SHTF (NOLA Zombie Book 0) (5 page)

T
HERE was
no way I was going to sleep. Not with everything that had happened tonight and the fact that I had a movie star sleeping in the bedroom down the hall.

No sleep for me.

I went to the front room and turned on the television and began scrolling through newscast after newscast. Lena was right, the national news channels were spinning stories of small outbreaks in only New York, Atlanta, and Miami. There was nothing about New Orleans and they were all saying that the infections were quarantined at the hospitals. It was contained and the patients were in recovery.
Bullshit
.

There was nothing on the national news about a Los Angeles, or Las Vegas outbreak. Nothing about crazy roommates in New Orleans that were trying to eat people. Nothing about the infection causing victims to attack anything that moved. They spun it like it was an unknown transmission and the infected were quietly riding out the virus in a hospital bed.

The local news was no better, just more of the same, just like that radio broadcast from earlier. They were reporting on a possible infection in the area, and that the emergency broadcasts went a bit overboard. The mayor was quoted as saying, "we just wanted to be cautious" and that there would be a press conference tomorrow morning. There was nothing to worry about.
More bullshit.

Obviously, mainstream media wasn't going to cut it. I wasn't a tech guru like Flip, but I could make my way around a website. I started trolling the conservative, right-wing sites first. They were always happy to post a conspiracy theory and while I never agreed with their conclusion, their sources and facts usually had some truth to them, if you could wade through the crazy. I had a knack for spotting the truth.

There was nothing on the conservative blogs. Posts were dated from three days ago, which struck me as odd–and like Martinez had mentioned earlier, the big ones that had reputable names were giving up 503 errors, meaning their servers were down.

I got on Twitter and sought out a few of the hacktivists accounts that weren't any better than the right-wingers, as far as conclusions, and their sources were sometimes skewed...but they had good information on occasion. The major account hadn't tweeted in twenty-four hours.
Something very wrong there
. Their last tweet teased "infected footage" to come.

I started searching Twitter for "infected" and "virus" and that got much better results. A lot of the Twitter accounts looked brand new, all sporting the Twitter egg, usually untrustworthy, but if what I suspected was true–Twitter accounts were being shut down faster than they could be created, which was why the new “egg head” accounts.

The buzz topic, that all these accounts seemed to have in common, was a frightening and unbelievable theory. Each one seemed to be circling back to one word, one answer for the victim's behavior–zombie. Most tweets were claiming it was the zombie apocalypse. Four hours ago I would have been scoffing and calling these people nut jobs. But now I wasn't so sure.

I clicked a few links and managed to get working sites. Reports from hospital officials flashed across my screen. No cure was posted over and over again. Reports that it was spreading faster than it could be contained and that the government was being overrun and couldn't handle the outbreak. This was in direct opposition to the more mainstream blogs that kept reiterating that the outbreak was under control and it was just a nasty bug that was going around.

I was leaning a lot more to the crazy zombie posts, because if a hospital just had five cases like the girls from tonight, it would be mass chaos. If those five cases bit just one of the emergency responders that would spawn five more and then those would attack more. It would be a pyramid effect of rapid infection. A nurse with just a tiny bite would go home and infect her family, those people would take down their neighbors...it was an endless cycle that had nasty consequences.

It was the SHTF scenario that me and my fellow Marines had always planned for. The worst possible scenario that we trained for, but never really expected to experience. Shit Hit The Fan, otherwise known as the breakdown of the chain of command, or when a disaster of epic proportions hits. A zombie apocalypse was definitely the shit hitting the fan.

I didn't want to overreact though. I could just be blowing it out of proportion in my head. The shit I witnessed today was all sorts of screwed...it was definitely throwing a black shroud on this whole situation for me. It had PTSD written all over it. It couldn't be as bad as what these posts were saying. If this was the case, we were doomed. I dug deeper, looking for footage, any kind of video of the infected, to see if Red Dress had been a typical case.

When I clicked on the videos I was met with black boxes and warnings that the videos were removed because of content issues. YouTube was pulling the footage. I finally found one that would play and it showed a patient in a hospital bed. The skin of the man was gray like Red Dress and her roommate. I focused on the eyes, red rimmed and the same vacant look. There was no one home. Blood seeped out from its mouth and ears and it thrashed at the bindings that held him. It was a horrible sight…and I grimaced as I watched it yank apart the weak bindings that held it to the bed and fall upon the nurse.

A spinning box appeared as if I lost internet connection and I hit pause and then tried to hit play again. The box went black, content removed. The government was censoring the videos of the infected, it was the only explanation that made sense. I hated being paranoid, but I knew how they operated; I had been on a few black missions myself and trained on bases that didn’t exist.

There was some serious shit going down and from what I could tell most people had no clue, they were just going about their lives. The television flashed to some party-goers celebrating the latest blockbuster release that had filmed in New Orleans, the ladies in their pretty dresses, the men in their tuxedos. What I saw today, was that real? Or was what I was seeing on the television real?

Had the world gone mad? Or just my little corner of it?

I
must have fallen
asleep because the ringing of my phone had me shooting off the sofa and fumbling for it on the coffee table. The television was muted and was now showing some infomercial for a vacuum cleaner that washed and waxed the floor at the same time.

The clock on the television said seven in the morning. Too early for anyone to call me unless it was an emergency. I glanced at the read-out and clicked accept when I saw it was Barbara.

"Did she sleep at your house last night?" she said before I could even say a word. No hello, how are you, she went straight to the point.

“Alicia? Did she sleep
here
?" I asked even though I knew what she was talking about.
Who else could it be?

"Yes!" she said frustrated. "Who else? She didn't come home last night," Barbara sighed and I could hear the strain in her voice.

"No, she didn't come here. She called me, but I told her she had to stay with you guys." I ran my hand over my face to try and rub away the cloudy feeling in my head. I puttered to the kitchen and began to make coffee. I would need caffeine to make it through this drama. I didn't need Alicia's shit on a day like today.

I heard the door of the second bedroom open and then the sound of bare feet on my hardwood floor. Lena poked her head around the corner of the kitchen, drawn by my voice. Her hair was mussed and all she wore was an oversized tee that I suspected was one of mine. It was ridiculously sexy. I never brought women to my house and I certainly didn't let them wear my clothes. I don't know why this was attractive to me, but it was.

Focus, idiot.

I pushed back the attraction and tried to pay more attention to some of her unattractive qualities to get me thinking about other things...okay, there weren't any.
Shit
.

I pointed down the hall and mouthed "bathroom" and she nodded gratefully, puttering back down the hallway. Barbara was still bitching about Alicia when I tuned back into the conversation.

"This is wonderful," she said sarcastically. "I just don't get this girl. We don't put a lot of rules on her, but still she has to push the envelope. She left a note that she was staying at your house, which I didn't believe for one-second since I knew you were on a job. Now I don't know where the hell she is," Barbara sighed.

"She mentioned some guy, Mark or Marcus, I think." I was going to kill her if she spent the night with a boy.

"Dammit, I don't need this shit now, Romeo."

"I'm right there with ya, sis, have you seen the news? Last night I saw one of these infected up close and personal and it was all kinds of fucked."

"Language," she corrected, but only half-heartedly.

"Whatever, this is some bad sh–stuff. I think it might be a good idea to get out of the city for a bit."

"We can't leave, Hank and I have work. You could go with Alicia, she's out of school now."

"No, you guys have vacation days, you can come, and you don't want to play with this stuff. At least for a few days, if it gets worse they won't expect you to come in any way. It's Saturday, if it's blown over by Monday we'll come back."

"I think you're being paranoid, Romeo," Barbara scoffed. I heard Hank in the background and she covered the phone and said something to him that I couldn't make out.

"Put Hank on the phone," I said loudly so she could hear me over her muffled conversation.

"Tim, I have a ton of work on Monday, I can't just blow town because of a virus," he sighed when I told him the same thing I was telling Barbara.

"This isn't a virus, Hank. This is an outbreak and it's in New Orleans. Things are going to get ugly, real quick. We don't have to go far, just to the facility my company has by Lake Catherine. If you sleep there Sunday night, you can still make it to work in the morning. Trust me on this, when have I ever jumped the gun?"

"We've been watching the news, it's only a few people at the hospital,” Hank argued.

"They have a media blackout in place like they did for the weaponized anthrax attack, every time a new report comes out on the web they shut it down. I've been through this before, Hank. If you've never listened to me before, now is the time. We need to get the hell out of the city."

"I believe you," Hank said, resigned.

"You can't trust the news now, you understand that, right?"

"Yeah, we gotta find Alicia, as soon as possible," he said.

"That's the plan. You know this Marcus kid?"

"He's the Trevalia's kid, the middle one," Hank said, relaying it from Barbara.

"You know where he lives, I'll just go get her from there, embarrass her, but at this point I don't give a rat's ass."

"Thanks, Tim. If we show up she'll freak out, she thinks we're the enemy now. That we're just out to ruin her life or something. She never used to be this way, she used to love Barbara, now it's a constant war."

"I know," I sighed. "I'll talk to her. Text me the address."