Brutal Planet: A Zombie Novel Page 4

  “Sorry about that. I don’t know, John. Maybe you should have stayed isolated in your Chilean desert, I can think of lots of worse places to be. Every day, more and more don’t show up for work, or just fail to return from lunch, I don’t know why I’m still here. You ask for a report and you’re told it might take a week, the network crashes and another day is gone while IT tries to fix it, if they can fix it. No one is fucking talking to each other! We’re all sitting in a big pile of shit and everyone is still playing spy vs. spy. Who the fuck thinks they are going to get a promotion out of this? We are not even close to understanding this thing, let alone find a cure. Even if we did have our shit together, my best guess would be two to three years. The government has already gone COG on us and we are essentially under military control. As far as research is concerned, it’s all bullshit. It’s a damn Chinese Fire Drill. The bastards in the military will not talk to us. It’s take, take, take. I try to call friends in Russia and I am told to submit an official request! The U.S. is copying the stuff the British have done, the British copying the Russians, the Russians doing the same with the Chinese. The Chinese, well who knows, they’re gone. Right now, the best guess for Asia is already over two billion infected.”

  “What?” Two billion! People don’t normally think about numbers this large and I couldn’t comprehend something like that. I didn’t know how to respond.

  “John, that’s a low-ball guess. That number is tossed around to make people feel good. There is a lot I don’t know and every day, I am locked out of more and more. This might be it.”

  “It? David, what’s IT?”

  “Armageddon. We could all very well be toast. China, Nepal, Bhutan, Taiwan, and a great part of India are just gone, and from the looks of it, I mean everyone. Wildfires of this shit are now worldwide, two billion ain’t nothing, and John, this doesn’t take into account the fucking nuke games India and Pakistan are playing. If I were you, I would head north, go where it gets really cold and stay there. My best guess is that’s already been happening around here. I just know I won’t be invited on the ark when the rain showers start. Man, I hope you are flexible enough to kiss your ass, because I think the last waltz is playing buddy. I’m sending Jenny and the kids to a friend in Idaho, can’t get them into Canada.” Dave seemed on the verge of tears, and so was I.

  “We’re all very scared here in Atlanta. Nobody seems to know what to do. Oh man, I’m from California, you know a ‘sun and surf’ guy, and I’m going to die in Georgia! Yep, somebody somewhere is having a cosmic belly laugh over this one. I wish all of us the best of luck. I have to go my friend. I don’t think we will talk again, so you take care.”

  “God speed, David.”

  I held on to the phone for a long time and stared at the number buttons. My mind kept reading them backwards from nine to one. I didn’t expect the call to be uplifting, but I also didn’t imagine it would hit me as hard as it did. At times of real crisis, the US is often very good, even brilliant, and the little child in me was almost sure we would pull a rabbit out of our ass on this one. But if David is right… A man made filovirus? Who? Why? What for? Why the fuck would you do that? What, nukes are too twentieth century? Two billion is a low estimate? What the hell was going on with India and Pakistan? Some guy was yelling at me to get off the phone and when I turned to look at him, he just stepped backwards and ran away. I hung up, walked over to a store window, and looked at my reflection. I now knew why he ran. Sweat was running off me and I was shaking. I looked at my hands and they were white.

  The filoviridae family is a class of single stranded negative sense RNA. It has several genera with ebolavirus and marbergvirus the best known. Both are some extremely deadly shit. As a grad student, I almost switched to microbiology to study this type of virus. Ebola is fascinating because it runs the mortality gambit from zero percent, as in Ebola Reston, to over eighty percent in Ebola Zaire, one of the most lethal pathogens known. It causes a hemorrhagic fever and a just plain nasty way to die: massive organ failure and bleeding through every orifice, the whole nine yards. Filoviruses, unlike influenza type viruses, are not airborne. They require direct contact with infected material: blood, tissue, vomit. So when you do get an outbreak, usually in some bum fuck isolated backwater (Sorry Reston, VA), it quickly burns itself out. Well, this one is not going to burn out, since we have this dire new twist to the whole epidemiology tango; fucking zombies.

  I got home and tried Liz again, but with no luck. It seemed like the system was still up and running, but this time, I did not get some pre-recorded circuits are busy message. It just did not go through. In a sense, the end of the world kept me distracted and I tried not to think about Liz and my family, or whether I would ever see them again.

  Each day, it got worse and worse. Egypt, Kazakhstan, Turkey, Romania, Brazil, Germany, Argentina, Israel, France, Australia, and the list went on and on. It was just a classic example of a novel lethal virus in a virgin mobile population. I was bothered that both South America and Australia now had it. I half hoped that they might be able to isolate and weather this storm.

  By the start of my second week back, everyone knew that it was in the US, it had to be. I placed a call to my brother in Montana and almost got past the first ring when it cut off. As the world went to shit, the news media fed us the same crap. Nobody could cross our borders, the quarantine restrictions in US were the best in the world, we will have a vaccine soon, everything will be under control in a couple of weeks, and the dead do not rise. We were now all treading water in the deep end of the pool.

  I thought about heading south and getting back to my mother in Rhode Island, but it was too late, the major highways were now restricted for military and official use. From Internet, TV and radio reports, it looked as if most of the secondary roads were a mess. I95, Route 1 and the 202 were nothing but a linear parking lot. Short of a helicopter, if you had clearance to fly, or a boat, there was no way to get south.

  Like everyone else, I had made several runs to the grocery and hardware stores to stock up on essentials, hoping that I could hang out in my condo and let this thing slide by. To be honest with you, I didn’t know what essentials really meant. I was lucky since I could walk to both stores and use one of my large expedition backpacks to haul stuff back. As expected, the stores were packed. It wasn't like waiting for a hurricane or big winter storm to hit. No one looked at each other, and no gossip about projected landfall or wind speeds or storm surge. Everyone was on a mission to get what they needed and get back to their families. We were all wracked with fear but trying really hard to act normal. In the supermarket, I passed one woman who was holding two cans of baked beans, different kinds of my favorite brand, B&M, original and maple. It was as if she was trying to decide which one to buy. She must have been there for some time since the entire aisle was wiped out, nothing left. Her shopping cart was empty. I walked over to see if she needed help and overheard her talking to herself about the caloric difference between the two. I just stood there and it dawned on me that I cannot help this woman. By my second grocery run, the woman was gone, and there was almost nothing to get and no one paying. I ended up with cans of anything I could find, mushrooms! I absolutely fucking hate mushrooms!

  Miami was the first U.S. city to be “officially” infected, but hey, the states a big peninsular and sections could be quarantined. I heard an ‘expert’ telling us that we could build a fence across Florida, like the Mexican border fence, in a few days. Problem solved! Then: LA, New York, Philadelphia, Atlanta, St. Louis, Omaha, Denver, Houston, and on and on. I don't know the exact order because the dominoes fell so quickly. In the U.S., like everywhere else on the planet, the human response was to riot, loot and burn. In essentially forty-eight hours it was over. When Boston was declared an infected city, I filled my bathtub, sinks, and any container I had with water. I was on the top, fourth floor, and the only way in was my front door. I decided then and there to isolate and wait. Shoot it out if I had to and save the last bu
llet for me. Yeah, right. If I rationed, three weeks was no problem, but what then? My neighbor Burt was out of town and I guessed he would not be coming back anytime soon, so I let myself in (we didn’t really hang out together but had exchanged keys years ago) and raided his place. I first went for water. Burt is a bachelor like me, in finance, and a bit of a health nut. While the bathtub filled, I checked his cupboards. Unlike me, he apparently does not eat anything out of a can, with one exception…mushrooms. I knew the power would eventually go and I'd have to eat all the veggies first, not that there were many of them. Carrots, green beans, tomatoes, broccoli, some bagged salad mixtures and kale. Kale? Who eats Kale? From my quick look around, nothing in the apartment stood out. I felt like an intruder so I didn’t open drawers and closets, yet. My other two neighbors didn’t answer their doors. I gave myself a day to decide if they were home before I broke their doors down.

  Two years earlier, I had bought a Ruger SR9 and a bunch of ammo. It was a semiautomatic with seventeen round clips and once you put the holster on, you really felt like a badass. I took a class in gun safety and actually motivated myself a total of two times to a firing range to play with it. I have absolutely no clue why I bought the thing. I was not in danger, nor in love with guns, just your classic American consumer. It looked cool, I had cash, had no record, now I had a gun. As with most of my impulsive purchases, I soon lost interest and to the back of the closet, it went. Now it seems like one of my better life choices.

  I sat down on my balcony, turned on the radio, and opened a Royal Crown Cola. I kept trying to call Liz, but the lines were jammed and all I got was a beeping tone. Lines, there are no lines anymore, so maybe the system will last for a bit. I looked out over the Penobscot River and downtown Bangor. Things were starting to change, some smoke in the distance, car horns honking, sirens, and no reported riots. Yet, if you could tune this out, you might be able to convince yourself that it was just a beautiful day in May with a great summer ahead. I just sat there in a daze. My mind was racing. It was easier to comprehend when hell was breaking loose elsewhere but the pigeons were finally home and the end of the world had reached my doorstep. The human mind is a crazy thing, because my train of thought quickly transitioned from the end of the world to a lament that I would not be able to make it to the Orono Farmers Market this year. Part of my ‘eating better/living better’ strategy, that usually lasts a month or two, and I started thinking that this could be my last address. After about an hour, I kind of came out of it and my brain started to register that there were more fires on the horizon, a whole lot more sirens and my soda was flat. I got to thinking that the city has a population of around 31 thousand, immediate surrounding area about 150 thousand. I had fifty-two rounds for the Ruger.

  While the government could control the print and mainstream media, it could not easily shut down the internet and the truth poured in. The actual Plague was not the main problem. The real issue was with the rising dead and the vicious nature of their being. It was now widely known that a bite quickly led to infection, death, and reanimation. We were hearing that the undead ate only part of the newly dead, at least till reanimation. One report talked about zombies being easily distracted by the living. Well, thank God, I am good for something. The average victim would take less than an hour to reanimate, everyone who died of a bite reanimated and you needed to disrupt the brain in order to “kill” the undead. The anatomist in me was a bit bothered by the whole shoot them in the head thing. Some inner part of my scientific brain was telling me that this did not make complete sense, as if the world being destroyed by zombies was part of your daily dose of rational thinking.

  My cell phone rang! It was Elizabeth; pure luck she got through. I was relieved, overjoyed, and I wanted to wax romantic, but she essentially told me to shut up and listen. Her ex, Roy, had a plan and she wanted to invite me along. He knew about our friendship and was surprisingly supportive. They had parted friends and after six years and his remarriage, he wanted the best for her. As it turns out, Roy was a bit of a survivalist, something Elizabeth had never mentioned. He liked guns and large motorized things. Yes, this goes hand in hand with the whole survivalist motif, but yet again, something she never mentioned. He had two friends with big campers and a couple of others with sailboats. Roy had a Hummer, which was tricked out, and according to Liz, he was almost giddy at the apocalypse that lay ahead. The idea was to get together ASAP, make our way to the coast, get to the boats, head south, find an island, and wait for this to blow over. I would have to meet her on the other side of town. In was clearly time to go, so I did.

  Chapter 4 ~ Refuge

  May 31st (continued)

  “Tan is looking good!” I had heard him messing around below deck and was waiting for Robert to come up.

  “Well, you know my motto, ‘it's not how you feel, it’s how you look’.”

  “I guess skin cancer is not a big concern these days.”

  “Melanoma is on the list, just not as high as it used to be. Make any coffee?”

  “In the galley, it’s instant. I have been looking at the charts we got off those boats yesterday and thought we might try for Monhegan Island, see what's up. Ever been there?”

  “Would it help if I have been there?”

  “No.”

  “I’ve never been there.”

  I heard the rustling of paper and opened my eyes. Robert was sitting next to me, laying out a nautical chart on the deck.

  “It's about forty miles from here. National Weather Service is off the air but the barometer and weather look favorable. With a little luck, we should make it today.”

  “Well, my dance card seems to be empty this morning, so why not. How many do you think?” I pulled myself into a seating position with my back telling me clearly that: A. You are forty-six years old. B. Even with a ridge rest, the deck is hard. C. There is a damn empty bed down below!

  “Well, as our good friend Bill Shakespeare would say, ‘now there’s the rub!’ Everyone and their brother might have sought refuge there, but worst comes to worst, should be plenty of boats to raid and a place to anchor if the weather turns.” He looked off into the distance and for the first time, I could visibly see the enormity of our situation on his face. No fear or real sense of sadness, just a deep understanding of it all.

  “What about Mantinicus? I heard it’s a nice place. Might have fewer people, less of them?”

  “Well, you might be right on that point, but those folks like to keep to themselves. Don't think we would find open arms waiting for us. Too bad, has some great lobster fishing. Well, anywhere we choose is going to be a crapshoot. We just roll the dice and see what lady luck brings us.”

  “Yeah, that bitch has been a real pal lately.”

  Robert stood, slapped me on the back, “Serenity now, my Boy! Serenity now,” he yelled and went below laughing.

  It took me a minute...oh yeah, Seinfeld. Thanks for reminding me about TV, asshole.

  I followed him down.

  “So, why the hell are you in such a good mood? I thought between the scotch and all the other shit, grouchy would be the theme for today.”

  “You know, John, you're right. I should be pissed off, life sucks, but we should be dead and we are clearly not. Everything we knew and loved is gone. Pain rules! I think it’s about time the two of us grew up. It's not a sin that we did not die with the rest of them. We have to forgive ourselves, you in particular. John, what you did on the mainland was one of the greatest acts of pure love I have ever seen. Remember that, and remember we have to survive.” He turned around and handed me a large cup of coffee.

  “And you will have to forgive me. This stuff, as my grandson would say, sucks ass.” He half caught himself and I saw pain in his eyes. I took a sip. Yes, it indeed sucked ass, but with a box of Thin Mints Girl Scout cookies added, breakfast wasn't half bad.

  Robert quickly composed himself.

  “Okay, so we set sail and check out this island. Generally, there are fewer than
one hundred people, but with tourist, I mean refugees, I expect a great deal more. If they got themselves organized, who knows? What do you think?”

  “Well, we’re going to need some supplies before venturing out. We’re short on batteries.”

  “And on Dewars. Let’s make Tenants Harbor our next stop.” He caught me thinking and gave me a stern look. “You know we are not thieves and there ain’t no way we are pirates.” He gave a short laugh and I gave him a no-shit look.

  “We are survivors,” I said, “Our moral obligation is to the living, to real people. The rest are just...very dangerous animals.”

  I busied myself with preparation to get under sail, but in the back of my mind, I kept thinking of Robert's concept of forgiveness. Hell, I was raised Catholic, ‘guilt, yeah, give the gift that keeps on giving.’ Can I really forgive myself? To live, I knew I had to. I had to keep saying that it was not my fault, but fate, whatever that means. I also knew that I had to calm down, rationalize and no matter how tired or how damaged I was, I need to think through everything carefully. I need to let go of ego and take to heart that I was not that smart, fast, or careful. I think what Robert was hinting at was to stay in the moment and live one day at a time, one hour at a time. I tried not to spend that much energy on my future and contemplating what was becoming more and more obvious. I just focused on that one word which adorns the Rhode Island state flag, Hope.

  Once we got underway, I started to settle down and got into a routine. Robert spent some time going over the basics of sailing, again. I also practiced knots and kept an eye out for other boats.