Cities of the Dead: Stories From The Zombie Apocalypse (25 page)

But the reactions of his people had been the same, closing down communities and shunning strangers. Carlos figured that only fools would trust the comfort of strangers in these times.

“America is not safe,” Carlos said. “No place is safe where there the undead roam.”

The room grew quiet and the Americans stared at each other glumly. Kate tilted her glass of wine into her mouth and drank it in three gulps, grabbed a bottle and poured her glass full.

“I thought there was hope, but there isn’t,” Kate said softly.

Ken turned to her. “There is. There always is. Kate, we’re going to find a way through this and get back to our families.”

“Or die trying?” Gail said. “We’ve been on the road for three weeks after a year of being holed up in a series of fucking hotels up and down the coast, waiting for a cruise ship or the Navy or somebody to come and rescue us. And we find out now that everyplace is just as bad? Where are we going to go?

“We’re going to stay with the plan, Gail, and drive you and Kate home first,” Ken said. “And then we’ll figure out what the next step is. Doctor Carlos said there are groups of people still out there. All of our families could still be okay. Let’s not assume the worst.”

Carlos raised his glass and tapped the floor with his foot. “Look on the bright side, you lived another day in the zombie apocalypse, be proud of yourselves; not everyone can say that. Celebrate a victory and take the day off. Tomorrow, you can return to your quest.”

He pushed himself away from the table and stood. “Please, enjoy the wine and eat some more. I have more work to do. If you need anything, Federico can help you.”

Carlos watched from the upper level as the American named Ken awoke on the cot in the center of the observation area. Ken coughed roughly and shook his head a little, as if trying to orient himself. He realized he was on a cot in the middle of a large dirt-floored room and scratched his forehead.

“What the fuck?” he said quietly, calmly.

Carlos wrote down the time of his awakening on the medical form and watched. Ken sat still and looked around the room, located Carlos on the upper deck and stared. Ken blinked hard.

“Is that you, Doctor Carlos?” Ken asked. “What the hell is going on?”

“I’m just observing your awakening is all,” Carlos said.

“Why am I here? I’m pretty sure I went to bed in one of your guest rooms.”

“You did. We moved you here after you were asleep.”

“Why? Is something wrong?”

“That’s what I’m trying to observe,” Carlos said. “You were exposed to what is an aerosolized amount of the zombie contagion, albeit at a lower parts-per-million content than I’ve previously observed. I’m trying to determine what the threshold level of airborne infection is, because this plague spread much more quickly than through bites from the infected. There has to be an alternate method of infection. The stories of people  just suddenly waking up infected or becoming infected while at work are too great to ignore, so, somehow, the alternate methods of transmission need to be determined.”

Ken stood and took a few steps, stopped, and tried to center his balance.

“Are the other guys okay? Is it just me?”

“Yes, they’re just fine,” Carlos said. “We’re just going to watch you for a while and see what happens.”

Ken nodded. “I feel kinda drunk ... or drugged.”

“Tell me every sensation you are going through. It’s important for me to know what’s going on with you so that I can figure out how to stop it.”

Ken stumbled a few steps and almost fell. “I’m hot ... I’m thirsty.”

Ken’s head rolled around his shoulders aimlessly and his body quivered. He suddenly coughed up a small amount of blood and mucus. He turned and stumbled back  to the cot and fell onto it. Carlos wrote a note and motioned to Federico for them to leave the observation deck.

Inside the next room, Carlos and Federico took off their face masks and placed them on the table.

“That was half the dose of the last subject, and it was still as quick. Whatever this bug is, it moves fast. Keep an eye on him throughout the day and let me know if he revives.”

“What about the others?”

Carlos shrugged. “They’re not going anywhere. Just keep them locked in their rooms.”

He walked through the laboratory and pushed through the office doors and sat at his desk. For some reason, the contagion took over a person much more quickly when a person was asleep and exposed to it by the air: almost twice as fast as by a bite infection or exposed blood contamination. It made no sense to him. Carlos looked at his watch and figured that if subject Ken reacted as previous subjects had, he’d arise as undead within six to eight hours. And his tests had all been conducted using his various guess-work concoctions as to what the pathogen might be composed of.

He was sure that for it to have spread so rapidly across the globe, and infected so many so quickly, there had to be a better explanation because it hadn’t infected everyone simultaneously. People in one house would arise in the morning like normal, looking for breakfast while the family next door would awaken to a life as the undead. It made no sense.

And then it hit him.

It was a learning virus. A retro-virus of some sort, perhaps, that couldn’t infect everyone at first, but as it mutated through those it successfully infected, it began incorporating the differences in DNA of the human species into its attack sequence. He sat back in his chair and wondered if that made sense, if a virus could be so adaptable. And, especially, if it could alter itself that quickly.

“But it doesn’t always change the host, it sometimes kills the host,” he said aloud, softly, to no one. Killing the host was a mistake. The virus must have adapted early on to revive the host as something different. But if it didn’t infect everyone through its primary delivery system then that meant there were humans who were resistant to the plague, at least until it evolved further. Which meant there was a cure. Or a vaccine. But there was hope.

He flipped through some of the paperwork on his desk and wished, again, he had a computer that could crunch data, analyze trends, spot outliers. This work could take decades done this way, and he wasn’t sure he even had years. He was going to need to run more experiments. He was going to need equipment. He was going to need time.

And he was going to need more test subjects.

The R
oad

Tulsa, Oklahoma - Day 204

The two were on horseback, now, having made the beginning of their trek across Oklahoma on foot under the searing summer sun. Carter hadn’t wanted to use a motor vehicle of any kind as he didn’t want to be tied down to the need for gasoline and maintenance. In the days they’d been making their way across the state, they’d come across countless little caravans of vehicles abandoned in the middle of the road, so he figured he was in the minority on this issue. The world had gone to hell more quickly than anyone could have imagined, abruptly ending thousands of years of steady progress toward air-conditioning and convenience store burritos, and most of the survivors were still clinging to the ways of civilization.

There was no civilization. Not anymore. Already, Mother Nature was taking back that which the humans had brought under their control, planting weeds and grass anywhere a seed could take root in a crack. It was only a matter of time until the tornados tore apart the buildings in Oklahoma City and Norman. In time, everything man had built would fall to the ground. Carter had no reason to believe the walking dead would maintain anything, seeing as they seemed bent on devouring the living. Whatever the future for man was, if there was a future, it would look a lot more like the distant past than the recent past. Carter figured that the people who adapted quickly to the fundamental change of how life would become and learned the skills sets of the outdoors would find themselves in a better situation than those who roamed the countryside in four-by-fours in search of a way to salvage what had been.

Like anything easy or fun, letting go of it would be difficult. People - Americans, he corrected himself (and, then, parenthetically, in his thought process, he guessed the West in general, and any advanced civilization on the planet specifically) would find it difficult to give up on the idea of electricity, automobiles, grocery stores and leisure time. For most of the lifespan of the human race, easy living had been the rarest of rarities, and those who had achieved it guarded it jealously. Most people had to eke out a subsistence and lived grubby, short lives of desperation and want.

Now the human race was back to that paradigm. The walking dead had seen to that. Why was a question no one might ever know the answer to. Not that it mattered. What was done, was done. Only now, humans weren’t the only Alpha Predators on the block, so the road back would be much, much more difficult.

The whine of dirt bikes rose above the sound of the wind and traced its way along the landscape off to their right, a niggling whirr of noise that spent a minute moving east before fading into silence. Carter made no effort to look, although he knew the boy certainly was.

“Don’t worry about it. There’s no shortage of people roaming around. Long as we can hear them, we know where they are.”

He lifted up his cowboy hat and wiped the sweat from his brow, pushed his hair back up and set the hat back down. The boy was probably right, though. It probably was the same pack of bikers, stalking them, now choosing to be brazen rather than stealthy. Whatever the boy had in his pack, they wanted it. They had killed his parents in an attempt to get it, and he had shown up however-many seconds too late to help them, arriving just in time to kill the two leather-coat-and-football-pad-encrusted thugs and save the boy.

He had asked the boy his name, but the kid - he guessed him to be about twelve - hadn’t answered. Carter had shrugged and not told the kid his name, and the two had formed a unit that had made its way across Oklahoma in silence. Carter prodded his horse and it began walking, the kid saying “let’s go” quietly to his horse a second later.

They kept the horses off to the side of route 51. The road was empty with the exception of an empty car or truck every couple of miles. They rode for hours without coming across another person - living or undead. Carter found that odd, and it rolled around in his mind, searching for a reason to stick to. This close to Tulsa, there should’ve been some activity. And then he smiled to himself and shook his head: just a couple of months into the zombie apocalypse, and he assumed he was already an expert at sensing the patterns of the new world. What the hell did he know? The kid probably knew more about zombies than Carter did.

They had seen the smoke pouring into the sky long before they got to the outskirts of the city, and Carter had figured Tulsa had fallen just as fully as every other city they’d been through. He had never really followed the news: pre-zombies he had been a Major League Baseball and college football junkie, so he had listened to sports talk radio and watched ESPN. By the time he realized he should find out what was going on with the world, it was too late.

“Over there,” the boy said.

Carter looked over at the kid and saw he was pointing. Carter followed the trajectory outward and saw a knot of walking dead. They were milling around on the other end of the dam which made Keystone Lake, almost as if they were guarding it, but still too disorganized to be a coherent unit. He watched the undead stumble around and thought about the options. It would be easy to go a different way, and the time lost wouldn’t matter, as he wasn’t in any hurry.

But, still, the undead had managed a choke point? How would they have known to form as a group here, where there were no other living? The zombies were constantly moving, in search of new food or new converts. He had no idea what the undead really wanted, what they were up to, only that they seemed always hungry for human flesh. Not that he’d had the chance to study any of them up close, but he had yet to come across one of the undead that was not hungry or intent on killing the him. Carter was pretty sure a sated lion wouldn’t attack something else and kill it just to kill it, although he nodded to himself that he didn’t know that for sure, either.

“Let’s not risk it,” he said to the boy, motioning with his head to the east. “We’ll head that way and find another spot to cross.”

At the intersection of routes 51 and 97, there was a massive traffic jam. Hundreds of cars were wedged against each other, many crashed into each other. Four-wheel drive vehicles were bogged down in the nearly dry river bed, the water dammed up miles behind them to create the lake they had just left. The cars had done the same thing to those in the city, forcing people onto their feet for the flight from the city. Most hadn’t made it: bodies were strewn everywhere, torn apart and stripped to the bones of flesh.

“Keep your eyes moving, you know how the undead like to hide among the dead,” he said.

“We gonna look for any supplies?”

Carter shook his head. “No. Going in there would be foolish. If there’s any undead, you’d never be able to get out. We’ll make our way across the river bed here, then skirt alongside the west side and make our way around the north end of the city.