Cities of the Dead: Stories From The Zombie Apocalypse (30 page)

Hristo shook his head and took several deep breaths. He was lightheaded. The inside of his sinuses tickled intensely, and the back of his throat quickly followed suit. He stood in the back yard and rubbed his tongue against the back of his mouth, trying to scratch the itch to no avail. His eyes watered. Hayfever? He’d never experienced it. He sneezed several more times in rapid succession, deep, full-body explosions that weakened him and made his eyesight wonky.

After a minute he stopped sneezing, but the itching in his nose and throat persisted. He picked up the meteorite and put it on a table on the back patio, thought better of it, and put it back where he had originally found it, in the splintered shed.

Inside the house, he searched through the medicine chest in the bathroom looking for antihistamine tablets. None of them were allergic to anything, so he knew it was a long-shot to find anything.

“Honey, do we have any allergy medicines in the house?”

Elena appeared in the doorframe. “What for?”

Hristo turned to look at her, “I’ve got some sort of thing going on in my head. Sneezing, itchy throat, watery eyes. I think it’s hayfever.”

“It’s December, people get hay fever in the spring and summer,” Elena said, closing the  distance between them and looking at his blue eyes. “Your eyes are completely bloodshot.”

“They feel weird. Kind of watery with a little itchy, too.”

“I’ve got drops,” Elena said. “Did you get dust or something blown in your face.”

Hristo nodded lamely. “I guess. I was in the backyard near the shed.”

He spent the next two hours on the couch in the living room with his boys, watching them argue-cooperate their way through a video game, sometimes having to mediate their disagreements, and sometimes having to tell them how to solve the level. He couldn’t remember if he and his brother had been like that as kids, switching from best friends to bitter enemies over and over again during the course of a day. Gavril’s three kids were the same way. Hristo’s father said that’s exactly how Hristo and Gavril had been as kids. Hristo just assumed that was how kids were, and it was the most unsatsifying aspect of being a parent: you couldn’t train your children to always be on the same side.

How true was that? Gavril had moved to America over the objections of their father after writing some software that had gained notice, and he had done well, married an American girl, and had - as he called them - American kids. The last twelve Christmases had been spent without Gavril; this one would be spent without their dad: their dad didn’t want to go to Los Angeles for Christmas, he wanted Gavril and his family to come back home so Gavril’s kids could see their heritage, their homeland. So while everyone was planning on twelve days in sunny southern California, their father was going to stay home and endure the cold. Not even Disneyland swayed him.

Hristo woke up just before noon the next day, thirteen hours of sleep under his belt, and still he felt dead tired. But his body couldn’t take laying down any longer, so he had risen from the bed, showered and made his way to the kitchen. His head hurt, but not like a headache, and he felt a vague sense of nausea, but not enough to curb his desire to eat something.

“You look pale, honey, do you feel okay?” Elena said as he entered the kitchen.

He shook his head. “I feel weird.”

“Maybe you should lay down and take it easy.”

He shrugged. “I’ve been laying down since we went to bed. I’m tired of that. I feel like doing something.”

“Maybe you could fix the shed,” Elena said and smiled.

“That can wait. I need some bacon or sausage or something meaty. I’m starving.”

The week had not gone well for Hristo. He had fluctuated between feeling better than he’d ever felt, to suddenly ill. At night, he dreamed of hunting deer and eating their raw meat. He found himself in the backyard one night, clad only in his pajamas, stumbling around as if he were drunk. He had no idea how he had gotten there or how much longer he would have lived exposed to the frigid night. He hadn’t felt cold, though.

The day before their departure day had been awkward: he’d spent the entire day eating meat and then barfed it all out before bedtime. Afterward, he sat on the floor of the bathroom and felt dizzy, the world spinning around him as if he were epically drunk. He felt bone tired, as if he could sleep for days.

“You should see the doctor,” Elena said.

“I’m fine. It’s a stomach thing.”

“Hristo, you’ve been having symptoms of something all week.”

“They come and go, though, so it’s not a something they can do anything about,” Hristo said, wiping sweat from his forehead onto the palm of his hand.

“I was looking online, maybe you were poisoned?”

Hristo smiled. “Poisoned? Who would poison me? You make all the food I eat, so if you were poisoning me, I don’t think you’d tell me to go to the doctor to find out if someone was poisoning me.”

When they boarded the plane for America on Wednesday, Hristo felt fine. He’d awoken from a series of nightmares and eaten nearly a pound of breakfast sausages and several fried eggs, and felt better. But after the plane had been in the air, he’d started to feel wrong. There had been a layover in Rome and he’d barfed the entire breakfast up in a stall in the terminal bathroom, and had been startled to see blood in his vomit. What was wrong with him?

During the trip over the Atlantic, he’d slept fitfully, sweating profusely and dreaming of hunting creatures he’d never seen before. He could almost taste the brains of the creatures he hunted.

Brains? He’d never eaten a brain of anything in his entire life.

“Hristo, wake up, we’re in America,” Elena said, jostling him awake.

“What?”

“We’re in America. We’ve got to change planes. Wake up.”

“I need water.”

“After we get off the plane. Come on.”

He took her hand and the look on her face morphed into sudden concern. She put her hand on his forehead. “You’re burning up.”

She bought a bottle of aspirin in a convenience store in the airport and made him take two with some water, telling him it would help to break the fever. He could feel the water and pills as they entered his stomach, a weird rush of cold that turned his stomach and made him feel every square-centimeter of its interior surface, a sensation he’d never had before. His first thought was that he wasn’t going to be able to keep the water and pills down because nausea quickly settled in, twisting his stomach. He could feel sweat bead up on his face on his upper lip and chin, could feel droplets of it in his hair as they moved down under the force of gravity.

He looked over at his sons in the waiting area of the gate, each playing on PlayStation Vita handheld gaming consoles, the centerpiece present for each the previous Christmas. This past year had been the most successful of his career as a software engineer, and he’d been glad that he’d taken the chance and jumped to the start-up firm in Sofia rather than remaining with the information technology division of the hospital. The next year would be even better and the future looked bright. This trip to California to visit his brother was sort of an advance on his future earnings and a carrot on a stick to lure him to America where he might find a better software company, yet.

For the first time in his life, he felt that he was finally in control of his destiny.

He didn’t realize he had fallen asleep on a chair in the waiting area until Elena woke him. “It’s  time to get back on the plane, honey.”

Hristo nodded. He felt awful. Elena touched his forehead.

“Your fever’s come down. You actually feel colder than you should.”

“I feel worse than I should. We’re on vacation and I’m coming down with a bug. I have a feeling I’m going to find out how good this world renowned American medical system is,” he said and smiled.

Shortly after the non-stop flight to Los Angeles had taken to the air, things changed dramatically for Hristo. He dozed fitfully, his body a furnace again, the sweat streaming off of him. He kept losing his color vision. He thought he could see sounds. And he was sure his bones were vibrating inside his body. He looked around the plane and everyone looked the same to him for long periods: he could see differences in size and sex, but they all appeared in his mind as generic mannequins. Something made him wonder about how he would identify the weak in the herd.

“Are you alright?” Elena asked, leaning in close to him and grasping his forearm with both her hands, her face a mixture of concern and panic.

He shook his head, slowly. “I have to go to the restroom.”

He stood up and paused, the interior of the plane losing its tubular shape, dizziness set in quickly and he swooned before suddenly vomiting a stream of blood and mucus over the passengers near him. He turned to make his way out of his seat, stumbled, reeled, took a step, grabbed the upright seat back and felt the fabric beneath his fingertips. He heard screams. He saw no colors. He gulped air.

“Hristo!”

A female voice.

The world tilted and spun around him and he felt hands on his body, pulling him back. Inside his body, he could feel every cell twitching, changing from ones to zeros. His teeth hurt. He couldn’t keep his head up, sleep bore down on him and crushed him into an atom and exploded. For a moment, he saw Elena coming after him down a path through a sea of chairs, her face pale with emotion. He smiled at her before shuddering violently and going slack in the arms of those who had grabbed him.

Then he heard the strangest thing he’d ever heard.

“He’s dead. Note the time of death on his chart and notify his next of kin.”

And then he fell asleep.

The Final Solution

Orth an der Donau, Austria - Day 1403

One day, I hope to sit street-side in a cafe in Vienna and watch the crowds move by, drinking wine with friends or having Sunday morning coffee with my husband. If I ever have friends again. Or get married. Two big ifs. But at least they are “ifs” again. For years, they were just “what ifs” that we used to chat about in the off-hours from the laboratories. What if we found a cure? What would the world turn back into? Would the previously infected remember their lives as zombies?

But we hadn’t found a cure. What was done to them could not be undone. They were no longer human. A DNA-altering retrovirus of unknown origin had genetically changed them, and over the years had continued to modify them into what they now were: a new species of biped. It had taken millions of years and a dozen or more mutations to form homo sapiens, it had taken only a few months to transform most of us into some base unit of them, and then a few more years for the new traits to appear. And nobody thought we had yet seen the endpoint of the species.

“What we’ve developed is not a cure,” Gunter said at the staff meeting. “It’s not going to undo the genetic modifications that have occurred in the infected individuals. What it will do is kill them. And, in the process, convey an immunity to infection to any surviving people so that we don’t have to worry about a re-infection in the future.

“We’ve managed to aerosolize it as a delivery system and we know from extensive testing that the undead will transmit it to each other by being in close proximity. It works like a virus, so once we get it into a population, it will spread of its own accord, so we don’t have worry about dosing individuals.

“On the plus side, everyone in this facility is now carrying the anti-virus in them, so none of us can be turned should we get bitten. They can still eat us, however,” Gunter said with a quick smile. “On the downside, we have no means of delivering the virus to the infected population, although what’s left of the army command claims to be able to modify artillery shells for that purpose. But we have to get it to them.”

The room stirred with the first half of that realization.

“You infected us without telling us?” Adolf asked.

“Not intentionally. The seals on the exam rooms haven’t been maintained in years. We just assumed they worked. They didn’t, and we kept it quiet to see what happened to avoid a panic.”

“Just like the Americans did when this broke out,” Adolf said, shaking his head.

Gunter ignored him. “The only problem is that we have no means of delivering  it anywhere but here in Austria, which means it will take months, maybe years to travel the globe and spread throughout the infected population. We’ll have zombies somewhere on the globe for as long as their lifespans are.

“And if they mutate into the ability to sexually reproduce, we may have to deal with them for a decade or more. Maybe forever. But one thing is for sure, this anti-virus will kill them.”

“At least in their present state. Who knows what another mutation might bring?” Adolf said.

Adolf had wanted to cure the infected. Instead, his discovery of the virus’ effect on the human genome had led to another lab working on a shut-off switch, an anti-virus that could be inserted into the undead which would kill them. Or, as I liked to think of it, resurrect them back to death. It had taken Adolf a while to accept that his discovery could save humanity. Millions, probably billions, of beings that had once been humans would be consigned to death because of his work.