasses and put them on when his hand reached them. The crippled old man spryly got to his legs so quickly that it surprised him. The inconsiderate prick was gonna get the good ol’ Iowa ass kicking. “Hey-a, buddy! What the fuckin’ hell are you doin’?” The old man placed the glasses onto his nose, making it all come to focus. A naked man stood before him . . . lightly swaying on his feet like a drunk. His chest had been cut open. It was a Y-shape that went from both shoulders down to the navel. The laceration had been stapled together, closing the pale and clammy skin shut. A few of the staples had come undone, exposing a green-tinted fluid that dripped out of the wound. The
thing
uttered a low growl – that of a dog. It was guttural and menacing. The strange apparition, like something out of a dream, reached out to Sheldon with fingers stained yellow from death and embalming fluid that was used to preserve him.

              Sheldon Little turned to run from the red-eyed horror reaching out for him when his left ankle was grabbed by a strong hand. Sheldon spilled to the ground . . . his matted white hair in tangles that obscured his failing eyes. A young woman, torn crudely in half at the waist, inched closer to him with her arms
.
Her lips peeled back and showed
teeth stained with blood. She screamed . . . a wet, gargling screech that sounded so inhuman and soulless. Her eyes burned with an intense fire that assured Sheldon that he was going to die. The panicked footfalls all around him were all he could see. People. Hundreds of them. All running.

              The woman, dragging her intestines behind her, slid forward and bit Sheldon on the forehead . . . sending warm blood into his eyes. Her mouth bit down with an unfathomable force. The old homeless man could hear the popping sounds in his ears; somewhere deep inside where she had broken through his skull. Amazingly, Little felt no pain. The hurt was an afterthought . . . only a millisecond long. Something was being pulled out of the hole at the center of his forehead. He looked up to see the woman pull something out with her teeth. It was a pink, fibrous thing that stretched for a moment and snapped off. She chewed it like a starving person would; nearly swallowing it whole. Confusing and strange thoughts entered his mind. Everything became jumbled together and odd.

The smells of smoke ushered him on his way into the unstated hunger now creeping up in his stomach.

VII

              Darin Miles snapped awake when the phone by the bed rang. Alone in his high-rise gated community apartment, he fumbled for the cell phone that was nearly out of reach. Glancing at the clock across the room, he answered it with a gruff and tired voice.

              The piercing sounds on the other line nearly made him toss the phone across the room on impulse. The shrill and sharp noises of incoherent shouting and crashes forced him out of the slumbering mind in an instant. “Miles??!!!!” the feverish voice shouted on the other line. That voice . . . even in an obviously frightened state, was unmistakeable. It was one of the Colonels . . . a Colonel Randall Browning. Development leader for the Lynn project. Darin had never met him, but he had talked to him on the phone about once a week and seen the man’s signature a million times. This was the man that approved all the funding for the Locke labs . . . domestic and overseas.

              “Browning?” Darin half-shouted, attempting to raise his voice over god-knew-what on the other end. Small pops sounded off in the distance. Tight packing sounds that reminded Darin of gunfire. “What the hell’s going on down there?”

              “Wait a sec!” the nearly retired Colonel shouted. “Stay on the line with me! Gimme a minute!!” A loud, echoey slam could be heard. The noises on Browning’s end had muted a bit . . . but Doctor Miles could still hear it. Men were shouting, pops in rapid succession and crashes every few seconds. The Colonel spoke quieter now. His words were coming out in panting gasps. If Darin didn’t know any better, he’d say the old shithead was having a heart attack. “She . . .Martha Perez.”

“Who?” Darin said, trying to place the name that sounded a bit familiar.

“. . . the one Samantha Winters attacked . . . she got out of the quarantine area. Killed four of my men. She did
something
to them . . .
GODDAMNIT!!!
They’re tearing ass through the whole fucking place!”

“Place . . . you mean the
Pentagon?
That’s where you sent her? I thought she was in a fucking hospital!”

The Colonel took one big, shaking breath. Darin could tell he had been crying. “Perez was in a medically-induced coma, for Christ sake! She got out and tore apart four men like they were made outta goddamn twigs! Oh, god . . . the place is overrun, Miles. They’re everywhere!!”

Darin Miles’ heart sank. He sat up in bed and got up as soon as his body let him. He got up, darting across the room to grab his shoes. “Randall, calm down . . .”

“Calm down, my ass! They can’t even be shot, man! Our weapons do nothing! There are over one-hundred of them now and they are walking around fucking
eating
people!!”

“Calm the fuck down!” Darin yelled. “You are no good to me if you’re hysterical. Are you in a safe place for the time being?”

“Yeah,” he said, sounding a bit calmer. “Hiding in an office closet.”

“Then I suggest keeping your voice down,” Darin said, throwing on all the clothes he had work the day before. “Now . . . take a deep breath and explain what the hell happened.”

“You friend . . . Nathaniel . . . stole Samantha’s body and hauled ass to downtown Des Moines. Proba
bly your lab at the university. Before he left, he let Perez out of her restraints.
”

“When did this happen?”

“I just read the e-mail when all this shit started happening. Nathaniel stole eighteen vials of the stuff, let all kinds of hell loose and Miss Perez got out of containment. They’re . . . everywhere . . . everyone she comes in contact with turned into things like Samantha and Brian. But this happened within seconds, not weeks! Everyone
they
attack too! They’re everywhere!!”

“You’re voice is getting loud again, Randy,” Darin said in as calm a voice as he could. The Colonel responded by letting out a sickening sigh. The man whimpered like a child. “Now, listen to me very carefully . . . can you do that?”

“Yes . . . yes I can.”

“The mitochondria in their cells are repairing at too quickly a speed. Anything you hit them with won’t work. As long as their brains are intact . . . even a partial brain can still retain basic function. Separate the head from the body. And for fuck’s sake, don’t let them get any blood on you, understand? The head will still be alive, so stay the hell away from it. Burn the heads ‘till there is absolutely nothing left. Are they out of the building, or did you manage to lock down the place?”

“They’re all over . . . all over the grounds . . .”

“Get you-know-who on the phone, sir. Now. I’ll head to the university and stop Nathaniel.”

“Yes.”

“It won’t be long before they get out and they’ll be all over the place. Nate’s gonna go somewhere and I need to cut him off. If I’m not too late already. Something tells me I already am. Get off the phone with me now and do it . . .
CALL!
”

“Okay,” he said. His voice was quieter, but still quite shaken. “Listen, Miles. There’s one more thi . . .”

The line went dead and the phone fell silent. Doctor Darin Miles didn’t need to call back. He knew what happened.

He knew.

VIII

              The place was still silent, thank God. The outbreak was still at the edge of the city. Darin knew this because of the smoke. Thick hurls of black smoke jutted out of the normally picturesque city skyline. They looked like black tendrils of some kind of monster crawling out of the earth. The apartment was only four miles to the university and the sun had only been up for thirty minutes when Darin pulled up in the parking lot. That blue Prius was parked in the driveway. Both doors were open and the car’s system beeped softly into the quiet morning. He got out of the car and pulled out the rife from the trunk. The thing was probably as old as the country it was in, but it would do enough damage should he find Nathaniel. Walking up to the car slowly, Darin peered into the Prius. Nothing was inside aside from a can of gasoline on the floorboard of the driver’s side and a bagfull of empty beer bottles in the back seat. A blood-stained pillowcase was slung around the driver’s seat head rest.

              “Nathan?” Darin said as he cocked the shotgun and walked into the building. His key card worked. Nathaniel hadn’t changed any of the locks yet. Either he was expecting the cavalry to show up or he was too far gone to worry about things like that. Darin expected to see an abattoir, but the place looked the same as it always did. All the lights worked. The carpets were recently shampooed and not a speck of dust was anywhere. He could smell the wax on the tile floor that lead to the lab area. Darin made his way across the lobby and office areas, poking his head in every doorway . . . rifle first. Darin craned his head to the end of the hall and saw that the Plexiglas double doors were malfunctioning. They were opening about two or three inches, then they would slam shut. Open and shut. Open and shut. There was a flamethrower just past the doors that he hoped to god Nathan didn’t steal. Every government-run laboratory is required to have a military-grade flamethrower in it. A hushed decision by the establishment secured that. The MacReady proposal.

              Darin had no idea what exactly caused the strange law, but he heard from a corporal at headquarters once about some kind of incident that happened in 1982. There was some Norwegian arctic expedition that went haywire and managed to spread its way to an American base. No one said anything as to what they were working on or what they found, but it was a matter of public record that the American base was simply there to study geological samples. The Norwegian records were destroyed. Their government locked away the rest. A Corporal back at the Pentagon told Darin once that sometime during the winter, the American base was destroyed and everybody ended up dead.

Those flamethrowers they used to knock away glacier walls and navigate the rough terrain were life savers for them . . . and possibly more people,
Corporal Rich said.
Used ‘em for site maintenance, too. The shit is so classified that I can’t even look at it. I’ve been curious a time or two, trust me. Always wondered what the hell happened out there. The base was destroyed and everybody in it was dead. The FBI arrived there that spring and found them all . . . and both complexes burned to the ground. There were two men outside of the American base. Both were frozen to death. It was so odd, though . . . I saw a photo of it once, believe it or not. They looked like they had willingly frozen themselves. They were sitting outside, across from each other and there was a beer bottle between them. They were having a drink together when there was a perfectly repairable helicopter and Snow-Cat less than a day’s hike away to the other base. Strangest thing I’ve ever seen.
I was even told never to talk about the photo. I was curious enough to go and look for it even recently, but when I checked the archives, it was gone. I didn’t press it. I didn’t want to be shot dead in a desert or left in a ditch somewhere because of a photograph. Rumor has it that whatever evidence was there at the base was shipped out to Quatar in Afghanistan for our boys to study. Why Quatar, I have no idea. Some of the boys that were out there had stories when they came back . . . stories you wouldn’t believe. The ones who talked . . . god knows what happened to them. They’re all gone.

              Nevertheless, it was ordered by the military oversight committees that flash grenades and flamethrowers be placed in every high-sensitivity black project lab. Sure enough, it was in there. It was a large, bulky thing that strapped onto the back of the operator. Two tanks were on the back of it, as well as a nozzle that operated like a power washer. Darin and the rest of the staff had been trained to use them and certified, but he had never expected to use the thing. Forcing the door open, he squeezed inside and put the flamethrower onto his back. Just one flick of a lighter on the end of the nozzle was enough to ‘load’ it. The heavy thing hissed to life as the little flame on the end of the nozzle danced like a perpetual candle. He pointed the thrower’s business-end away from him and pulled the trigger. The result was immediate. The heat coming off of the thing was unreal. Even with it pointed far enough away from him, he felt like his eyebrows were going to be singed off. Even the gloves did little to insulate the heat coming from the handle. A huge blue and white flame shot out of the nose of the long nozzle . . . about three feet long. It still worked. Even though no one had come to inspect it lately and its shelf-life was a year overdue, it still worked. The gas that fuelled the gun sputtered a little bit, but it would still do the trick.