Authors: James Cook
The cameraman, having seen enough to know not to stick around any longer, dropped his camera and followed the fat bleeding cop in his retreat from the nightmarish scene. The broadcast abruptly cut back to Anderson Cooper, his expression stunned and horrified at the same time.
I know Anderson eventually got his shit together and started talking again, but I didn’t catch any of it. I was too busy spraying cool ranch Doritos and bile out of my mouth all over the back of my sofa. I dropped to my knees and heaved until there was nothing left in my stomach. When the vomiting subsided, I crawled backward until my back hit the living room wall. Call me wimpy if you want to, but I used to have a very bad reaction to the sight of blood.
Somehow, in the midst of all this, I managed to hang on to my cell phone. I could hear a tiny Gabriel voice in my palm, but could not make out what he was saying. I brought the phone back up to my ear.
“Eric? Eric? Are you still there? Can you hear me?”
“I’m here.” I croaked.
“Did you see that? What just happened on TV, did you see that?” he asked.
“Yes, I saw it, Gabe.” I wiped a handful of puke off my chin and flung it to the floor. “Dude, if you have any idea what the lovely fuck is going on down in Atlanta, I would really appreciate an explanation.”
I could hear Gabe take a deep breath.
“It is highly infectious, and spreads through direct fluid transfer. If an infected person bites you, you’re infected. Sometimes just a scratch is enough, if they have infected tissue in their nails. There is no cure for this thing, and anyone who gets it will die. Unfortunately, that’s not the worst of it. Sometimes it takes a few hours, sometimes it only takes a few seconds, but after the infected person dies, they reanimate.”
“What do you mean, reanimate?” I asked.
“I mean they come back to life, sort of.” Gabe replied.
“That’s crazy Gabe. That’s not possible.” I said.
“I know it sounds crazy, but I’ve seen this thing with my own eyes. No matter how nuts it sounds, I need you to believe me. Whether or not you live through the next few weeks depends on what you do in the next few days.”
Looking back, I was definitely in shock at the time, but something in the primordial lizard part of my brain that controls my survival function was listening and taking notes. I had known Gabe for four years by then. We had become good friends, and he wouldn’t be trying so hard to get me to believe him if he didn’t think it was really true. That worried me a great deal.
“Okay, assuming I believe this crazy shit is true, what do I need to do?”
“Your bunker. How are you as far as supplies?” He asked.
“I have about three months worth.” I replied.
“Good.” Gabe said. “Did you get one of the radios I told you about? The kind you can wind up to power?”
“Yeah, I did, and a couple of those wind-up flashlights too.”
“Okay, great. If the Phage makes it to Charlotte, get to your shelter and monitor the emergency broadcast bands. That will let you to keep track of what’s going on in the rest of the country. Do not leave your shelter for any reason once you seal the entrance, until you are down to a week worth of supplies. Ration your food and especially your water. Where your community is, clean water may be a hard thing to come by in the near future. Make sure you connect your gutters to your rain cistern.”
“I’ll do that.” I replied. The cistern connected to the gutters on my house and garage, and into a filtration system in the shelter beneath my back yard. The tank could hold five hundred gallons.
“Make sure you fill that fucker up as soon as we’re off the phone.” Gabe said. “While you’re at it, full up all of your bathtubs, sinks, buckets, and anything else you can find that will hold water, and I do mean absolutely anything that will hold water. Pretty soon, clean water is going to be a lot more valuable than gold. After you do that, get as much of your food and water that is in the house into the shelter as quickly as you can. DO NOT tell anyone you know about what you are doing, unless you plan on taking them into the shelter with you. If you plan on letting Vanessa in on any of this, now would be a good time.”
Vanessa was the girl I was dating at the time. I paused for a moment, considering how to explain all of this to her.
“Hey, what if Vanessa doesn’t believe me? It’s not as if I can force her to stay in the shelter. I mean, this is hard for me to believe, and I’ve been preparing for the possibility that something like this could happen for over a year now. I’m not sure how Vanessa is going to react.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, bud.” Gabe replied. “If you think she doesn’t believe you, then don’t tell her where to find the shelter. You don’t want anyone knowing about it, and if they do then your problems will get a lot worse once the dying starts. People will be desperate, scared shitless, and there will be thousands trying to find a safe place to hide. If any of them catch up to you, they might not take ‘no’ for an answer.”
“Alright, I’ll deal with that when I get to it. Now back to our earlier conversation, what the fuck are we dealing with here? You said this thing kills people and brings them back to life? Is that why those people on the news didn’t get hurt by the bullets hitting them? Because they’re already dead?” I asked.
“That’s right. There is only one way to put them down-- massive brain trauma. Just busting open the skull won’t get the job done. You have to penetrate deep into the brain and destroy the brain tissue. A bullet to the head works. So does beheading them or ramming something sharp into their skull. A sharp narrow object through the eye is another way to go, but be careful to get it in good and deep. You want to touch the back of their skull.”
Listening to Gabe describe various methods of destroying the human brain did very little to ease my mounting fear. I had only fought in anger twice in my entire life, and although I could handle myself pretty well, I had most certainly never done any of the things that Gabe was describing. I was guessing that he probably hadn’t been as lucky as I in that regard.
“You said earlier that you had seen this disease before. What is it? How could something like this get loose? Doesn’t the government know about it?” I asked.
I got up off the floor and made my way into the bathroom, putting the cell phone on speaker along the way. I put the cell phone down on the counter beside the sink and cupped my hand under the faucet. I ran some water into it and rinsed the puke out of my mouth and off my face. As I grabbed a towel to dry myself off Gabriel began speaking again.
“I don’t know what it is. It’s not a virus or a bacteria, at least not like any that have ever been studied before. It is some kind of microscopic organism, similar to a bacteriophage, but it doesn’t really fit into any of the scientific categories that I know of. Whatever it is, the shit is lethal, and you do not want to get exposed to it. First you get lethargic and feverish, then you go into convulsions, and after the convulsions subside, you die. After awhile your body will get back up, and will have only the most basic functions available to it.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Those who get infected and reanimate can walk, see, smell, hear, and control their limbs. They don’t seem to feel pain, and they will eat any living thing they can get their hands on. They’re drawn most strongly to human beings. I’ve seen these things munch on dead bodies, and when they spot a living human, they immediately forget the body and go after the live person. They’re determined sons of bitches too. You can fire a cannonball right through the middle of one of these fuckers, and the only thing it’ll do is piss the bastard off. That being said, they get distracted easy, and don’t seem to be able to communicate amongst one another. They don’t behave in any sort of coordinated manner with the other dead, but they don’t go after each other either. I don’t know why.”
“How is it possible that these things exist and no one knows about them?” I asked. “For Christ’s sake, we’re talking about a germ that brings dead people back to life.”
“They’re not really alive,” Gabe replied, “they move, eat, and can even make some kind of weird moaning sound, but their hearts don’t beat. Their blood doesn’t flow. It doesn’t make any sense that they should be able to function, but they can, and they can somehow sustain themselves by eating living things.”
“But why have I never heard about any of this before? Why hasn’t the government warned people about it? I gather from what you’ve been telling me that they definitely know it exists.”
“The government has been very hush about this thing for as long as I have known about it.” Gabe answered. “When I left Aegis, it was made very clear to me that if I ever tried to go public with what I know that I would be dealt with harshly. I even had to sign a non-disclosure contract, as if the threat of being killed wasn’t enough to keep me quiet. I think I understand, though, why they were so concerned.” Gabe paused for a moment, then took a deep breath and continued.
“After being sent on a few missions to eradicate outbreaks, I started to get suspicious about the circumstances surrounding them. These outbreaks were always in some backwater, isolated community in a third world country, with no strategic or diplomatic value to the U.S. The first few were small scale, but they got bigger and worse as time went on. Larger communities, more people, varying levels of infrastructure, it was just too damned convenient. I got the feeling that these outbreaks were not an accident, and that the guys on the strike teams were being used as guinea pigs in some kind of experiment. I think some agency of the government, acting without sanction, wanted to know what it would take to contain this disease if it ever got loose on U.S. soil. The outbreaks were all just a ruse to run field tests. That was the reason I finally left Aegis. I just couldn’t deal with it any longer.”
“Why would the government do something like that?” I asked.
If what Gabe said was true, then the implications were horrible. The thought of government agencies callously killing innocent people just to test out ways to contain a disease is beyond monstrous.
I looked up from where I had been staring down at the sink and saw my face in the mirror. I was wide-eyed and pale; much like Anderson Cooper after seeing the footage of the riot in Atlanta. My irises looked like dark blue pebbles against a blood-shot background. I replaced the towel on its rack and went back into the living room.
“I can’t say this with any degree of certainty,” Gabe continued, “but I think that the government might have a hand in this. I think either they created it, or they know how it was created. Maybe they were doing medical research on tissue regeneration and it went horribly wrong, maybe it’s some kind of biological weapon they were developing, maybe it came from fucking outer space and the Department of Defense just wanted to see what it could do. I don’t know. Wherever it came from, it looks like the lab rats at the CDC didn’t keep a tight enough leash on it, and it managed to get out. If this thing spreads as fast as I think it can, the government may not be able to stop it.”
As I entered the living room, I sidestepped the wide puddle of vomit behind my couch. The news was still showing footage of the outbreak unfolding in different parts of Atlanta. I watched it on mute as Gabriel and I spoke. There were shots from a helicopter that showed smoke rising from several buildings in downtown Atlanta. People were running panicked through the streets, trying to get away from the hordes of undead headed toward them. Massive vehicle pileups halted traffic on most of the streets and highways immediately around the downtown area. Everyone was trying to get out of the city on the same few roads, and no one was able to get anywhere.Cars sat immobile in long lines at every intersection and on every highway. Frustrated, frightened, and angry drivers honked horns, yelled at each other, got into fights, and did every stupid thing that a person can possibly do to make a bad situation worse. The graphic on the bottom of the screen read that looting and vandalism had broken out all over the city, and that hospitals were quickly filling up with casualties of the spreading chaos.
“What’s going to happen if the government can’t stop this thing from spreading?” I asked. “Is there a vaccine or something to keep people from getting infected? If the government created this shit, then they should know how to stop it, right?”
“I don’t think so.” Gabriel replied. “I think they might have bitten off more than they can chew with this one. If they can’t stop this outbreak, then within a few months, maybe even less, there won’t be much left of civilization in this part of the world. That’s assuming it doesn’t somehow manage to spread outside of North and South America.”
“So what are you telling me Gabe? Is this like, the end of the fucking world or something?”