Medora: A Zombie Novel (21 page)

“That’s my gun.”

Harold looked at the gun and scoffed, “What? What’re you talking about?”

“You stole it from my wife.”

“Hey, hey, look I had to do that. She was bit; she’s infected. There’s nothing you can do for her now. I had to do what I had to do.”

“I want my gun back.”

Harold moved the gun down by his side. “Uh, no sir. This is my gun now.”

Keith continued looking at him, not
sure, if he was trying to intimidate the janitor or just stalling to figure out what to do next. He was angry with himself for letting a slow rage build inside his chest. He had already let a man die today in the subway tunnels and now he was forced into another situation where he might have to deliberately take a man’s life. He didn’t know if it was revenge that he was feeling or a survival instinct growing in him to get his gun back. His mind was running with the violent thoughts of the day; the woman he had just decapitated with a baseball bat or the hordes of bodies falling off a skyscraper. All the carnage was mixing and he was afraid for himself because if he were to kill the janitor this minute, it would make no difference to him. The outbreak had made him complacent about who lived or who died. He wasn’t even sure if he cared about living at that moment.

He felt someone brush his back. Turning around, he saw his wife looking up into his eyes. She stared at him, her eyes vibrant and calming. He wondered how she could be so shocking and beautiful after being
beaten and burned half to death.

“Keith, just let it go. He’s just scared like all of us. I’m so happy to see you, I love you so much.”

“I love you, too.” He leaned down and kissed her.

“Hey, hey, is that the same woman?” H
arold got to his feet with his gun still at his side and look at Ellen. “I told you she got bit, so she can turn into one of those infected any minute. What’re you doing?”

Ellen looked at him, “What difference does it make now? We’ve got a hundred of them coming up through those stairs right now and a thousand more surrounding the school.”

The three of them looked back at the door entrance of the roof where the rest of the teachers were huddled around, trying to stop the crowd of the sick from breaching the roof.

H
arold walked up to the teachers and yelled, “Oh, shit. What did you people do? How did they all get into the school? You fucked us! We’re dead! We’re completely surrounded.” He stumbled around the gravel of the roof, repeatedly shrugging his shoulders for dramatic effect. “This school was the only thing we had and you assholes just let them waltz right in here.”

“Hey, why don’t you come over and help us hold the
door, you son of a bitch,” a teacher yelled back.

Ellen spoke softly to Ke
ith, “I know where Jayne is. Miss Stutsen wrote on her chalkboard that she took her and some other kids to her house a few hours ago. It’s just a few blocks away. If we can just…” She looked past Keith to the neighborhoods that seemed to be a hair’s length away to her. “She’s just right out there. I know the exact street.”

They stood lookin
g out over the horde of the infected that milled around the school, waddling around like animals, constantly bumping off each other. They were marooned on the island of the once living. The sounds of helicopters thumped in the distance.

“Is there any way we can get flares
to maybe get one of the helicopters to see us?” Ellen asked while looking upward towards the sky.

“No, we didn’t find anything like that in any of the storage. Maybe one will come by and see us
…” Keith was cut off by a tremendous burst of air and sound that overtook them, pushing them both to the ground and dampening all other sounds. He opened his eyes and quickly felt his arms and legs, wondering if he was still intact. He looked over at Ellen who was covering her head with her arms. “What was that?” He yelled.

He got to his feet and saw a large cloud of fire and smoke that was billowing up into the sky a few blocks away from the school. Ellen stood up and saw the brilliant orange cloud as it grew into the dark sky. Overhead, two firefighter jets streamed, roared loudly and flew out of sight.

“I was afraid this might happen.” Keith put his arm around Ellen. “They’re bombing us.”

They only had to follow the continuing trail of metal, rounded pieces of fuselage and luggage. All of the debris scattered led the Humvee west as they passed sign after sign indicating their approach to Strykersville, a painfully small town in northern state. Dave expected massive traffic jams as all of New York City tried to make an exodus from the infection but the roads were virtually empty. Too many people died too quickly, he thought, not enough time to pack your family and get the hell out of town. He wondered how many people had died today, probably more at one time than any single battle of any war he could think of. Are millions dead? He was trying to guess how many people were in the Manhattan area at any given time and then stopped.

He looked over at Layton, his short, bright red-hair peeking underneath his helmet as he peered out the window with the muzzle of his gun sticking out. Anderson was at the wheel with Ortega riding next to him who was constantly in communication with some clandestine authority whispering commands and giving updates through his earpiece. Ortega had hardly spoken a word to the crew of Medora One since they crossed the bridge with the scorched plane tail beneath
. He was in a constant chatter with upper command.

Dave had managed to muster some sort of respect from the crew who now allowed him to sit in the very back of the Humvee, rather than the roof, sitting
along side the massive tank of fuel for the flamethrower. He had considered many times just being dropped off on the side of the road but in light of everything that had happened to him today, including hanging off the side of a skyscraper as the living dead tried to eat him alive, he figured that being part of a classified specialized military unit may as well also happen today too. Besides, he thought, he didn’t really have anything to go back to besides his sad one bedroom apartment and his fifty-five inch TV. It wasn’t suicidal staying with the team, he reasoned, more like complacency over his own stupid life.

The Humvee passed the last sign to
Strykersville, showing 1.5 miles to the exit also indicating a gas station at the off-ramp. Pulling off the exit, they took a right and saw the gas station around the corner, which had recently suffered some sort of explosion. The roof above the pumps had been blown up and outward, with its support poles leaning over with the entire roof rolled back from the impact of the explosion. There was an overturned blackened SUV sitting on its side next to where the gas pumps once were. A gas pump lay in the middle of the road as the Humvee drove up and stopped.

“Alright,” Ortega spoke to the
unit, “I’m going to take this gas station as a sign. We’re going to assume that this entire town has been compromised by the infection presumably from the airplane crash which satellite confirms is just about one mile north of our current position. Shoot to kill any person that is infected but do not pull the trigger until you confirm that the person is indeed infected. Basically, if they’re talking to you, they’re not infected. Anyone bitten who is not yet showing symptoms will be detained. Understand?”

“Yes,
sir,” the group responded in unison.

“I want Layton and Clarence to go clear that gas station.” The Humvee stopped and the two jumped out with gas masks in place and rifles drawn out. They ran into the gas station while sweeping the area with their rifles back and forth.
Moments later, a few pumps of gunfire were heard and the two emerged, running back towards the Humvee.

Clarence got in the back seat
. “All clear, there were three in there, all compromised.”

“Let’s go
,” barked Ortega.

The Humvee lurched forward and then sped off down a gully and back up a long hill. The road led through a pleasant wooded area without any signs of people or buildings. Dave looked over at Layton again
. He had his rifle propped up on the window seal of the door.

“Hey…” He timidly touched his jacket.

Layton looked over at him through his goggles. “Yeah?”

“Why are you guys called Medora One?”

“You ever heard of it?”

“Of what?
Medora?”

“Yeah.
It’s a small town in North Dakota.”

“No, never heard of it.”

“Well, you definitely won’t hear about it any more. That place is burned off the map. There’s nothing there anymore. We made sure of that.”

“What happened?”

“I definitely shouldn’t tell you any of this but the Captain doesn’t seem to give a shit about you having a gun and riding along with us so I’m not going to care either.” Layton took off his goggles and rubbed the sides of his nose. “Two weeks ago, this same shit happened there. People infected with this same exact thing. Mothers started eating their kids right there in the middle of damn dinner. Everything went crazy in a matter of hours. Our team didn’t show up until late in the night after the outbreak and there was pretty much nothing anyone could do. We got special authority from the government to contain the infection by any means necessary and we had to pretty much mow down the entire town.”

“Wow, how did it happen? Where did the outbreak happen?”

“The shit if I know. They don’t tell us anything about that. Captain Ortega knows everything though. He was in every inch of that town. We all spent most of our time sweeping out a hospital.”

“How did all of this stay out of the news?”

“Ha! You’d be surprised, my friend, what our government can keep a secret. You think they can’t wipe an entire town off the map and have no one question it? They sure as hell can and did. I’ve been in Afghanistan and Iraq but I never had to shoot down a bunch of crazy civilians who are all eating each other. Now this shit doesn’t even faze me. I’ll put a bullet in any one of these infected bastards in an instant. Makes no difference to me. They aren’t human once they’re bitten and turned into the dead.”

“They are dead, right?”

“Man! The hell if I know, I’m not a freaking philosopher.” Layton took off his helmet momentarily to scratch his hair. “Anyway, they eventually bombed that town; an air raid right on American soil. This thing, this virus or whatever scared the hell out of the government and it’s scaring them now. I don’t think any of them know what in the hell they are doing. New York City is… it’s gone. It’s just gone.”

“It’s hard to understand right now.
Can’t even wrap my mind around it.”

“By the way, how did you make it out of there alive anyway? Everyone in that street was dead. Where did you even come from?”

“One of the buildings right where you found me. I worked there at a marketing firm. I managed to barricade myself in a room and found my way down.”

“
Oh, yeah, I guess after that avalanche of bodies came down in the street, probably cleared some room up in that building for you to make your way down.”

“Yeah.”

The Humvee came around a final thicket of trees and opened up to a long road that led to a small main street of the town. A pillar of black smoke was trailing from the center of town into the sky, right in front of a hazy sunset. As they approached town, they could finally see the wreckage. The airplane had bulldozed entire buildings as it came down, creating a gigantic wedge of destruction right through the middle of the small collection of houses, shops and gas stations. Scattered chunks of brick and piping lay about the street where small buildings had exploded with the fantastic force from the impact. They drove past a huge crater in the ground where another building had been destroyed, probably the spot where the plane made contact with the ground. The plane lay sideways across the main street and towered over the small one-story buildings of the small town. There were no people around, no police cars, no fire trucks and no traffic.

Anderson
wound around debris in the road until they saw an entire detached wing of the airplane leaning on a building. The turbine engine had settled on top of a car, crushing in the roof. In front of them, the plane had come to rest with the nose buried in the building and most of the body lying across the street. The once shiny metallic white of the fuselage was now charred with a gaping scar running the length of the plane, exposing the main cabin floor sunken downwards into the electrical compartments below. They could see many bodies sitting silently in their seats, still waiting for the plane to touch down on a tarmac somewhere, uneventfully.

Dave let out a long and nervous breath, “
Wow, they’re just sitting in those seats there like nothing happened to them.”

The men stepped out of the Humvee, their boots crunching on glass and gravel.

Ortega spoke softly to the group huddled next the Humvee, “I want Clarence, Layton, and Clinton to set up a perimeter around the plane. Anderson, Jeremy and I are going into the plane to retrieve the passenger manifest. I’m not sure how much time we will have on the plane. It might be full of infected civilians. Whatever happens, we must retrieve the flight manifest from the cockpit. Everything else is only secondary to the flight manifest, got it?”

“Yes, sir!”
The unit responded.

“Good.” He pulled out a magazine clip from a backpack and slipped it into a front pocket in his jacket. “
Boomtown, I want you to stay at the Humvee, standing outside with your gun drawn. I want you to defend the Humvee and alert the perimeter team by walkie-talkie if you see any infected approaching. Do not be afraid to shoot.” He looked around the area. It had a quiet calm considering that a commercial airliner had just crash-landed in the middle of town. “There’s not a lot of movement around right now, but we all know just how quickly that can change with the infected.”

The two groups split up with three spreading out around the crash site and Ortega leading the rest towards the plane. Dave stayed at the Humvee putting his back against the door with his handgun drawn. The sun was beginning to sink in the sky and the summer day began to cool off. Dave wondered why there wasn’t anybody on the street. It was
as if the whole town froze in place once the plane came down.

Ortega approached the plane first and put his foot up into the long scar in the main cabin. He put the end of his boot on a woman’s naked foot that was still buckled into her seat and tapped it up and down. He waited for a response and got nothing. Walking over to another passenger, he tapped a man’s hand with the muzzle of his gun and waited again, no response.

“Alright, I’m sure as hell not stepping into that plane until I’m sure that none of these people are going to get and up and corner us in the cockpit. Anderson, you know what I’m thinking?”

Anderson shook another
passenger’s leg. “Yes sir, I think we need a bullet for every person as we walk down the aisle.”

“Read my mind.
Okay, I want you to crawl up into that hole… there. You see it?” Ortega pointed with his gun at a small hole that was torn next to the plane’s airlock. “Think you can crawl right up into there?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Alright, you get on up there and open the airlock for us once you’re in. We can cover you from out here if any of them start waking up.”

Anderson stuck his head and neck inside the side of the plane through a large hole, hoisted himself up with his arms and disappeared into the
plane’s main cabin. “Oh man,” he yelled from within, “these people did not do well. I’m seeing a lot of body parts… and… holy shit.”

“What is it? Do you think they’ve been infected?”

“No, no, these people definitely died from high impact trauma. It’s just pretty bad in here.” Anderson made a grunting sound followed by a mechanical sound of metal hitting metal and the airlock suddenly fell from its place in the doorframe and dropped to the asphalt of the street, hitting a parking meter.

“You’re up.” Ortega grabbed Jeremy’s bulky arm and pushed him towards the door where Anderson grabbed his arm and helped him up with Ortega following.

The inside of the plane was dimly lit with orange sunlight streaking through the tiny oval windows of the passenger deck. They looked down the doomed aisle and saw a body sitting in almost every seat. They seemed alive with their heads facing forward, getting ready for takeoff, but the cabin was too quiet and too dark to maintain the illusion that this was a normal flight. The occasional severed arm and leg cluttering the isle also took away from any semblance of a normal flight.

The three men were crammed into the flight attendant area, their gear bouncing off one another. “Alright, alright,” Ortega paused as he looked down the other end of the plane
. It was mangled with wires and charred walls where the tail had been blown off. A few spots of sunlight shot through the blackened mess of hanging cords and melted plastic. “I’ll walk first down the aisle. Anderson follows behind me as we both put one bullet into every head that we see. Jeremy, you cover our six.”

Ortega slowly stepped forward down the
aisle toward the cockpit and stopped at the first row on his right, looked at the faces of the three men sitting there, and putting his handgun to each of their heads, pulled the trigger jolting their lifeless bodies from the impact of the bullet. He turned to the next row over, inspected their faces and did the same. Advancing one row up, he looked at the passenger’s faces and even turned one of their heads toward him when he couldn’t see it.