Dead Wrangler
Dead Wrangler
by Justin Coke
Copyright 2015 by Grand Mal Press. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written consent except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address www.grandmalpress.com
Published by: Grand Mal Press, Forestdale, MA
Dead Wrangler, Copyright 2015
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Grand Mal Press
p. cm
Cover art by Stephen Bryant, www.srbproductions.net
CHAPTER ONE
He clung to the spire of the Chrysler building.
He was wretchedly thin, his ribs jutting out of his shriveled chest. They were coming. He could hear them scratching and screaming and moaning. They were almost through. The barricades worked too well. It was easier just to go through the walls.
He looked down. For miles and miles, dead bodies packed so tightly they could barely lift their arms. From this height their moans almost sounded like the babbling of some peaceful creek.
He was the last man in New York. The rest had given up days ago. There had been nothing to eat except one another for weeks, nothing to drink but piss and rainwater. And one look at the mass below was enough to know, without a sliver of doubt, that they were really and truly doomed.
He knew that now. He accepted it. He was fine with it. He'd had a good twenty five years to live. That wasn't as long as he'd like, but it was longer than many. And until a few months ago it had been a good life. Under the circumstances, he felt that the rule against suicide must be temporarily waived. Fate had certainly fucked him, there was no argument there. But that didn't mean he was willing to accept the form of immortality on offer if he stayed. He deserved that much.
The wall caved in and they came poring through below. He knew who had sent them and he'd left them a surprise. He was going to enter the afterlife right after the few thousand zombies he had just detonated, and right before a few thousand more that were going to get crushed by ten thousand tons of debris. He wondered for a second whether they would be his slaves in the afterlife.
He closed his eyes and kicked out hard. One Mississippi. The wind roared in his ears, so loud he could barely hear the explosion. He felt it deep in his chest. Three Mississippi. The top ten floors of the Chrysler building detonated and sent shards of metal and glass flying. Five Mississippi.
The shards were flying nearly as fast as he was. Seven Mississip.
CHAPTER TWO
The plague began somewhere. It spread so fast that no one knew exactly where. It barreled through big cities. It burned like a slow fire in small towns. It even came to towns with no zombies, but scared people stopped to buy gas or to find a place to sleep for the night. A few days after they left, one or two people didn't show up for work. Maybe one night one of them, with dead eyes and bloodless cheeks, would break into someone's house. Maybe they would kill someone. Maybe they would get shot in the head. It didn't matter. Most of the time anyone who came within ten feet of them–they would change, too. Even if the corpse failed to eat, it still succeeded. The only way to be safe was to be
isolated. Did you know even the most extreme shut-in can't escape contact with other people for long, at least on a microbial level? It's much harder than it sounds.
It wasn't obvious either. No fever, no gangrene. They didn't even feel queasy. They just got a little forgetful, and a little stupid. And then they slept. When they woke up they had been replaced by whatever it was.
The plague was Airborne. And it caught easy. Seemed like about one in three people couldn't catch it from the air. But even they could get it if they got bit. But some people could get bitten. Didn't do anything to them. The confusion was immense, and the TV didn't help. The government was saying it was some new kind of disease. It wasn't bacteria. It wasn't a virus. Too complicated to be a prion and too aggressive to be anything but furiously alive. It changed our brains first. It overrode our souls and turned the brain into a broken thing, like an engine with bad spark plugs. It used our instincts to feed to make the propagation of the disease the brain's only priority. It changed our bodies, too. As it converted us into it, we became difficult to kill. We didn't starve. We didn't drown. Our hearts didn't beat and our intestines didn't absorb nutrients. But somehow it seemed to defy the laws of physics and keep going in perpetual motion. The only thing we did was burn. And we burned like sparklers. That was the only way to truly kill us then. See, if you destroyed the brain you destroyed the zombie’s ability to maul you. Without the brains ability to sense and sort reality, it didn't know how to attack. But it still laid there and propagated copies of itself into the ether. It just couldn't bite you. A lot of people died because they forgot that. I knew a guy who was immune to the Airborne. Then one day he was hauling a zombie that had been dead for a week to the pit and his hand slipped. Scraped his knuckle on the zombies tooth. Two days later I was hauling him to the fire pits.
It was a terrible time. Everyone was so afraid. You could never really be sure that you were immune to the Airborne. And even if you were pretty sure–what about a bite? The only way to figure that one out was to get bitten. If you were wrong, and you most likely were wrong... finding out was even worse than wondering. And you couldn't be with other people. If they turned in the night, and you were in bed next to them?
Let's just say a lot of marriages ended in the late night hours in those days. One way or the other.
I was afraid. I was so afraid that I don't have words for it. It was a dread beyond anything I had ever felt before. It was the dread I got from looking at religious tracts about the Apocalypse, but the Apocalypse was happening right in front of me. I knew my soul wasn't safe. The isolation made the despair worse. You had to stay away from people. You couldn't sleep around them. They couldn't sleep around you. And every morning, every single morning for weeks, instead of seeing your friends when you knocked on their door, you'd hear that frenzied spasm and howl. At least once a day. People shrunk into themselves, already writing off everyone they knew as dead. There were a lot of church services done via Skype in those days.
What was odd to me was how often the door was open and they were gone. It happened a lot more often than you would think, since everyone was so paranoid. You'd think every door would have been barricaded. Maybe they just wanted an escape route. Maybe they knew that the change was coming, and wanted to clear their path. For a long time I thought maybe the zombies were a bit smarter about some things than they appeared. Especially maybe things around their house, where they had a lot of instinct and muscle memory to go off of. That may well be true. I don't know. The problem with zombies is that you can't have a control group, you know? Sometimes you see a zombie doing something that looks like something from their previous life. Or you see something that looks like a strategy. Sometimes you see them doing something so stupid that you can't believe they are anything but gaping maws of mindless need.
One morning while the phones still rang, I got a call from my landlord. It was silent on the other end, but it woke me up. My landlord was a nice guy, short, older, a little pudgy. He was one of those old school gentlemen homosexuals you meet in small towns. It's a bit of an open secret, but also a big secret, if that makes sense. He used to come over in the mornings for coffee. I helped him with projects around his properties so he'd cut me a break on the rent. Anyway, we were friends. The call is just silence. After a bit I hang up and head down for coffee. My landlord is staring at me through the window, dead as nail and clawing at me and trying to hammer out my window with a whiffle ball.
Maybe he just happened to pocket dial me. Maybe he just happened to be outside the window of the kitchen his old self knew I always went to when I woke up. Maybe. I still can't quite believe that, even though I wish I could believe it was a coincidence. But then again, if my landlord was some kind of zombie genius and had laid this ambush for me why would he have picked a whiffle ball as his weapon? For every story where a zombie does something clever, there's another story where they can't get out of their car. As with any other group, I think zombies operate on a bell curve. There's the average zombie, who can figure out how to operate a door handle if you give him a few minutes. There's the dumb ones who end up trapped in a phone booth for years. There's the smart ones. I've watched through binoculars and dirty windows more than one zombie just lie down in the middle of the street and pretend to be dead. Coincidence? Maybe. But people give off a lot of things. We smell of sweat and pheromones and shit. We make noises. Our favorite tools tend to hum or vibrate or emit exhaust. When I see a zombie doing something like that I can't help but think maybe zombies have a human sense. They sense the potential for humans the way an arthritic joint senses a change in air pressure. And some of the smarter ones might just be able to think of the future and come up with a plan to achieve their goal of eating me alive.
The cities, the big cities. They were so much worse. In my little tiny town in the middle of Missouri, a two thirds casualty rate meant I had to deal with two hundred zombies. There was a lot of open space, fresh water, plenty of gardens and farms and game to eat. The New York metropolitan area had twenty million people. That meant thirteen million zombies. That meant seven million people in a concrete jungle fighting off thirteen million zombies. Maybe two million of them were immune to bites, but that didn't make them immune to bleeding to death. Or starving because all the semis that should have been carrying food to you were headed the other way. Or dying of thirst or disease when the water stopped. Even if you found water, there were a few hundred bodies upstream polluting it. And it's not like they had a whole lot of guns either. Being immune to the plague doesn't mean you are immune to cholera. It's one thing to be outnumbered two to one when you have a rifle. It's a whole other thing when all you've got is a kitchen knife or a baseball bat. It's a lot harder to have to fight that way. I thought I was in pretty good shape until I started having to fight zombies hand to hand. There's only so much that you can take. Even elite athletes get tired after ten or fifteen minutes of hand to hand combat. Imagine fighting an opponent who didn't get tired with you. All the zombie has to do is scrape you to win. You have to penetrate the skull. And doing it again and again as your diet went from fresh food to canned ravioli to dead rats. Maybe they started to wonder if it's cannibalism if you are eating a zombie. By the way dear reader... while this is a last resort... I've been told that if you boil it for eight hours it will turns into a sort of purplish-brown paste. As a last resort. If you are totally immune. And you are starving. Like really starving, not I-missed-lunch starving.
The last transmission from New York was the day after Christmas. That's three months after the city was declared dead. They went crazy in there, talking about demons walking the earth and giving orders to their minions. Three months. That's a long time to spend in hell.
The only people I've ever even heard of who survived New York City made it out in the first week. Or maybe got picked up off a roof by a helicopter, but the helicopters didn't last much past the second week. Anybody who waited any longer... well, my God. When I feel bad about my life, I imagine what it must have been like to try to keep your family alive in NYC as things death spiraled. That is enough to get me feeling grateful to the Creator again, no matter how bad things get for me. On the bad nights I wonder if maybe those last messages weren't the ravings of people pushed into insanity by fear and starvation. Maybe they were just warning us.
By comparison my story is almost tame. We were a hundred miles away from anywhere, just a gas station and a few antique shops. Three hundred people. The disease spread slowly. There was talk of a quarantine, but the idea of stopping the wild eyed and well-armed refugees from St. Louis didn't seem like a great idea. Even if you didn't get in a gun fight, you got exposed to the Plague. Instead we turned the gas pumps on and put up a sign. The sign said they could have the gas, but warned they would be shot on sight if they left the station. But the plague was already among us.
My town was an old town. I was thirty, and of my high school classmates I was the only one left in town. If you didn't have a farm to work there wasn't much of a way to make a living. So the native zombies weren't the most formidable. Every morning there would be one or two more lurching around town. It was easy enough to dispatch them. Somehow or another we just knew that we needed to burn the bodies. Within a few weeks the trickle of refugees had turned into a surge, then a trickle again, then a drip. It was a week after the last strangers had come to town that we took stock of the situation.
We had eighty men, women, and children. Half of them were elderly. Now, these were life-long farmers, so they were pretty tough. I don't want to give the idea they were helpless. Most of them were probably more useful than I was. But they had health needs. The nearest pharmacist was thirty miles away and rumor had it he had taken his family and disappeared after he had been bitten. Everyone was convinced the Apocalypse was happening all around them. Some wanted to go, but we didn't know where to go. It was hard to imagine that anywhere else would be safer than where we were. Others were convinced they might as well stay, because the Rapture was sure to happen any time now. Maybe a few zombies were filtering in from neighboring towns, but for the most part we were safe. Or we thought so, anyway. Most wanted to stay, and they had some persuasive arguments. We had food here, and the means to grow more. We had plenty of guns and ammunition. These were our homes, and life on the road to some mythical safe place didn't make a whole lot of sense. So we stayed, but Bob Bass and I were asked to head to the pharmacy with a list of pills a mile long. We were also expected to pick up anything we thought might be useful. Bob Bass used to be a pharmacy tech, and they thought he could get their meds for them.
So we took Bob's truck down to Bowling Green, the town with the nearest pharmacy. The ride there was surreal. There were abandoned cars everywhere, many on fire. Corpses on the side of the road. Some must have been zombies who had turned on the road. Sometimes others had died over some petty squabble about fuel or food. Others still had guns in their mouths. Even though this was a salvage trip, neither one of us seemed too eager to scavenge from this trail of tears.
When we got near Bowling Green, Bob Bass did something smart. He pulled off the side of the road and started climbing a gravel trail up the hill.
"What are you doing? It's going to get dark soon," I asked.
"By your own math there should be six thousand zombies in Bowling Green. I'm not going to just pull up to the CVS parking lot and start waving a white flag."
Six thousand. I had been saying two thirds, but I hadn't r understood what it meant until he said that. Six thousand people. I couldn't even picture it. Until then I hadn't thought it was much more than an errand.
And he was right. The streets were full of them. The zombies had taken the town. We watched them through binoculars, trying to wrap our heads around it.
"If we don't get this stuff, half the town is going to be dead or sick as hell in the next week." Bob said. He was right. He was right. But I just couldn't see a way. One of them would see us, and it would scream. Then we'd have about a minute before they overwhelmed us. We didn't have the ammunition, or the time to set up on them if we had. I said as much. He looked at me and he looked back at the crowd. He sighed. He looked at me. He looked back at the throng of zombies below.
"Well," he said, "Guess we're just going to have to outsmart the fuckers."
We got in the truck and headed back to the road. There was an old Ford Taurus wagon there. The owner was a suicide. The car was fine though, and Bob and I pulled the stinking corpse out of the driver’s seat. I'd read somewhere that they used to just junk cars that had people die in them. No steam cleaner on earth can get the smell out. I think they were right. The driver ran out of gas, that was all. Guess the driver was looking for a reason to quit. We siphoned a few gallons from Rob's truck and she started up just fine.