Zombie Wake (5 page)

“Sit him down. Sit him down
dammit
.”

They both kneeled down in front of me
and started unzipping the bags. The one to my left pulled a plastic carboy out
with attached tube and sprayer. With one hand he motioned to his eyes, closing
them as his open hand slid in a downward motion over his face. Then he pointed
the nozzle at my face and started spraying. My eyes were stinging before I
realized he was telling me to close them. The smell of ethanol burned my nose
and tongue and soon I was saturated.

“Take off your clothes,” the other
yelled.

I’m not sure how I transformed from
a mad-shooting, gun-slinging, baton-wailing raging man to acting like a
mud-crusted boy whose mother was standing with a bucket full of soapy water and
a scouring pad; but without hesitation, I started unsnapping, unbuckling, and
shedding the sweat, blood and ethanol filled polyester. As my shoes and clothes
started to stack in a heap, the other bag was unzipped and out came another
carboy. This time, I closed my eyes before the spray started but the bleach
seemed to go right through my eyelids and my hands went to my face while I
crouched down resting my forehead on one knee.

Rubbing my eyes with a towel that
one of them planted in my hands, I was able to see one of the medics pulling a
black gun-shaped device out of his bag. He grabbed my arm, placed the barrel of
the device against my forearm and a fiery sting shot from my arm to my
shoulder. When he pulled the gun away I saw an angry star-shaped hole gouged
out of my forearm. The medic, I would later know as Johnson, looked down at the
device. There was a purplish glow coming from a screen on the back. As the
screen flickered in the eyes of Johnson’s partner, I noticed he was shaking.
The man, who had first approached me, reappeared watching Johnson and the
device. Holding an assault rifle in arms and he flicked the safety lever on and
off as he chewed and spit sunflowers seeds. He was wearing no mask.

“Come on Johnson what is it?”

“Just chill a sec, Dyer. You know
this thing takes time.” Then Johnson turned to the other medic and said, “The
paper reading.”

“Oh, yeah,” the guy murmured
fumbling into the side pocket of the bag.

“NOW!” Dyer yelled. Then those
trembling gloved hands put a narrow sliver of paper on the edge of my lip. Dyer
moved in closer with his gun, pointing it directly at me. “Lick it,” Johnson
told me.

I licked it and the medic snatched
it back so quickly, he pulled my lip in the process. He held the paper in one
hand while awkwardly maneuvering a flashlight with another. A blue light
eventually flooded the paper and a bright fluorescent yellow appeared. He held
it up.

“Negative.”

Soon, there was a beep and a click.
Johnson looked up at Dyer and gave him a thumbs-up. Dyer noticeably relaxed and
swung his weapon around behind him.

“Nice.
A little
good news on a shitty night.
Alright
Johnson
get him on the bird and get him checked in. And you,” he said pointing to the
medic, “I’ve a notion to bite you myself. This was your first and last
assignment. Go put your seatbelt on.” Turning to the rest of us, he said, “Now,
we’re
gonna
be
outta
here
in ten!”

With that Dyer turned and took off
toward the battle that was still raging on shore at the base of the pier. “You
did some work here tonight,” Johnson told me while pushing
a
gauze
dressing on my forearm where blood was pooling. “Let’s get you
checked in. Here.” He handed me white
Tyvek
suit. I
stepped into them and slid the Velcro up to my neck. Then he tossed some
plastic thongs toward my feet. I slipped them on noticing that the elastic
coverall legs came only mid calf.

“Alright sir it’s your lucky day.
Come with me. We are
gonna
take care of you.”

Johnson guided me toward the
aircraft, up the ramp and inside. He motioned to a jump seat along the wall.
Next to me was a corner sealed with two clear plastic drapes, a makeshift room
with Velcro doors. Inside, two individuals sat dressed in
Tyvek
suits similar to mine. But they also wore booties, hoods and a mask like
Johnson’s. They sat side by side harnessed into seats, one looking into a
microscope on a retractable table and the other dripping clear drops into
consecutive tubes in a tabletop instrument. The clear walls bowed in like an
hourglass, concave and taut. Along the floor, a chill blew from the seams of
the craft itself whose floor and wall junctions were lined with long narrow filters.

*

What I didn’t know at the time was
that zombies pose the greatest threat to humanity. Moreover, the fact that I
survived without succumbing to infection, I was told later, was improbable
beyond calculation. In fact, the only one ever documented to endure such an
attack was Dyer himself was a legend to the field and founder of the official
zombie eradication project.

Transmission, which occurs
generally with a bite, strikes with violent speed resulting in near immediate
dissemination. Following, epidemics are almost guaranteed with just one source.

When saliva, teaming with viral
particles, enters through a skin break, the victim has approximately
twenty-four hours until reanimation. And death follows within hours.

In the blood the virus hijacks red
blood cells, then produces and secretes more virus into the plasma. Since the
virus can double its growth in 3 minutes just one virus can result in over a
million in the course of one hour. It is believed that the first symptom, which
occurs within 15 seconds of the bite, is a metallic taste, and is the effect of
iron lost from infected erythrocytes. At the two-hour mark, the spleen ruptures
and the heart rate slows to half its normal rate. Three hours post infection
the victim becomes agitated, disoriented and notably distracted by smell. At
hour four, violence and a preoccupation with eating human tissue begins.

Death and reanimation occur nearly
simultaneously. As the heart stops and blood flow ceases, the virus moves to
nervous tissue. Sometimes in the early phases of reanimation, the zombie is
perceived as deceased. Those cases are profoundly disturbing to witness
especially if the reanimation occurs after burial. And this uprising is
undoubtedly the source of folklore and legends that coincides with modern human
history.

*

But I wasn’t thinking about all
this as I looked down at my cold feet and noticed they were red and blotchy
from the bleach. In fact, I felt raw all over; my skin was crawling with
irritation. The hairs on my arms were orange-white.

The evidence that bleach denatures
protein is apparent in the way it obliterates
chromophores
,
pigmented proteins. The orange in carrots, the green in grass, the brown in my
hair, will all turn white when the broken protein bonds are destroyed and
wavelength absorption is
disabled.
Similarly, the very
envelope that houses the zombie virus is disintegrated when it contacts the
toxic substance. It turns out that bleach and extremely high temperatures are
the only things that can annihilate the bug. I was soon to find out how fire
would be used.

With the fatigue and hunger
restlessness gripped me and I found myself wanting to get up. As I swung around
to look down the ramp, Johnson appeared, lips moving and motioning to his
shoulders. He had a headset on and an extra in his hand. As he approached, he
flung my shoulder straps over, buckling me—a harness with two over the
shoulder straps and two over the leg belts meeting up at my sternum. He cinched
the straps tight as I felt the engine start to rev. Before he turned away, he
tossed me the headset, gave a quick smile and a thumbs up. Then he buckled
himself into the seat next to mine.

As soon as I put the headphones on
I noticed a clicking and ringing that corresponded to the movements of a man
sitting across from me. The man, whose back was to me, was seated in front of
an array of electronics. There were multiple video screens. I could also hear
radio traffic. The images were of the scene that I just left, ambling zombies,
gunfire, combatants. I even saw one flash of
Toothbeak
perched on a victim’s open femur. It was apparent that the soldiers were
wearing cameras. And the man who was surveying the feeds was clearly in charge.
I watched as he keyed a microphone.

“OK Dyer lets do this by the
numbers. Sweep it left to right then pull it in and get ready for the burn.
Once we have all hands ready to mount up, I will call in the fast movers to
lay
down the ‘palm. We got the one survivor aboard so
movement equals hostile. Hawkeye tells me we have a solid perimeter with good
intel
on this one. No heat
signatures.”

“Roger that skipper.” Dyer’s voice
sounded tinny over the speaker. I saw his face in the greenish light of one of
the monitors as he turned from the camera starting to shout unheard orders.

The
voice
, I thought...
it’s
… But
before I could register the familiarity, the man at the station turned in his
seat and extended his hand. I saw his face—I recognized him.

“What the
fuh
….”

“How you
doin
Storm? You ok?”

“
Ulric
?!”

“Yeah. Well, we got some talking to
do. You just sit back and watch the show. It’ll be clear in a bit.”

The popping of gunfire echoed in
the distance and staccato of automatic weapons slowed down and became more and
more intermittent. Then men began to run up the ramp and take seats along the
walls of the aircraft. I looked out and saw Dyer walking backward toward the
craft scanning the pier for movement. He casually walked up the incline past
the Gatling gun and grabbed a strap that hung from the ceiling of the craft. A
crewman at the door with a flight helmet was manning the gun and seemed to be
linked to the pilot. Dyer gave him the OK sign and he keyed his mike. He
grunted three words that I couldn’t make out. But they must have been the
command to go because I felt the craft lurch and begin to rise. We rose up and
away from the pier.

Ulric
tapped his eye and motioned toward the still open ramp. I looked out to see two
bright lights appear to the east and streak across the sky. A flash of light
and twin boiling balls of white-hot fire rolled across the park. Each was a
quarter mile across and enveloped the entire length of the park. Just as the
fireballs began to shrink, two more flaming streaks appeared and lanced into
the scene. I could actually feel the heat from the blasts.

As I watched my little park
transform into a raging inferno, I saw a black shape, backlit by flames,
streak. Twin blue afterburners lit up the rear end of the jet as it rocketed
past the pier.
Half a second later, a second jet flashed and
disappeared into the night sky.
Dyer leaned across the back hatch and
slapped the gunner on the back to get his attention. The crewman turned as Dyer
waved his hand back and forth across his neck in a cutoff sign. He nodded in
response, grabbed a control hanging next to him and stabbed a button. The ramp
at the rear of the craft slowly rose and closed off my view of the fiery
carnage. A vibration passed through the aircraft as the engines tilted from
vertical to horizontal. There was dull throb of power and the vehicle pushed
into the night leaving a red and black wake of death.