Chicago Fell First: A Zombie Novel (18 page)

“Shit,” he muttered. There were 753 people named Danielle Hayes on Facebook.

He added “Chicago” to the search phrase and narrowed it down considerably to seventeen people. He rolled down the page, squinting at the tiny photographs beside the names. Bingo! There she was! She was standing there dressed in the white outfit she probably wore on student rounds at the hospital, smiling brightly in happier times.

He opened up the private message feature and typed.

“Danielle, I hope you’re alive and well, and Brandon, too. Please call me. Terence.”

He added his phone number and sent the message on its way.
He disconnected from the Facebook page and put the abandoned phone aside. He hoped Danielle’s phone alerted her of Facebook activity. And he hoped she would call him sooner rather than later, before his battery died. He could have carried the other phone with him for he doubted its owner would return for it, but he wanted to minimize his baggage. The city was still a danger zone and fighting or running would most likely be necessary for the foreseeable future until he got out—if such escape was still possible.

Dr. Bosc had brought a microscope with him. It was the best one he could get that could run on battery power out in the forest where there was no source of regular electricity. It would have to do. Bosc sat at the table while Danielle stood beside him to assist. The audience of Harrison and Doug sat off to the side.

“The idea here,” Bosc explained, “is to mix these various samples of blood and observe their interactions.”

He began to work, mixing and matching droplets of blood on slides and observing the strange dance of fluids and cells as the waters of life mingled on the thin glass sheets under the powerful eye of the magnifying lenses. Doug and Harrison knew enough to keep quiet and let the medical man work. Danielle spoke only as needed to assist the doctor. Kacey murmured occasionally from the bed, lost in a dream. Bosc mixed blood, peered through the microscope, scribbled notes, repeated the processes over and over with different combinations. Once or twice, he laughed like Newton when the apple fell. 

When he was finished, he sat back in his chair smiling. Danielle, as his assistant for the time, had some idea what he had been finding, while Harrison and Doug waited eagerly to hear the results. Even Kacey sat up partially and listened.

“This is incredible,” Bosc began. “Every combination of blood samples yields the results we’d hoped for. I saw strange abnormalities in the blood of our captive, as if the cells were as rabid and feverishly active as the body, which housed them. When I added a drop of Danielle’s blood to that sample, all activity ceased. All activity! The cells stopped multiplying. Danielle’s blood killed the zombie cells! I then reversed the process, taking another sample of Danielle’s blood and finding that it appeared perfectly normal under high magnification. I added some zombie blood to that sample and the result was the same as the opposite order: Danielle’s blood halted the activity of the prisoner’s blood!

“For my next test, I used a sample of Kacey’s blood from after she had been injected with Danielle’s, to
whom I added some zombie blood to mimic the event of her being bitten again. There was no infection and the zombie cells died. It seems that once cured, a person is then immune to future infection.

“To be sure of that, I took a sample of Donald’s blood and added zombie blood. Infection took hold immediately as I watched Donald’s cells taking on the same frenzied characteristics as the zombie’s cells. Normal blood catches the infection almost immediately although, as we have seen, the full effect may take some time to manifest or Kacey would have been transformed before we could administer the cure.

“I then performed two final tests. First I took Donald’s blood and mixed it with Danielle’s. I then added a zombie sample. Exposure to Danielle’s cells made the blood of a healthy person who had not had cancer immune to infection by the zombie plague. Second, I took a separate sample of Donald’s blood and mixed it with Kacey’s blood to see if a second-generation immunity could occur, if the blood of one who had been cured and made immune would pass the immunity on to another person. That did not work. The immunity must be passed directly from a person with immunity, which apparently means some, if not all, survivors of cancer, can give blood to a healthy recipient to protect one from the infection caused by contact with the zombies’ fluids.”

When Bosc had finished, he fell silent as if still digesting the lesson. The others began to speak now.

“Most interesting,” said Donald Harrison, professorially.  

“Holy shit, I was right!” Danielle said, grinning.

“Kickass,” Kacey said, weakly but happily.

“So what do we do with the fucker in the other cabin?” Doug asked, not yet ready to celebrate.

“That other cabin,” Bosc answered, “is where our next round of testing will take place.”

“So we’ll inject it with Danielle’s blood and watch it die?” Doug guessed.

“Not quite,” Danielle said, “or at least not right away. We know my blood is destructive to those things, but we have to find out how much exposure there has to be to have that effect. What if a zombie breathes the blood in, or swallows it, or does it have to actually be sent directly into the bloodstream? The answers we get to those questions mean a lot.”

Doug nodded his understanding.

“I have one more question,” Professor Harrison said, raising his hand like a schoolboy.

“Yes, Donald,” Bosc called on him.

“Why are we discovering this? I mean … the government must have hundreds of the most noted scientists in the nation working on the problem of Chicago. Even if they’ve given up and quarantined the whole city as the news seems to indicate, why hasn’t anyone else stumbled onto this apparent solution?”

“That’s actually quite simple, I think,” Danielle said, offering her theory before Bosc could answer. “I noticed that the one survivor interviewed on the news was a cancer survivor because, being one myself, I tend to notice mentions of the disease when I hear them. There may have been many former cancer patients bitten or scratched during the last few days, but no others have come to the attention of the media. The city is in chaos so there are probably those who survived but are still trapped in Chicago or left the city and never gave a second thought to the fact that they were almost infected and once had cancer. Also, Professor, how many people who were attacked by the zombies might have avoided infection but died from their wounds? Had my bite been deeper or in an area of the body more prone to bleeding, I might have died before it could be understood that I was immune. It was purely by chance that I happened to hear the one news report of a survivor and that survivor mentioned having beaten cancer and my mind began to wonder about a connection. That, I think, is why it was missed by everyone but us as far as we know.”

Harrison nodded. Bosc closed his case of blood samples, several vials still full of red. He grabbed his bag as he stood up.

“Let’s continue with the next phase,” he said as he headed for the door.

“I’ll remain here with Kacey,” Harrison volunteered. “I truly have no desire to watch what happens next.”

Danielle and Doug followed the doctor outside. 

Constable Fess and the guards stepped aside to let the others into the cabin. Inside, the room was still dark except for the light of the lamp that hung above the table. The prisoner was still tied to the table, struggling ceaselessly against his bonds. Doug and Danielle stood and watched as Bosc knelt on the floor and opened his bag of tricks. He took out a silver cylinder and unscrewed the top, revealing a tube that ran into the body of the object. He took a bottle of water out of the bag and poured some of the water into the cylinder. To this he added some blood from one of the vials. He screwed the silver top back into place and proceeded to shake the thing for thirty seconds. He stood up, looking very much like Van Helsing armed with Holy Water.

“What is that?” Doug asked.

“Round one,” the physician answered. “This is an aerosol can. What happens if this abomination breathes in the blood of a cancer survivor carried in a spray of plain old H20? Will you remove the gag from its maw please, Doug?”

Doug tore the rag from the Empty Sheriff’s mouth, and quickly backed away. Bosc moved up, held the canister inches from the face of the captive zombie, and sprayed one quick full burst. The liquid shot forth in misty, scattered droplets and the Empty Sheriff breathed it in.

Seconds ticked by, not even a full minute. A gurgling noise came up from the thing’s innards; the reanimated body shook, quaking like a fault line had shifted, and died, expired like last week’s milk.

“The hell with round two,” Danielle said. “As Kacey said before, my blood kicks some serious ass!”

“So what can we do with this information?” Bosc asked. “We can’t just go to Chicago and spray every zombie in the face. And we’d run out of your blood quite quickly, Danielle.”

“The military needs to know about this,” Doug said. “I know what the news says, but I find it hard to believe that the government is just going to leave Chicago walled in to wipe itself clean.”

Danielle’s phone beeped and buzzed in her pocket. She turned away from the sight of the dead zombie to manipulate the touch-screen. When she read the words it showed her, she muttered, “Shit, that’s sweet timing.”

“Gentlemen,” she said, turning back to her companions, “I know one military man who’ll be willing to listen to what we have to say.”

Terence Trumbull had been on the move. He stopped several times when he spied Empty Ones roaming the streets looking for human flesh to tear and consume, and he shot them. Other than those pauses to kill, he kept going. He ate a bit when he found unspoiled food, used abandoned bathrooms when the need came, and waited for a call that might or might not come.

It came. His phone rang; he pulled it from his pack as quickly as he could. It had to be her.

“Hello.”

“Captain Trumbull? It’s me … Danielle Hayes. Where are you? Are you all right?”

“I’m okay. I’m still in one piece, still in Chicago. Where are you? How’s the kid?”

“We’re fine. We made it to the safe place, thanks to you. In fact, we’re better than fine.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean we’ve found somethingn. We’ve found a way to stop the plague!”

“A cure?”

“Yes … no … kind of. It won’t help those that have already changed, but it will kill them without bullets. And it can make others immune, we think. But we need help. We don’t know how to use it and we need the government or the CDC or the army or somebody. Can you help us?”

“Danielle … I’m kind of disconnected from the rest of things. I guess you’d say I’m rogue. But if I can …”

“Can you get out of the city?”

“I’m sure I can find a way. Where should I go?”

“Hold on a sec. Doug, what’s the name of that town we picked Kacey up in? Oh, yeah, okay. Captain Trumbull, if you can get out of Chicago and get to a little town called Bellamy … northwest of Chicago a couple hours, we’ll meet you there. Can you be there tomorrow?”

“I’ll try my damnedest.”

“Good. We’ll see you there. Text me or call me if things change.”

“I won’t let you down, Danielle. Tell Brandon I’m sending a salute. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Who was that?” Doug asked as Danielle ended the call.

“The solution to our problem, I hope,” she answered. “I have part of a plan in mind and maybe he can come up with the rest.”

Chapter 17

They gathered in Harrison’s cabin: Bosc, Harrison, Danielle, Doug and Kacey. The mood was positive but very serious. Only Bosc and Danielle understood the scientific specifics, but everyone realized the tremendous implications of what had been discovered.

Danielle had emerged as the unlikely and unofficial leader of the small band that had been thrown together by circumstance. It was assumed by all present that she would do the talking now that they had come together to decide what to do with the information they possessed.

“So,” she began, “we seem to have found a way to kill those things and prevent anyone else from being infected if we can find a way to somehow deliver the blood of cancer survivors into Chicago. The government may have decided to shut off the city from the rest of the world, but I don’t see any reason why we can’t try to help. There must still be people in the city, desperate and afraid and losing hope.

“I have a friend, an army officer, who helped Brandon and me get out of the city. We probably would have died without his help. I’ve been in contact with him and he’s agreed to meet me tomorrow in Bellamy. I hope he can help us figure out what to do about Chicago. Now here’s what I need from the rest of you, assuming you’re all willing.

“Kacey, I need you to call your boss at that diner and talk him into letting us use the restaurant as a meeting place. We have to have somewhere to get this plan figured out. After that, you need to rest. You’re still woozy from your injury, I can see. I need you to stay here and recuperate and, most importantly, help to watch over Brandon.

“Doug, you’ll ride into Bellamy with me since you know the way.

“Dr. Bosc, I’m assuming you’ve had patients who have had cancer and survived; contact them. Go back to your practice and find their records if you have to. Find others if you can, maybe patients of colleagues or whomever you can get. Ask them, beg them if you must, to help us. I don’t have enough blood to do this alone. They’ve all survived against the odds and maybe now they can help others do the same. Professor Harrison, go with the doctor if you will. I’d rather that none of us go alone. If you can find those people, bring them to Bellamy.”

Everyone nodded. They all understood. Danielle tossed her cell phone to Kacey, who dialed the number for the Mirage Diner.

“We should leave now then,” Bosc said. “It will take time to go through my records and call the people who might respond to our needs. Donald?”

“Agreed,” the professor said, and the two older men walked out together.

Terence Trumbull needed wheels. If he was going to get to Bellamy, he had to have a car. He was already out of the city; that had been the easy part because he did it in the way that went against his immediate plan. His first thought had been to use his combat training and swim through the sewers or rappel down one of those half-erected walls in a spot where the army presence on the borders of the city was thin. But then it had occurred to him that taking the dangerous way out was over-complicated. His training from his Special Forces days had included other things, too. There had been times when he’d become someone else for the purposes of a mission. Why not do that now?

The soldiers who remained around the city were not supposed to let anyone out. Chicago was now a quarantined prison. Trumbull had watched people begging for an exit, turned away, at gunpoint even. But those had been ragged people, clothing torn and bloodstained, unwashed and desperate. It had made him wonder what would happen if a more presentable supplicant asked for a pathway to freedom.

So he cleaned himself up. He searched a few apartments, some of the more expensive ones, until he found one that had clearly been lived in by a man of his general size. He washed, shaved, and put on an expensive black suit with a red tie. He found some cash in the apartment too, several hundred dollars. He took it, but not easily; that was the one thing so far that his conscience almost made him leave behind. The suit was one thing but taking cash seemed somehow intrinsically wrong, yet it was a matter of survival and, if Danielle’s words on the phone had not been an exaggeration, not only his survival. He took a guitar case from a ruined music store and used it to conceal his guns. He strode up to one of the few remaining openings in the closing concrete borders around Chicago and told the guard, a nervous young private, “They might have kept on playing as the Titanic went down, but I, young man, am one musician who intends to get off this boat before it’s too late!”

Nervous private called confident sergeant, Trumbull repeated the line to him, got a laugh, and was let out. He strode into the suburbs feeling like James Bond and burst out laughing as soon as he was sure he was out of earshot of the soldiers. It was the first time he’d laughed in days.

He found a motel. It was nothing special, just part of a chain of identical lodges that stretched across the nation, but it was clean and the water ran and the lights went on and off when he flipped the switches. It was almost hard to believe that, a few miles away, the great city of Chicago had become a walled-in wasteland.

Trumbull relaxed that evening. He turned on the TV and tried to watch the President talk about Chicago, but quickly grew tired of hearing the phrases “tragedy” and “necessary for the good of the rest of the nation,” and changed the channel. He fell asleep watching an old western with Gary Cooper and some guy he recognized but couldn’t name. In the morning, he would rent a car —rent and not steal this time, he thought happily—and be on his way to Bellamy.

His last conscious thought that night was a reminder to himself that it was about the people of the world, those he was trying to help, and not about the subtext that kept creeping into his mind, the idea that maybe his eventual reunion with Danielle Hayes would mean something beyond business. He tried his best to squash those thoughts. There was too much at stake to get caught up in personal hopes.  

Evening had fallen on the little village. Professor Harrison and Dr. Bosc had left for the doctor’s office some twenty miles away. Among those who remained at the village, talk turned to what to do with the corpse of the former Sheriff. Constable Fess, Irena and the other adults refused to allow the body to be buried in or near the settlement. Doug suggested burning and it was agreed. A pyre was made and lit. They all stood and watched the flames consume the subject of their experiments.

Kacey had gotten out of bed and sat in a chair that had been carried outside for her. Doug stood behind her with his hands upon her shoulders. Danielle stood a few feet to their right. Brandon was with her and she held his hand. Fess chewed on a blade of grass as the reflection of the flames danced in dark eyes that had seen so little of the world into which he had been born.

Danielle had something in her free hand and she squinted to read in the firelight as she opened it. It was the wallet she had taken from the Empty Sheriff’s pocket just before the body had been placed on the stacked branches to be burned.

“His name,” she said, “was Harmon Lassiter. He was forty-four years old. He carried a picture of his children.”

Giving a name to what had become a monster changed things in the minds of some of those who watched the flames consume the empty flesh vessel. Brandon squeezed Danielle’s hand. A tear trickled down Kacey’s cheek. Doug’s mind was divided; part of him felt sadness at all they had seen and done in the past few days, but
the sight of the fire devouring its meal fascinated part of him.

When it had grown late in the night and the fire died away, Fess and two helpers shoveled away the ashes. Danielle and Kacey went back to Harrison’s cabin to sleep. Brandon returned to the family that had been providing him with a bed. Doug wandered off into the woods around the settlement; he was not ready to sleep yet.

“You’re that guy that fixed my Pac-Man game,” Henry Brunt said as he opened the door of the Mirage Diner to let Doug and Danielle in. A sign on the door announced that the diner would be closed today. It was mid-morning. “Where’s Kacey? I should fire that girl for quitting like she did, just walking out.”

“She won’t be coming today,” Danielle explained. “She was hurt, she’s recovering someplace safe, but don’t worry, she’ll be fine. Thanks for agreeing to let us use this place.”

Brunt shrugged. “It’s all right, really it is. If what Kacey told me on the phone is true, and you kids really have a way to kill those things … then I want to help. I’ve got a brother in the big city, his wife and my three nephews, and I haven’t heard a word from them since the shit hit the big fan. I hope I haven’t lost them. You want some coffee maybe?”

Danielle and Doug nodded. They sat down to wait for the others.

Twenty minutes later, the roar of a struggling, coughing car engine cut through the air. Danielle looked out the window to see what sort of horrifically mistreated vehicle could be laboring in such a way. She found a rusted, dented little sedan that must have been nearing its twentieth birthday crawling into the Mirage lot and barely making it into a parking space. She almost laughed but seeing Terence Trumbull climbing out of the wreck suppressed the giggle. He looked the exact opposite of his transportation, dressed in a high-end suit, more like a Wall Street executive than a soldier.

Trumbull entered the diner, hugged Danielle, shook hands with Doug and immediately said, “I don’t want to hear any cracks about my car! The rental places were tapped out with all the people fleeing the area. That was the best I could do. It did its job, got me from Point A to Point Crappy Little Diner.”

“Hey! I heard that!” Henry Brunt shouted from behind the counter. “You want a coffee, too?”

“Absolutely,” Trumbull said as he sat. “So, Danielle, tell me about this discovery you’ve made and how I can help.”

For nearly half an hour, Danielle related the whole play-by-play of her experiments with Dr. Bosc and the others and the zombie blood and her blood and the final victorious stroke of the aerosol in the Empty Sheriff’s face. “The problem is,” she finished, “that we don’t know how to get this information to the right people or, since I don’t think anyone will listen to us anyway, use it ourselves to fix things.”

“Danielle,” Trumbull said, his face dropping, “I’m kind of cut off from the army right now. My commanding officer, the one man who might have believed me, is dead, and I’m probably assumed dead or AWOL myself. That city’s in lockdown. They won’t let you or your friends anywhere near it. On top of that, your blood might have taken out that one Empty One, but what are we supposed to do, bleed you dry?”

“Terence,” Danielle said, using his first name for emphasis, “we really need your help now. And think of what happened in Africa and what you’ve been through since it started in Chicago. Think of it as revenge, as maybe ending this thing before it gets any worse. It’s not just in Chicago now. Yeah, the government sealed off the city, but there are towns out here that are infected, like the one we got that sheriff from. Maybe this town will be next.”

“Look,” Trumbull nodded, “I’ll help if I can. You know that, but what about the blood?”

“There will be others,” Danielle said. “I’m sure of it.”

Doug, who had been listening but not speaking, piped up.

“I think they’re here.”

All eyes shot to the window. They had been expecting Raymond Bosc’s little car, perhaps followed by a few others. What they got was a bus.

Professor Harrison got out first. Bosc followed, carrying a larger version of the medical bag he had brought to the village with him. Behind him came a parade. People of various ages, of both genders, of all different colors and sizes and backgrounds streamed off the bus, several dozen. Most of them looked healthy. A few moved more slowly. One woman came on crutches, one-legged. There were several with bandanas over chemo-bald heads. With Harrison leading, they marched across the parking lot and up the steps to the diner’s doors.

Doug got up to let them in.

“I think I’m gonna need another pot of coffee,” muttered Henry Brunt.

Terence Trumbull began to laugh. “Shit, Danielle, you weren’t kidding about the cavalry!”

The little diner was soon filled almost to capacity. The assembled talked amongst themselves for a while as Henry Brunt passed out coffee, tea and water. Introductions were made between those who had been there waiting and those who had just arrived. When all was ready and everyone seated and comfortable, Danielle stood in the center and began to speak.

“Thank you all for coming on such short notice. I’m sure Dr. Bosc and Professor Harrison explained as much of the situation as they could. My name is Danielle Hayes. I’m a friend of the doctor and the professor, I’m a medical student, and, like all of you, I faced cancer and survived it.

“I’m sure a lot of you have been told, by friends and family and maybe even by strangers, the same things I’ve been told—like how brave you are and how great it is that you beat the odds and lived. I’m happy to be alive, of course, but I’ve never felt particularly heroic about it; I just wanted to live and I’m glad I’m still here. But I guess we are brave people, all of us. We’ve been through pain and changes and emerged with our scars but with our lives, too.

“But now something has happened and we, just we among the many thousands of people in the area and the many millions of people in and around Chicago, have a chance to help with this strange situation that’s already cost the lives of so many innocent men and women … and even children, people who didn’t ask to be attacked or infected or turned into grotesque versions of what they once had been.