The Great Wreck (2 page)

More people
poured out into the corridors as the screams of the living and dead mixed
drawing more living to the scene. It was a bloodbath. Whatever had infected me
had spread to the socialite bitch and then to the unfortunate man who had only
wanted to help, then to the two crewmen who were with him, then to the teenage
girl who stepped out into the hall to see what was going on, then to her
parents, and so on unto the Queen of the Caribbean was a plague ship carrying
the first load of newly dead and living dead to the Brazilian coast.

The dead
ignored me so I sealed myself up in a cabin and attempted to drink myself to
death. I failed at that which surprised me so much that when the ship ran
aground and the local police came to investigate and thereby get themselves and
the local population infected, I gathered up what food and water I could carry
and decided to try to get back home.

On the way I
raced with the ever growing numbers of walking dead to see who could spread the
infection we were carrying faster. I lost all moral bearing and bit, fucked,
drank, and snorted my way north. The chaos spread, law broke down, and I became
an animal.

Survivors
would invite me in. I’d kill the men, fuck the women, then kill the women. I
never fucked so much as I did these last few months. It was glorious. I was a
monster that stalked the streets as the dead raced around me in a frenzy to
catch the living. I was just like the infected, the dead, except better
camouflaged. I made it all the way back to Los Angeles, to Ground Zero, all the
way back to the research center that had injected me with this thing.

Only now,
here at the end of this rope I have strung around my neck, I realize that the
fuckers had injected me with something that got out of hand. And by “got out of
hand” I mean destroyed the fucking world. I don’t know what they were trying to
do. I don’t know if they meant to unleash what they did. So I am making this
confession. I am writing it down and putting it in a plastic baggie with these
blood samples. I have pulled as much blood as I can and sealed it in these
tubes. I’ll put it in the freezer but the power will go out soon enough. I hope
whoever finds it can figure out what was in it, maybe find a cure. I’ll be dead
by then but unlikely to be completely dead though. When the roped snaps my
neck, I will die. Then I’ll come back and dangle there at the end of my rope
where the birds can peck me to pieces is left for years and years.

That is a
fit punishment for all the pain and agony I have caused.

Out
of the Desert

Patient Zero One Epsilon, Unscheduled Release

(New Mexico Proving Ground)

           
What was left of Carl Dennis Spencer
stood at the bitter edge of the Black Rock Research Center. The laboratory
worked with diseases of the southwest: hanta virus, bubonic plague, rabies, and
such. It worked to cure these regional specific diseases with no other purpose
than to relive human suffering. No military application, no secret plan to
destroy the human race, just pure medical research to find cures.

           
But at 4:00 o’clock there was not a
single soul alive in the research facility. Of the two hundreds researchers,
secretaries, interns, and staff that had reported to work at eight o’clock,
every single one of them was dead. Only they weren’t dead exactly as attested
to by the remains of the aforementioned Mr. Spencer.

           
Mr. Spencer worked with a very
virulent species of neurotropic viral rabies from the Lyssavirus genus of the
Rhabdoviridae family. A mouthful, I know, but stay with me. Mr. Spencer also
had a very young wife who was sleeping with a great many men when Mr. Spencer
was at work. Today, before he had left on the long drive out to the isolated
facility, he had found a stash of tapes that carefully documented each of his
wife’s affairs in graphic detail.

She
seems to be enjoying herself, he thought as he wife cried out under her lover
in ways she never did for him. Carl felt his life and his sanity slip away. He
carefully replaced the tapes in their secret spot in the back of the closet,
finished getting ready for work, and made the ninety minute drive out to the
research facility where he promptly entered his laboratory and injected himself
with a very nasty concoction of rabies virus that killed him within the space
of a very few minutes. His staff, shocked at witnessing his calm and controlled
suicide rushed to his side as the virus worked through his body and rapidly
brought his heart to a stop.

           
Shocked, they all stood, crouched,
or knelt next to his corpse and began to realize they all might have been
exposed to whatever the good doctor may have injected into him. For a split
second, someone, anyone could have halted the holocaust that would in the years
to follow sweep away human civilization. Someone, anyone could have slapped one
of the many bright red buttons, the big,
shiny
,
candy
-
like
red buttons scattered around the laboratory. Each one located
at every entrance, every doorway, and every work station that would have sealed
the facility and isolated the microbial nightmares that they kept contained
there. Of course, there were the others making their way through urban
population centers, but the good folks at the Black Rock Research Center did
not know that. And so no one moved and when Carl sat straight up after being so
clearly dead, his staff gaped in amazement thinking that they might have dodge
a very deadly bullet.

Then
the feeding began.

           
Carl bit his young, pretty assistant
on the throat. A move he had fantasized about many times when he was alive but
not exactly in this context. She screamed repeatedly sounding an awful lot like
his wife and her lovers. Had Carl been alive, he might have relished the irony,
but he was dead and what was left of him rapidly devoured his pretty little lab
assistant before launching onto another. A few seconds later, the pretty little
lab assistant was up and diving into the fleeing researches like a tight end
making the winning tackle in a football game. And they bit their friends. And
they bite
their
friends, and so on,
and so on until the entire facility was engaged in a massive slaughter. By noon
it was over and the things that used to be normal people working towards the
good of all mankind were now shambling about the dead facility in various
states of half eaten carnage.

           
Then the delivery guy came in the
front door. They were on him before he realized what was happening. There were
so many on top of him that when they were done, there was nothing to come back
from the dead except a few scraps of bloody cloth and bone fragments. But what
was left of him managed to prop the front door open and through this the dead
things of the facility poured out and into the desert.

           
What was left of Carl Spencer Dennis
stood at the bitter edge of the Black Rock Research Center. The guard in the
security shack was then well and truly eaten and the thick security gate was
slowly sliding open. What used to be Carl stood there looking at the wide open
road that lead back to the suburbs of Gallup. Deep in the dead mind of the
thing, where the brain had not completely died, a memory arose. Carl began to
shuffle his feet along the asphalt highway heading north. Carl was going home.

Signal
Lost

Patient Zero One Whisky

(New York Proving Ground)

Test Subject
PZ-1W Identification:
  
(Redacted)

Time of
injection:
                               
(Redacted)

Time of
release:
                                  
(Redacted)

Incubation
Time:
                               
(Redacted)

Time of
first confirmed infection:
     
Injection
time +36 hours

Subject
lost:
                                       
Injection
time +72 hours

Confirmed
by:
                                   
(Redacted)

Initiate
antiviral procedures:
              
(Y/N)?

Initiate
antiviral procedures:
              
(Y/N)?

Initiate
antiviral procedures:
              
(Y/N)?

Signal lost.

The First Days

           
I was sitting the in parking lot of the
local supermarket when they came. I had been hearing about them for weeks:
marauding bands of people with some sort of disease, something like rabies the
news folks said. They’d get together in groups and riot or start
getting up the Dickens
as my mom used to
say, rushing around, biting others. Stories on the internet spoke of
cannibalism but I didn’t believe that. The police had a curfew and these riots
or outbreaks or whatever they were seemed far away. And we needed toilet paper.

           
So I sat in my old, beat up ‘92 ford
pickup truck waiting form my sixteen year old daughter, Georgiana, who of
course we all called Georgie, to get the TP, water, food, and whatnot watching
the weird people drift in and out of the parking lot or the other people in
their cars next to me waiting, like me for their partner to finish up getting
the groceries so we could all get the hell out of town and back to our homes.
No one
was getting up the Dickens
here as far as I could see.

           
It was warm and my truck didn’t have
any air conditioning so I had both windows open. An irritable hot breeze blew
in from the west doing absolutely nothing to cool me down. The fancy young lady
in the car next to me had her engine running and the windows rolled up. I could
almost imagine the cool air blasting from her dashboard keeping her as cool as
a cucumber. My truck was a good deal higher than her little sports coup, so I
got a serious eyeful looking down into her driver’s seat. She was a real
looker: short, black hair pulled back into a pert ponytail, tight white tank
top that clung to her body it was like a second skin, and cutoff shorts that
would surely violate some local morality ordinance if they were any shorter.
She had pretty blue eyes and a small button nose and was a good twenty years younger
than me. Somebody’s young wife, girlfriend, or such waiting in her pretty
little car without a care in the world. She looked up and saw me gawking. I
tried to smile and play it off: just looking around, ya’ see, and you happened
to look up at me at the right time kinda thing, yuck yuck, but she was having
none of it. She gave me a little sneer while cocking her head up and pulled her
tiny shorts down a bit. They wouldn’t go any further down and immediately rode
back up the top of her legs but the message was clear: quit your perving out at
me, grandpa. I blushed and looked the other way at some homeless guy working
his way down the line of cars to my right.

           
This guy was a real wreck, not one
of your nicely dressed bums you see standing on every corner nowadays. His
cloths were filthy, torn, and threadbare draped in layer upon layer of
mismatched and ragged shirts and jackets covered by some type of robe or poncho
that must have been in continuous use for decades. I could imagine what he must
have smelled like. Something like a mixture of gasoline, old sweat, and rancid
grease. He was tapping on the window of any vehicle that was occupied. I
calculated he’d reach my truck in about five minutes. I’d start up the old girl
and move before he came into my orbit and get around behind him until he was
gone. I don’t have anything against the homeless and I’d try to help them out
if I have a few bucks in my pocket, but this one was clearly crazy, a burnout
that had dragged in from the desert drifting through the parking lot as he sang
some hymn to the Good Lord Jesus stopping every few feet to hold his arms up to
the sky, thanking God for something or another then shuffling on. And I didn’t
have a dime on me anyway.

           
With his heavy overcoat and ratty
knit beanie perched on the back of his sunburned and peeling face he scanned
the cars looking for anyone who might be trapped waiting. His teeth had parted
ways with a brush many years before and the sandals he wore were held together
by wire.