She dropped him on his head.
Then she staggered back, screeched like a Poe raven, and blood jetted, spraying indecipherable graffiti around his apartment. He started to see words in the splatterings . . . until he came to his senses and realized that he was lucky to escape with his life. Then reality hit him. He had killed his ex-girlfriend.
He threw up on the carpet.
Before the menace fell from the sky and landed in the center of town, far away in an undisclosed location worked a scientist named Dr Parkingapp. He was part of an elite team of scientists perfecting the supersoldier serum for the United States government, codenamed Project Captain America. He believed, after years of research and thousands of hours of tests - measured out in the lives of a billion mice, along with perpetual graphing and calculating at the expense of tax-payer dollars - that he had finally discovered what would make it work. This so-called working serum he had poured into a single test tube, and now he looked upon it with glee. The government, however, didn’t share in his glee and was talking about cutting his funding so that they could build a rumored weapon, the Earth bomb, which no one would talk about at length except to say that it was a destroyer of worlds and could one day be used against the threat of alien invasion, in case aliens were real.
Not wanting to lose his funding, Dr Parkingapp was eager to test the formula. But since he had no more mice to destroy - he had tested the mice that had been injected with his formulas by seeing if they could withstand conditions of extreme heat, and if they could, that meant that the formula worked
2
- it was time for him to use it on himself.
With his stereo cranked to full, he stood with his legs spread and pointed to an imaginary crowd while holding a liquid-filled test tube in hand. Springsteen’s ‘Born in the USA’ rocked his loudspeakers. He sang along in a punched-testicle falsetto, using the test tube as a microphone. When he broke into a dance step, he accidentally tripped and spilled a drop of serum on the tip of his shoe. It was more acidic than he thought. It ate through his shoe and into his foot.
‘Ah, shit. I fucked up. Oh, my god, I fucked up. Holy crap it burns!’
His screams of agony were drowned out by the music.
Danny grabbed his notepad and ran from the house, leaving the door wide open. He ran down the street in a state of panic. He had killed the only woman he had ever loved. It was awful, horrendous. He felt hideous.
After a while he stopped running to catch his breath and try to get hold of his emotions, which seemed to be overpowering him with grief. Despite the obvious signs that Jennifer had contracted some terrible sickness, he was convinced it was his fault. He looked around town and saw the street where they had walked hand in hand for the first time. There was part of a fuselage on the sidewalk. He didn’t notice that. It was unfortunate that he focused only on his own grief, because if he had stopped to turn around before running off, he would have seen Jennifer sit back up on the floor of his home and say, ‘Rreor.’
Exhausted, Danny found a light pole on a street corner to rest against. From this vantage point, he surveyed the downtown area. It seemed normal, at first glance. Then he spotted the plane wing sitting in the road. There was an alarm going off at the local bank. Screams of terror. People running. The cops were on the scene, only they didn’t seem to be doing anything. They were standing around. Danny didn’t know what to do. Cops? What if they were looking for him? He was a murderer now. He was trying to save his life, but was it worth it? Maybe he should have let her kill him; maybe he deserved that, but . . . what was going on? This scene didn’t seem right. He moved in closer, finding some of his energy coming back to him. He looked at the back of a plane engine lying in the street. There were feet sticking out from under it.
Oh, my God!
One of the officers was swaying back and forth as if he were a leaf being pushed by the wind. When Danny got two steps closer, all of that changed. The officer turned around. He looked as if he had been buried underground for the past nine weeks and had somehow come unearthed. He let out a sound somewhere between a murmur and a roar. Danny looked past the man-thing and saw that the screaming inside the bank was no longer going on and that there were more of these moaning and groaning man-things coming out of the bank. He backed up, shaking his head in disbelief.
A bony hand fell on his shoulder, and an inhuman voice hissed in his ear: ‘I likey . . . fresh . . . meeeeat.’
Danny jumped, pulled at the arm, and felt it give. Next thing he knew he was running down the street with someone’s arm in his hand, the body that it belonged to far behind him. He ducked around a corner and winged the arm on the ground in disgust. When he saw it move, he stomped on it and booted it away. He was breathing hard. It wasn’t just Jennifer any more. It was the entire town.
‘Jesus Christ.’
He looked toward city hall, where the impaled body hung, roasting in the sinking sun. He thought he saw it twitch.
Did he? Yup. He did.
‘Jesus Christ!’
Dr Parkingapp was no longer coherent. Placed in a straitjacket, he was bounding up and down and cackling like a madman, swinging his shoulders into the soldiers that had been brought in to restrain him. General Deaconheinz, a tall swarthy man with a handlebar mustache, stood there grinning wildly. His unit commander was at his side, fussing with his nose, attempting not to appear as if he was picking it, although that was exactly what he was doing.
‘This is the greatest day in our nation’s history.’
‘Sir, I don’t understand, the supersoldier serum was a failure.’
‘No, it wasn’t a failure. It just wasn’t a supersoldier serum.’
‘Sir?’
‘It’s classified. But let me put it to you this way: he wasn’t working on a supersoldier serum. That’s a load of hokum from the comic books. You’d have to be pretty stupid to believe he was working on that. That’s the brilliant thing about these genius scientist types. They’re smart enough to make discoveries but dumb enough to misunderstand what they’re discovering. Soldier, he was developing a very dangerous biological weapon.’
‘Shit from Shinola, sir. That’s positively brilliant.’
‘I know. I’m the one that thought of it. Now let’s get him aboard the plane and get the hell out of here.’
It wasn’t safe to stay, Danny knew that, but what he would do he did not know. It was just that he had to leave. First, he had to get back to the diner and warn everyone. While he didn’t like the patrons of the diner, they were still people, and he was still freaking out about Jennifer. If Charlene was good for anything, it was setting him straight. He had to hurry, and then he’d flee for good. He went in through the back entrance. He wanted to get a few things from his locker. He undid the lock and took out some money and a knapsack that had water, spare clothes, and protein bars. He filled it frantically with more food from the kitchen and then slung it on his back. He walked out through the kitchen and into the diner’s main room. What he beheld looked normal. The customers were seated in their booths, and Charlene was at the front of the diner looking out the window, perched on the ledge.
The television on the counter was on. The broadcast made Danny halt. Newscaster Terra Gerstner, in bobbing red curls, was giving a stunning report. She looked different from the last time he’d seen her on TV.
‘Two planes heading due north appear to have disappeared over a small town. Now there is word that the planes might have been involved in a fatal midair collision that has caused the quarantine of the same town. What authorities aren’t saying yet is what was on board one of those planes. One of the aircraft was believed to be military-related, and some are speculating that a biological weapon was aboard. It is believed they were transporting the carrier of this weapon before the accident. Rumors are running rampant, but the government denies knowledge that they have created a zombie plague to destroy civilizations they don’t agree with. It’s just preposterous . . . Well, so’s taking a shit in the refrigerator, I say!’
3
Was she insane? Talking like that on the news . . . And then he saw that tinted look in her eyes . . . and he knew . . . he had seen enough. He started forward to warn the customers, but his tongue caught in his throat. One of the patrons seated at a booth grabbed his arm and snarled that same rictus snarl that Jennifer had. Danny couldn’t get his arm free when he tried to tug it away. And when he looked up he saw Charlene moaning toward him, all deformed-looking. He wanted to vomit.
‘Charlene, no, please don’t. I . . .’
He kicked the patron in the head. Twice. The patron still wouldn’t let go, so he pushed with his foot against the creature’s shoulder and tore himself free, pitching to the floor from the exertion. Naturally the hand came with him, detaching itself from the zombie’s body. The zombie moaned. Danny jumped to his feet, took the hand, and stuffed it into the zombie’s mouth. The zombie made a sound of incomprehension. He began to gnaw away at his own hand, chomping on it like tasty spare ribs. A finger fell to the ground. He stopped. Danny looked down at the finger. The zombie looked at Danny and then raced to pick up the finger in case Danny got hungry and thought to take it from him.
Charlene came down on top of Danny. He braced her with his arm, holding her off. He screamed when he saw her canine teeth flash in front of him, trying to bite and chomp through his face. He couldn’t believe this. This was his boss. Yes, she was a bitch, but now she was a zombie bitch!
With a strength he didn’t know he had in him, he flung her off of him, then got up and charged through the others as they tried to stop him.
He ran out of the diner.
Groups of three and four zombies were on every street corner, moaning and walking at a snail’s pace. Some were people who used to come into the diner occasionally. Now they lurched in Danny’s direction, sensing fresh meat. There were others huddled in a semicircle, trying to make headway somewhere and snarling angrily as they were chased back. Danny wondered what it could be. When he got there he saw a fierce Chihuahua, fending off a horde of zombies, biting and growling. They kept trying to get their hands on it, but it barked and tore at their appendages, rending them apart.
It ran through legs and arms, stopped in front of Danny. When Danny started to run, the dog ran with him, first at his side, then running ahead, showing him where to go. A kinship was instantly formed.
Butt Muncher.
Cool nickname, Danny decided, and gave it to him. He had seen the dog bite one of them in the ass. Seemed apropos.
‘He broke free of his harness!’
‘What?’
‘He broke free of his harness!’
‘What?’
‘He broke free—’
‘Why do you keep repeating that?’
‘Well, you said, “What?”’
‘Soldier, I heard you the first time. I was just expressing shock that it had happened! It’s like saying “What the fuck?”’
‘But—’
‘What now?’
‘When did you say “What the fuck”?’
‘Fucking get it together, soldier! Tell me what happened!’ He swallowed. ‘He gnawed off part of his arm.’
‘Good God.’
There was a bloodcurdling scream. General Deaconheinz looked over the soldier’s shoulder and saw one of his men writhing on the floor, while the pocked and bubbling body of Dr Parkingapp huddled over him, mouth thrust against his neck, chewing away.
The plane lurched to one side, going off course.
Military units were making their way down the streets, a combination of gear-saddled soldiers on Segways with mounted machine guns and military jeeps carrying personnel. Behind that was a slow-moving tank. Danny and Butt Muncher headed in their direction. Machine-gun fire went off around them, and flecks of flesh and blood soared through the air. Danny covered his ears, and the dog barked. The soldiers obliterated the zombies that were in front of them, leaving behind bricks of shredded flesh. It was impressive stuff, all that firepower, and after the initial shock of it wore off, it got Danny to thinking about Jennifer. The explosions reminded him of the Fourth of July, so many years ago, when they had shared their first kiss - with tongue. ‘Oh, God,’ he said. ‘She’s everywhere.’