Cities of the Dead: Stories From The Zombie Apocalypse (2 page)

“Banged his head pretty good hitting the floor,” Ze’ev said, standing up and hurrying to the other side of the room. He picked up the phone, “I need a first responder unit to the morgue stat, we’ve got an injured staff that needs immediate emergency treatment.”

Ze’ev returned and placed a bandage on the wound.

“What would have bitten him?”

Ze’ev half-stood and banged his head into the open tray door.

“Jesus!” he said, his eyes rimming with tears as he shoved the tray back into the wall. He paused for a moment and focused on the intense point of pain on the crown of his head, willing it to fade away. He took a long, deep breath and opened his eyes.

Ze’ev turned to Bright and shrugged. “Who, you mean, and why?”

“What do you mean?”

“No ‘what’ bit him. That’s a human mouth bite on his arm. Believe me, I’ve seen hundreds of them, maybe thousands. Usually they’re just bruises with indentations, maybe once in a while you’ll get a body in here with punctures from somebody’s mouth, but that’s rare. This wound, this bite, you never get that from a person. Dogs, yeah, sometimes. People, never,” Ze’ev said. “Which means you have to ask, ‘who bit him?’”

“And why?”

“Exactly,” Ze’ev said, turning to the intern and patting through his clothing for any obvious signs of other trauma.

Bright looked around the room and immediately noticed a puddle of blood on the floor near the equipment table, and a small rotary saw lying on the floor. She walked over to it and saw a spray of blood across the counter and onto the wall. The various tools were in disarray, a smear of blood across them as if someone had been desperately snatching for them.

“He doesn’t have any cut wounds on him, does he?” Bright asked.

“No, why?” Ze’ev said.

“There’s a rotary saw and some autopsy tools here that have blood on them.” Bright noticed a bloody palm smear on the table.

Ze’ev gave her a curious look. “Those tools should all be clean and ready for the autopsy.”

He got up and walked across the room and looked down at the equipment. Ze’ev gave Bright a look of mild bewilderment and almost shrugged. “Let me see if I can’t get a hold of Marcus. He should have been here helping Jason. Maybe he knows what’s going on.”

Ze’ev picked the phone off the hook on the wall, punched in a code, and spoke. Overhead, the speakers let out the muffled, softened sound of Ze’ev’s voice calling for Marcus Glass to come to the morgue examining room. Behind them there was a slight groan and the gentle sound of a pair of double-doors swinging to a close. Ze’ev turned.

“What the fu—yee-oww!” Ze’ev said, his voice changing from deep confusion to clear pain.

Bright spun around and stared for a moment at the sight of Hristo Gruev biting deeply into Ze’ev’s neck, Gruev’s hands clasped tightly around Ze’ev’s right arm and shoulder, blood coursing down Ze’ev’s shirt and gurgling up across Gruev’s bared teeth and lips. Ze’ev smacked Gruev with his left palm several times, his hand making dull slaps on Gruev’s forehead but doing nothing to phase Gruev. Bright took a pair of steps sideways and tried to make sense of what she was looking at: Gruev should be dead.

Yul Ze’ev let out a second yell now. It was an animalistic plea for help from the heavens, a sound uttered by uncountable numbers of prey as they realized the bite they were suffering would be fatal, the grasp of the claws un-releasable; that life was rapidly coming to a close should some divine intervention not materialize. Bright recognized the sound on some primal level, and she moved forward quickly and grabbed Gruev’s right arm at the biceps and elbow, trying to bend it up and away from its grip on Ze’ev.

But Gruev did not budge. Beneath her fingertips she could feel the thick deadness of Gruev’s arm, as if she were grabbing modeling clay. His body temperature should have been that of the morgue’s storage tray’s refrigeration, but instead he was burning hot, a warmth that should not have been inside of a dead body. She could hear him breathing as he resisted her attempt to move his arm, a slow, almost-silent in-and-out of air that would've been lost in the sound of the room's ventilation were she not so close to him. She flicked her eyes to Gruev’s face and watched as he slowly moved his head from side to side, trying to bite off a piece of Ze’ev’s neck. Gruev’s eyes were slits, his brows furrowed with intense concentration.

The air was filled with sudden noise and commotion, and a half-second later she was pulled away from Gruev and Ze’ev while a pair of paramedics wrenched Gruev off of Ze’ev, each medical technician taking one of Gruev’s arms at the shoulder and breaking him off of the pathologist. Ze’ev collapsed, his arms around his neck, blood seeping through his fingers.

Bright turned and watched the paramedics as they struggled with Gruev, a lump of Ze’ev’s neck in his mouth. Gruev wriggled to break free of the paramedics while he continued chewing, his naked body streaked with rivulets of blood. Although he was supposed to be dead, Gruev was winning the wrestling match with the two paramedics, slowly breaking their grips on him.

“Call security,” the paramedic on the left said to her, his voice tinged with annoyance more than fear.

Bright rushed over the phone on the wall, picked up the handset and scanned it for a listing of punch codes, found it and entered the numbers.

“Security.”

“Hello, I’m Dr. Lucinda Bright from-,” she paused a moment, composed herself. “I need security to the morgue operating room as quickly as possible. We have a patient who’s attacked two staff members and is currently engaging two emergency medical technicians. Please hurry as both staff have suffered serious wounds and are in need of emergency medical treatment.”

Taking Gruev down had required the use of two Tasers, and even then Gruev had only been stunned long enough for the security guards to fix a pair of handcuffs on him before he had started to try to get up off the floor. Unable to rise, Gruev had spun slowly on the floor, his legs pushing him lazily, aimlessly, relentlessly.

Ze’ev and the intern had both been taken to the emergency department for treatment and each was unconscious. Marcus Glass was dead, his body had been found down the hallway from the morgue, his throat torn out and right thumb bitten off. Hristo Gruev, pronounced dead only eleven hours earlier, was now strapped to a bed in a room with a two-way mirror, a pair of armed sheriff's officers outside the door to the room, an Internet camera focused on him and monitors of every sort imaginable plugged into his should-be lifeless body.

But there he was on the other side of the glass wall, moaning incoherently and straining against the bed's leather straps, a fact that totally baffled Bright and Special Agent Hoffman. He turned away from the glass and shook his head slightly, perturbed.

“We’re sure he was 100 percent dead?” Hoffman asked.

“Well, I wasn’t the attending, but according to his chart, he died,” Bright said. “There was no heart rate on the cardiac monitor. No active breaths. They did an apnea test and the CO2 was greater than 120 without any breaths. The only thing confusing throughout all of this is that Gruev's body temp never got below 104 despite the environmental cold and lack of any other vitality in the vital signs. His brain was cooked. He was dead.”

“All the way dead?” Hoffman asked “I mean, there’s no chance he was kind of almost dead, and putting him in the refrigerated drawer in the morgue might have put him in hibernation or something?”

Bright wanted to roll her eyes in disbelief, but, clearly, something had gone wrong and Hristo Gruev hadn’t died. She shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never heard of something like this happening, but there’s a first time for everything.”

Hoffman stepped up to the glass and leaned close to it, staring through it at the man strapped to the bed, blood trickling out of the corners of his mouth, his fingers clawing at the sheets.

“What does he have? Rabies?” Hoffman asked. “Would that make him attack people like that?”

“I don’t think so,” Bright said. “Some of the symptoms are similar: fever, twitching, the strange breathing pattern. But I don’t know that I’ve ever heard of blood loss like this.”

“Couldn’t that maybe be the foaming at the mouth you hear about?”

Bright shook her head. “No, but I’m going to test for it, anyway. Something’s wrong with him.”

“So, what do we do with the rest of the people who’ve come in contact with him?” Hoffman asked. “I’ve got a dozen people who’ve been waiting in an airport conference room since yesterday and I don’t think I’m going to be able to hold them there much longer.”

“We're going to hold them another twenty-four hours. If they don't exhibit any symptoms, they should be okay,” Bright said. “We’ll want to notify this guy’s wife we’ve got him here and bring her in so we can get the required authorizations for treatment, but the rest can go to Disneyland if nobody gets sick.”

“What about the people he came in contact with here?”

Bright poured a cup of coffee from the pot in the observation room, added some Coffee Mate to it and swirled it into a tan color. She sipped and thought.

“We’ve got the two injured men in separate rooms, under observation with guards outside their rooms to prevent accidental exposures to unauthorized people, so we should be okay on that account,” Bright said, walking up to the wall alongside Hoffman. “The other man, Marcus Glass, died from his wounds. His body was transferred to a funeral home about an hour ago. I met his parents and explained what happened, as best I could, but they couldn't believe we thought Gruev was dead."

Bright took a sip of coffee and considered the situation, turned her head to Hoffman and sniffed out a tiny laugh, “I’m sure someone will get sued because of this.”

Days Go By

Bridgeport, Pennsylvania – Day 132

For rotting corpses, zombies don’t exactly smell bad. Rotting corpses are supposed to smell bad. You watch a crime show about a coroner or CSI unit, and they smear that white stuff under their noses sometimes when they’re going to investigate a body. Bodies are supposed to decay, melt into goo and turn into bones. Not zombies. Zombies are kinda like the Energizer bunny: they just keep going and going.

Until you put a big hole in one’s head. Or chop its head off. Or burn it. Or spray it with enough acid. Or flatten it with a steamroller. Otherwise, they’re sorta like that black knight in that Monty Python movie, you can keep hacking parts off, but they just keep on living, trying to get you. Run, walk, crawl, slither.

Why they want to eat you is a big mystery to me. They’re supposed to be dead. Or, undead. I’m not exactly clear on that one. Before Kyle got eaten by a pack of zombies on Fourth Street two weeks ago he had been researching zombie history and come to the conclusion that zombies were re-animated corpses, brought back to life by black magic. He thought Holy Water in a Super Soaker might be a way to kill them, so he loaded up a tank at St. Augustine’s and headed down Fourth Street to the Wawa convenience store, which is where a lot of the zombies kind of hang out when there’s nobody to try to eat.

Almost just like before there were zombies, only back then the people would stand in front of the store with cups of coffee and smoke cigarettes. Now, they groan and shuffle back and forth.

Anyway, Kyle rode his bike into the parking lot, started squirting at the zombies, and before he could start pedaling away the borough secretary came up on him from behind and grabbed his hair. She must’ve been about sixty before she was turned into a zombie, but one thing about zombies is they’re freaking strong, and all hundred pounds of the lady – Mrs. Scotoline – dragged Kyle to the ground and bit him on the shoulder. A couple of seconds later and Kyle stopped screaming as a dozen or so zombies had him and tore him apart. What’s left of him is still lying in the parking lot.

Kyle never said how Holy Water would stop black magic, but I thought it was a dumb idea at the time. These are zombies, not vampires.

But you know what does smell after a while? People. Living people. I’d like to say you get used to it, but you head outside for a while in the fresh air and when you get back home, all you smell is sour stink. Almost makes you want to risk a dash down to the Schuylkill with a bar of soap, but the last person that did that was Marsha something-or-other, and now she’s a one-armed zombie that mostly hangs out around Christine’s hair salon down the other end of Fourth Street. You don’t realize how much that daily shower really does for you even when you don’t think you’re dirty.

So, life kinda sucked before the zombies. My mom and dad made me do homework first thing every day after school: before dinner, before video games, before anything. Homework. And my dad kept signing me up for baseball and football. Baseball is boring and football practice sucks. I don’t know why I just couldn’t play video games or watch YouTube or whatever, but I couldn’t. Some of my friends had parents like mine, but most of my friends had their own televisions and computers in their bedrooms. Not me. Life sucked. Kinda, like I said.

And then the zombies came. My friends had told me about them, sort of, at lunch. Weird stories they heard about from their parents about Los Angeles and New York and Europe. Or Russia. Russia’s in Europe, I think. Close, probably. Anyway, all I knew about zombies I knew from the movies. So, not much, really. Fast zombies. Slow zombies. All of them want to eat you.