Zombie Wake (3 page)

At one Peace Corps training
Ulric
and I witnessed the dark side of something grisly. It
was near the beginning of our tenure. We were bouncing along miles from the
training center in the back of a diesel land cruiser pick-up with two Ugandan
park rangers. The rangers were pushing the envelope on travel distance in their
attempt to impress us and as a result it was getting pretty late. We had at
minimum an hour drive over heavily rutted roads to look forward to so we
huddled down in the bed of the truck behind the cab. One of the rangers we were
riding with was talking to the other in Swahili when he said something that
captured
Ulric's
attention.
Ulric
interrupted asked if he was speaking of
mulokalay
.
Both rangers looked at him expressionless without response.

I wasn’t surprised at their
reaction. On many occasions I had heard the term. The translation, Night
Dancer, I understood as a mythical made up thing; a strategy mothers used to
keep their children close and in at night. Sometimes people, drunk or mad with
fever were pointed out as night dancers. One story told to me by a great
grandma described them as drugged cannibals. Another pegged them as magical
creatures akin to werewolves.

I was always frustrated by the
stories because each scenario played out the same time and time again. Some
Ugandans would be talking, they would forget that the Americans were
listening,
they would mention the night dancers. When asked
what a night dancers were, there was the deadpan stare again. The subject was
dodged with platitudes and feigned language barrier. I had long since given up
on trying to figure out what the hell a night dancer was, so when these two
rangers froze in mid sentence and looked back at
Ulric
with that typical expression, I was ready for a long quiet ride home.

But
Ulric
looked at them and said that he knew about Night Dancers and that he had seen
some at
Katonga
. He told them that he knew that Night
Dancers were real and they did not need to worry about us thinking strangely of
them. To my amazement, the rangers told us about an incident that had occurred
the previous night in a distant part of the park.

There was a fishing village along
the lake near the park boundary. Some fisherman had stayed out too long fishing
and ended up beaching on a small island for the night. According to the
rangers, Night Dancers came into their camp and killed them all. Six fishermen
were found the next morning torn to pieces. Four were missing.

“Could it have been lions?”
Ulric
asked. But both rangers were adamant that they had
seen lion kills too many times and that these men were not killed by lions.
Then they told us that the bodies had shown signs of having been eaten. At the
time, I was a bit cynical about the Ugandan tendency to try to scare us about
life in Africa.
Ulric
, on the other hand, continued
to grill the two men about the incident. He seemed obsessed with the gory
details.

The next evening after class,
Ulric
was a million miles away. At Dinner I asked him what
was up. He told me that he was thinking of sneaking out later to try and locate
the Night Dancers. His plan was to steal a boat from the village and paddle up
the channel to the island.

“You’re nuts,” I said. African
waterways at night are not safe places. If you were to take a poll of a
thousand Americans and asked them what the most dangerous animal in Africa is,
most of them would say lions, or hyenas, or leopards. Very few would know that
the most dangerous animal title is a tie between the Cape buffalo and the
hippopotamus.

The
Kazinga
Channel was world famous for its hippo populations. Hippos are notoriously
territorial and aggressive. Bulls sport canine teeth that are as big around as
you forearm and as long. I had personally witnessed a bull hippo attack and
bite a metal boat. He punched two large round tooth holes in the bottom of the
boat and it almost sunk. The idea of paddling a wooden canoe up the channel in
the dark sounded pretty stupid.

But twenty minutes of
Ulric
talking his magic and I was transformed into a
willing accomplice.
Ulric
convinced me that Hippos
come to shore at night to graze so being out on the channel would, in
actuality, be the safest place to be when it came to hippos. I couldn't fault
his logic.

Three hours later found the two of
us kneeling in a 16-foot long canoe paddling up stream. It was a fairly bright
night with an almost full moon. I could hear the mosquitoes and feel them on my
face. Even worse were the clouds of lake flies. While harmless, the insects
swarm over the water in the evenings so thick that anyone who goes to lake fly
country has to quickly get used to inhaling bugs. They get in your eyes, ears,
nose and mouth.

Ulric
was
up front, leaving me to the steering. The canoe was difficult to manage and I
found that I worked hard and didn't feel like I was getting anywhere. After
what seemed like hours,
Ulric
hissed at me to stop. I
noticed for the first time that there was a glow ahead. It looked like the
headlights of a vehicle on the shore of the channel.
Ulric
motioned at me to keep silent and pointed toward the vehicle.

As we bobbed in the water about 60
yards off shore, I saw armed men getting out of the vehicle. It looked like a
military truck. I heard doors open and slam shut. The men walked to the front
of the truck and spread out in the glow of the headlights. The truck was
parallel to the channel’s bank with the lights shining upstream. It was then
that I noticed there were people walking towards the soldiers. They were still
pretty far away and were barely visible. I recall thinking that they didn't
look quite right. They seemed uncoordinated and walked with a drunken
stupor—sort of a shuffle with their shoulders slumped and their head
down. I was just about the say something to
Ulric
when he turned, looked at me in an intense way and held his index finger to his
lips. The look in
Ulric's
eyes gave me pause.

Then the loud voice of a soldier
shouted an order in Swahili.
Ulric
turned at the
sound of the shouting just as the four soldiers started shooting their rifles.
I watched in shock as they calmly and almost robotically gunned down the people
on the bank. The shooting lasted for 20 or 30 seconds and then it stopped.
There was a silent pause, and then one of the soldiers walked forward drawing a
pistol from his belt. The man walked from corpse to corpse and fired one round
into the head of each of his victims.

“If you like breathing, you better
keep quiet,”
Ulric
whispered. Somehow he got me to
help him turn that damn canoe around and get the hell out of there. We both
agreed that we saw nothing and that we would never speak about it again.

I pulled the trigger. Plum Thumb's
hand splattered first. I shot again. His head exploded the instant I heard the
metal shell ting against the wood plank somewhere behind me. The whole event
seemed, somehow, to precede the sound of the actual shots. Boom. Boom. It was
done. He dropped. I felt a breeze against my face when tooth beak flapped her
wings, swooping into the midst of the slimy pool now dripping through the
planks. She scooped a piece of grey, white and black into her pouch and
returned to my side. The odor, a musty smell, burned my nose, turned my stomach
and pushed me three steps back and into the wet night of the bus accident.

I couldn't place it that night. I
thought it was fresh skunk spray mixed with my adrenalin-induced heightened
senses. It hit me as I stood in the mud watching a victim in the creek flounder
half inside the submerged vehicle. He was a trooper, a survivor...the survivor.
I silently celebrated as Joe and Dylan secured him to a harness and
methodically worked against the fast moving water, pulling him to the safety of
the dark morass. I learned later that he was not the driver of the golden
crumpled automobile but was thrown from the bus and pinned between the water
and the sedan. The smell increased my motivation to get the man back to the
road and I relayed through dispatch to the Fire captain for assistance with the
hillside transfer.

The scent, skunk and rotten fish,
was inescapable. I wondered if the smell was what drew tooth beak to the
remnants. It seemed like an atypical animal behavior—at least for a
pelican. Maybe it would appear more natural if the bird were a buzzard, or
seagull even. Often, when I see a circle of buzzards, I hike to the backcountry
location beneath to find a carcass half consumed. If it was anything of
stature, I note my position and return later to collect the bones. Those
situations, while vile smelling, never disrupt my sense of the world’s balance.
They never seemed horrific or contaminated. No animal part could look or be as
wrong as the chunk that tooth beak rolled out of her mouth—a piece of
curved skull, with stings of mucus. It was impossible to distinguish color
under the orange glow of the sodium lights but the hair attached, now matted
with slime,
displayed
what could have been the same
reverse grey pattern that I had seen on the woman in the bus.

I wondered if the bus of patients
were the hospital ward residents that my wife had spoken about. Could they be
responsible for this? Three years ago, after the birth of our second child,
Claire quit her position as a scientist at the university to stay home with the
kids. But these last few weeks, she’s been touring the local research
facilities, once again exploring her career options.

It was after her last walk through
the clinic that she came home baffled. “Things have changed,” she said. Since a
three billion dollar grant to fund pandemic viral research has affiliated the
University with the hospital, the timeline to go from laboratory bench research
to clinical trials has been sped up. The consequence, faster than industry
standards… and she went on to explain the latest trial... Something about using
a genetically modified avian flu virus and there was something about
stimulating stem cell production. The treatment had a rejuvenating effect,
including, if I heard right, grey hair reversal. Despite forcing myself to sit
still and nod, I remember more about the state of our backyard than the details
of the conversation. I only half listened to her that morning while sipping my
coffee and looking out the window at the neighbor’s cat, who seemed to be
stalking our chickens. It took me three rounds of cell biology to figure out
that my ability to tune out the subject was and continues to be exceptional.
And that discussion, as with so many of those conversations, ended with the
plea, “It’s not that I’m not interested. It’s just… you know me and
..
.”

What questions I would ask her now.
Now she is lying in bed ten miles from here—so far away, yet too close to
this zombie ridden pier. The head, remember, the head, I remind myself.
Lowering the rifle once again, I begin to make my stand.

Now, I wouldn’t say math was my
best subject but I figure, pretty
quick
, that with two
magazines for the AR15 (each 28 rounds), and my 40-caliber Smith and Wesson
(three sets of 11 rounds plus 1), I have less than one third the bullets I need
for this event. The pier is filled with… individuals. All look tattered, torn
and decomposed. One, holding an arm severed at the elbow, spits out a finger.
Most are moving forward.

We are trained that the use of
force is a continuum. You are constantly evaluating the circumstances before
you, and reacting appropriately. The Peace Officer Protective Equipment,
sometimes jokingly referred to as the batman belt, is a toolbox of options. The
most common first line of defense is voice, verbal judo it’s called. “Excuse me
sir, that behavior is unacceptable in this public setting…” that sort of thing.
Then there’s pepper spray and the baton. It is a common public misconception
that the use of force is like a ladder. You have to stand on rung number one
before you got to rung number two. In reality, you are continuously escalating
and de-escalating your response to match your environment. And rungs can be
skipped.

Now it’s time for bullets—all
of them. As I start shooting, really start, I think,
Don’t
pick them up
. It’s funny how even thoughts can become routine. In
a famous shoot out, three cops were killed because they stopped shooting to
collect their brass. During trainings, they had been taught to clean up their
empty shells promptly after unloading their weapon. When the real thing went
down, they maintained the tidying ritual. Because of that, trainings were
reworked and we were taught to let the metal fly. I am conscious of them
hitting the ground. BAM, ting-ting-ting, BAM, ting-ting-ting-ting.

The living dead go down with a
thump, one at a time.
I’m doing them a
favor
, I think. But with each shot spent my adrenalin levels increase, and
my pity is short lived. What is propelling me started as fear, quickly turned
to pity then finally to
anger.
Rage pumps out each
bullet. This is not my job. Furlough days, decreases in budget, failed
equipment and now this. This guy with a beer in his hand and one eye hanging
out of his head wants to eat me. NO.
Boom,
tinka
ting-ting.

But that was the last bullet. I let
the AR15 fall to my side. Before the strap catches, I have my handgun up and
shooting. Eleven zombies, they fall like dominoes almost stacking. I push
another magazine in and start pumping. Another layer of them stack up and the
ones behind start tripping. I push the last magazine with force. Methodically
and calculated, I start back. But instead of plucking one off at a time, hair
and scalp start flying--the zombies cease to fall. It takes me three rounds to
realize it’s the bullets. Oh no not the pig bullets.

*

Months ago, we had some pigs to
dispose of. You would never know during the day that they were there. At least,
I never saw one—not a one. But their nighttime activity was wreaking
havoc on the environment. The churned soil patches appeared completely
roto
-tilled, especially under oak tree canopies. The pigs
were eating acorns, tilling the soil, all the while introducing exotic
non-native weeds. We thought they were pigs. And after leaving buckets of
fermented corn under a motion-activated camera, our suspicions were confirmed.

Following a ton of paperwork,
permissions, environmental consultants, waivers and calls, we baited three
traps with sixteen pounds of fermented corn. We called it the Feral Pig
Eradication Project of the
Gaviota
Coast. Take them
out three by three. Shoot them. We had inquired about donating the meat to the
local homeless shelter but some line had been drawn deep in the sand and the
encouraged alternative was to dump the carcass off the bluff. To stay environmentally
conscientious, I ordered lead free bullets. But in my rush, I didn’t look at
all the options. Didn’t even realize there might be a lead free bullet without
the punch. I ordered the first on the list, which happened to be the ammunition
used by air marshals, frangible ammunition. It’s designed to break apart when
it hits a solid surface.

One boar came eager to eat. Walked
right into our trap. I wasn’t on duty the morning of the episode but the
rangers told me every detail—what a mess. They didn’t know why the animal
wasn’t going down. They just kept shooting. Shot after shot went into the kill
spot until finally… It must have run out of blood. They took me up to show me
the stains on the trail. After reenacting the scene and promising me I didn’t
deserve it, they opened an adjacent cooler and pulled out a gallon bag full of
red meat. I tucked it into my bag knowing that it would be a long time before I
lived this one down.

*

Would I live it down now? The extra
magazine I grabbed just an hour ago was left from that pig eradication project.
I had been meaning to move the open box to a better spot. Now, I aimed for
remnants of a nose in hope of finding a soft entrance. The result—her
face blew off. I shot another one clear into the eye and he dropped. But the
next two came out like puffs of air. Panic washed over me. Sheer panic.

In survival situations, the people
that make it are the ones that feel as though they can. It’s hard to see how
you could be in such a situation and not contemplate the worst. I needed a
plan. Survivors always have a plan.
Something to keep them
going.

I had about three feet between the
wall of rotten humans and me. Bodies littered the planks; the prone ones were
still. But the cadavers moving toward me were making headway and the pier was
thick with them, at least a hundred. I holstered my weapon, took a step back
and looked down into the water. The sun was far from rising; the air, clear,
dry and brisk. The water must be below 60 degrees. But I could swim to shore.
Many times I had watched the junior lifeguards jump from the pier and knew that
the shock would be tolerable. My twenty-pound gear belt would have to go. I
can’t see the bluffs or the
beach,
it’s still too
dark. With the water temperature, I wouldn’t be able to withstand it for too
long.
Not time for that…yet
, I think.