Rotter World (3 page)

Chapter Three

Robson entered the door to the eight-by-twenty-foot steel container that served as his quarters and trudged over to the cot. He stripped out of his boots, jacket, and military gear, leaving them in a pile in the center of the floor. Taking the pack of Camels off his nightstand, he flipped open the lid. Damn, only four left. He hated the idea of using them up, but he sure as hell needed one now. Pulling out one between his lips, he closed the pack and tossed it back on the nightstand, grabbed the nearby box of matches, and lit up. Robson opened the window above his cot to let the smoke filter out and flopped down to rest, staring up at the stark steel ceiling.

Usually after a raid, the adrenaline rush shut off once they got back to camp, and he would be fast asleep within thirty minutes. Not today, though. What Mad Dog had said to him about Compton being responsible for the Zombie Virus weighed too heavily. Robson wanted to ask more, but Mad Dog had stormed off, angrier than he had ever been in the past. Robson did not want to press him about it so he came back to his container to sleep, but that turned out to be futile. The minute his head touched the pillow, the repressed memories flooded his consciousness like the waters of Katrina.

Despite everything that had happened, Robson still found it difficult to believe that only eight months ago society had teetered on the brink of extinction without even knowing it. At the time, he had been a sheriff’s deputy in Kennebunkport, with an excellent service record and on the fast track to becoming sheriff. His life had been so normal, with a house on the beach and a fiancée, Susan, who, while high maintenance, loved him dearly and made him feel like a man. Like everyone else throughout the world, he had remained blissfully ignorant that in a research lab in Fort Detrick, Maryland, the U.S. Army had created a virus that killed off living tissue and reanimated it, with the horrific side effect that the reanimated tissue required living tissue to obtain the nutrients necessary to sustain reanimation. At least that’s how the government and the media had described the process once the outbreak began. Officially the government referred to it as the Revenant Virus, or R Virus. For those caught up in the months-long feeding frenzy that followed, they had called it by the more appropriate name of Zombie Virus.

Unfortunately for mankind, the R Virus had come to the attention of the vampires, another nightmare most humans had been completely unaware of. Vampires had lived among men for thousands of years, farther back than even they could remember. By the twenty-first century, more than eight thousand had intermingled with humans, being careful how they fed so as not to draw attention to themselves, hoping their victims would be counted among the mass of missing persons. Small bands of humans had known about their existence and hunted them with surprising success, mostly because the undead had to regenerate during the day and avoid sunlight, their immobility making them vulnerable to attack. So the Vampire Council, the decision-making body comprised of the masters of the ten most influential covens, had developed a plan to steal the R Virus and release it on mankind to keep the humans so occupied battling the living dead they would stop hunting vampires.

It turned out to be the biggest miscalculation since Hitler had invaded the Soviet Union. The vampires had failed to take into consideration the fact that the rotters’ constant necessity to feed derived from the need to sustain their reanimation through the nutrients found in living tissue, even if it came from vampires. Rather than dealing with a small number of hunters who could only take down a few of their number at a time, the vampires now faced millions of rotters that tracked them down with a ferocity unmatched by man, sniffing them out in the dark recesses where they hid. If the vampires’ inability to move about by day had been a detriment when dealing with human hunters, it became their demise when confronted by zombies. Vampires had practically become extinct within four weeks of the outbreak.

Not that Robson or anyone else gave a fuck considering the holocaust the rotters had brought to mankind.

No one knew for sure how the vampires had gotten hold of the virus since those who masterminded this insanity fittingly had been among its first victims. Nor did it matter. Once the vampires had stolen it, they created a small army of zombies across the world, confining captured humans in isolated buildings and injecting them with the virus, waiting until it killed the host and reanimated the body as a zombie. The virus was extremely virulent with an unusually rapid gestation period. A single bite from one of the infected could turn a human into a rotter in a few hours. Multiple bites could turn a person in minutes. Once bitten, there was no cure.

That’s how it had begun. One morning mankind had gone about its business, oblivious to the fate that awaited it. That night, the vampires had released the virus-infected humans on mankind. Twenty-four hours later, society had begun to sound its death knell.

The first zombies had been a fucking nightmare. Recently reanimated, the bodies had only just started to decay, which meant they were still relatively limber. As a result, the initial attacks by these zombies, or swarmers, had been fast and vicious. They had descended on humans like packs of rabid dogs. As weeks and months passed and decay set in, the zombies had slowed down, their attacks becoming more rambling and less deadly. By that time, though, the damage had already been done and the zombies had overwhelmed humanity.

Air travel had been banned on the third day when an outbreak occurred on a trans-Atlantic flight from London to New York. A passenger had snuck past security, concealing that he had been bitten on the thigh, and turned half-way across the Atlantic. Every terrifying moment had been captured on video cell phones and transmitted to the BBC until the amateur cameramen became food. The following day, most countries had closed their borders to all types of international travel. Mass evacuations had jammed the roadways out of most cities, making travel around urban centers virtually impossible. The situation had grown so bad that FOX Business News had dedicated its entire coverage to reporting on traffic and road conditions around the country.

The virus had spread most rapidly in dense urban populations. Within a week, the world’s largest cities had succumbed to the rotter holocaust, carried live by around-the-clock cable news. The images would remain scarred into Robson’s memory forever. Tokyo in flames. Military units in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square gunning down living and living dead alike. Moscow’s Red Square filled with tens of thousands of swarmers. Zombies crowding the base of the Eiffel Tower trying to get to the handful of survivors left on the structure. New Yorkers trapped and slaughtered along the Hudson River by hordes of swarmers, the river turning crimson with blood and body parts. Marine One lifting off the White House lawn, carrying the First Family to safety as Washington crumbled around them.

Then cable news had begun going off the air. Most of the correspondents had fallen victim to the swarmers, or to the gangs and thugs that took advantage of the downfall. A few had died on camera while filming, which would have been fantastic for ratings if anyone cared about such shit anymore. Slowly, one by one, as the world’s cities fell to the living dead, the cable news shows had gone silent, followed shortly thereafter by the local channels. An involuntary news blackout had descended across the world. By the third week, the main source of information came from short wave radio, which the survivors used to keep in touch.

The ones who had survived had been those smart enough to choose the right location to hold out in and who had the courage to cull the infected from their ranks. For the most part these had consisted of secure military facilities, although some civilian enclaves made it through the initial holocaust. The walled, medieval island city of Mont St. Michel off the coast of France. The underground bunker complex built beneath Moscow to withstand nuclear war. The Crimea, until the rotters had learned how to walk under water and had waded ashore near Sebastopol.

Less populated areas had come through relatively unscathed, at least in the beginning. Thousands who had made it to mountain regions found themselves safe from the living dead, but died en masse from exposure during that first winter. Other areas had fared much better. Most of the smaller Pacific islands. Siberia. The Australian outback. Africa, although by last accounts the continent faced an imminent invasion from millions of rotters wandering south from the Arabian Peninsula.

And the American Midwest. After abandoning Washington, the President had set up a government-in-exile at Northern Command Headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska. Needing to face the reality that zombies had overrun most of the nation, the President had made the necessary but unpopular decision to write off the two coasts and the urban centers along the borders, and had established a defensive perimeter in the relatively untouched center of the country. The Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi River formed natural barriers, although the latter had to be fortified with hundreds of miles of fence and barbed wire to deter any rotters that crossed the river. With the east and west flanks relatively secure, the President had sent every physically-able man and woman north and south to stop the zombies. Most had never even held a firearm before, let alone possessed military training. This makeshift army had set up defensive positions on whatever terrain they could find – interstates, rivers, high ground – and fought until forced to fall back or overwhelmed. As of a month ago, the northern boundary of the uninfected United States ran through northern Wyoming and South Dakota to just south of Cedar Rapids. The southern boundary followed a meandering line north of Flagstaff, Albuquerque, Oklahoma City, and Little Rock.

Robson found all this out much later. In those first few weeks, he had been preoccupied with trying to maintain order in Kennebunkport. That had been tough enough with television’s round-the-clock coverage of the fall of civilization. Most town folk had preferred to stay put, reasoning that the Zombie Virus would burn itself out before it reached this far north. This had suited Robson just fine since that meant he only had to contend with the steady stream of traffic on I-95 racing north to the supposed safety of Canada and Nova Scotia. Everything seemed under control until a military helicopter had flown in one night to transport the former President and his family to safety. The tenuous order collapsed in hours.

With that collapse had come the unraveling of the bonds of humanity that used to hold society together. The sheriff and two of his deputies had abandoned the town before dawn, taking most of the firearms and ammo with them and leaving the people to fend for themselves. One of the deputies had stopped by the local gas station to gas up his SUV and stockpile supplies, demanded not to pay for any of it since he was law enforcement, and shot the store owner in the head three times when he refused. That act of cowardice had set off a firestorm of violence. Town folk Robson had known for his entire life turned on each other. Dozens of vehicle accidents and fist fights had erupted on the roads out of Kennebunkport as everyone tried to escape at once. Anyone who had a means of transportation out of the area, or food and water, had become targets for those who failed to adequately prepare for the evacuation. The number of assaults in town had quadrupled overnight and, as the rotters drew closer, the murder rates had spiked. The once quiet coastal community had devolved out of control, overwhelming what little law enforcement stayed behind. Robson and the last few deputies had lingered just long enough to warn the remaining citizens that they should seek the safety of a less populated area. Then they had gathered up whatever supplies they could muster, wished each other luck, and got the hell out of town.

He and Susan had headed west for either Vermont or upstate New York. In retrospect, he should have paid more attention to the news. If he had, he might have chosen a better escape route. They made it as far as Newington, just outside of Portsmouth, where bogged-down traffic blocked their path. Before he could figure a way around the jam, the cars had been set upon by swarmers. Their only choice had been to set out on foot.

Sweat poured down Robson’s face and soaked his shirt. The rapid, shallow breathing and racing heartbeat constricted his diaphragm, making him feel as if his chest would cave in. He jerked upright on his cot, planting his feet on the steel floor and breathing deep, trying to calm the anxiety attack. Slowly his breathing and heart rate returned to normal. It happened every time he recalled that afternoon, which was why he tried to block out that memory. He had replayed the events a thousand times in his mind. Other drivers and passengers being overrun by swarmers, dragged to the ground, ripped open, and eaten alive. The screams of the living and the moans of the living dead. Susan, frozen in terror, refusing to open the car door, wasting valuable seconds as the swarmers approached. Himself yanking her out with one hand while shooting swarmers with the other. Susan plodding along, whining that he was running too fast. Running too fast? Jesus Christ, they had been running for their fucking lives.

Robson chastised himself for constantly revisiting that day. Each time he did, he told himself that what had happened had not been his fault, and each time his conscience would not allow him to accept that. Closing his eyes, he concentrated on the sound of the surf through his tiny window as it crashed on the rocks below the fort wall. Robson lifted the cigarette to his lips for a much-needed nicotine fit, pissed to discover that the tobacco had burned itself out during his attack. He tossed it aside and massaged his sweaty forehead.

The days following the swarmer attack in Newington still remained a blur to him. Somehow he had survived and headed back to Kennebunkport, staying to the back roads where zombie activity was minimal. Eventually he had stumbled upon Fort McClary, where Paul had already established the camp and gathered survivors. Robson had joined them and, because he was a sheriff’s deputy, Paul had placed him in charge of the raiding party sent out to gather supplies. It had taken a couple of months, and more trips into rotter territory than he cared to remember, before they had transformed the fort from a tourist attraction into a semi-modern and viable camp to sit out the apocalypse.