Necrophobia - 02 Read online

  Still, of course, I was trapped.

  I was nearly delirious from hunger.

  I was dizzy and nearly mad from living in the dark. Unless you’ve been in a situation where you can’t stand up, you don’t know how awful not being able to do it really is. I used to put my feet up against the walls and pretend I was standing.

  I’m not sure if it was the day I came out of it or the next day after, but the trapdoor opened and one of the soldiers tossed my water bottle down. I’ll never forget that guy. He was a black dude with a white scar down the bridge of his nose that looked like a question mark. To amuse himself and make my degradation that much worse, he couldn’t simply toss my daily water bottle down, no, he had to throw it. He liked to peg me. When he bounced it off my head, he cheered. When he hit me somewhere else, he started cussing.

  Anyway, the trapdoor opened and I was ready.

  I wasn’t going to do anything foolish like leap for freedom…the brightness of the world up there was overpowering after being in the dark. No, I had a hobby, you see. And that was to fill my empty water bottles with dirt until they were heavy. When he opened the trapdoor that day, sighting in on me and throwing my bottle, I surprised him and caught it. And then I surprised him again by throwing one packed with dirt right into his face.

  He pulled his TR-15 and was ready to shoot, but some other guy told him to knock it off. Before the trapdoor was closed, they tossed another guy down there. An old guy with white hair. “Have fun with your crazy friend, Pops,” they told him, slamming the trapdoor shut.

  THE ANSWER MAN

  For a time he did not speak and neither did I.

  We just listened to each other breathing in the darkness.

  Finally, he said, “Are you as crazy as they say?”

  “Much worse,” I said, my voice dry and rough. I sipped some water. “I’m only as crazy as they make me.”

  “Aren’t we all.”

  “You have a name?” I asked.

  “Sure. Once upon a time, I was known as Clayton King, but these days folks call me Pops. Must have something to do with my age.”

  I introduced myself and just listened to him talk, something he seemed to enjoy doing quite a bit and the reason for that became clear as he told me he had taught biological sciences at Manhattan College before the Army rounded him up with a group of others. He was too old for soldiering, so they made an orderly of sorts out of him. He cleaned the camp barracks and swept up, did just about every odd job that came along.

  “Sort of a camp boy and at my age,” he said.

  “I always hoped the Army still existed,” I told him. “I hoped they’d straighten this out, put down the zombies and restore some sort of order. But this Army isn’t the one I was hoping for.”

  “No, not exactly. What you have here are remnants of several regular Army and National Guard units thrown together by Colonel Brightwater. He maintains discipline and keeps them alive and they follow him. Brightwater’s strategy is simple, Steve. He plans to exterminate every last zombie, every militiaman and survivalist, every crazy and radical that is a threat to the order he wants to reestablish. It’s a pretty ambitious plan, eh?”

  It was. And it was very similar to the plan we had come up with: to take back our world street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood, village by town by city. It was only now that I realized the folly and impracticability of it all. Yet…what else was there? You couldn’t just hide your head and hope for the best. Maybe the idea of Brightwater—with the sixty or seventy soldiers Pops said he had—cleaning out New York City borough by borough was unrealistic. Maybe the idea of my little group doing the same with Yonkers and the like was even more preposterous, but I still believed the seed of something larger was the thing that could turn the tide. For if in every town and city across the country and the world, rational survivors banded together and waged war on the undead and the unlawful, predatory elements, then there was hope. But doing nothing was not only self-defeating but suicidal.

  I told Pops this.

  “Agreed. It has to start somewhere. And if it’s happening here, it’ll be happening other places. We can only hope.” He sighed. “But as things stand, Brightwater’s Brigade—yes, he actually calls it such—are not so much fighting a war but simply fighting to survive.”

  “I’ve seen what they’ve been doing. They’ve been clearing a lot of neighborhoods.”

  “Yes, small potatoes, though. You should see what it’s like in Midtown Manhattan or Brooklyn. Unimaginable. Not just the militias and crazies, but millions of zombies. Much more than even a well-armed group on the ground can possibly handle even with helicopter air support. No, the only thing that will thin those numbers are concentrated air strikes and bombing campaigns. Nothing less.”

  “You sound more like a tactician than a teacher.”

  “Certainly. It grows on you.”

  I asked him why he was down there with me and he admitted that he had broken one of Brightwater’s cardinal rules. He’d swiped a slice of ham from the larder where he’d been assisting one of the cooks.

  “Usurper, heretic, criminal, that’s me.” He laughed. “That is what we are reduced to here. Brightwater controls the food and rations it accordingly. You get no more than your daily portion. The politics of survival have necessitated that even food and water be strictly regulated.”

  Solitary, as he called it, for swiping a piece of ham? It seemed a little severe, but he told me it was actually quite merciful because Brightwater had a positively Medieval turn of mind and it was only two weeks ago that another food thief was executed for doing the same, and another not long before had his hands chopped off and was thrown to the zombies outside the gate.

  Medieval, was right. Barbaric.

  “Brightwater is what I would refer to as a disturbed individual. I have no doubt that he was a good soldier: authoritative, fearless, and absolutely merciless. He followed orders, I would think, to the letter and expected others to do the same. He did not question them. Now, however, the old order is gone but lives on in men like him. Men who have absolute power and absolute authority. I honestly believe that as harsh as he can be, he really believes it’s for the good of the many rather than the few. He sees himself as a father figure, a leader, a king, and we are his subjects.”

  “Do any of his men ever go AWOL?”

  “Yes. Several have. Three of them have been shot for deserting. Two others were publicly tortured. If you have any plans like that, keep them under your hat because somebody is always watching and Sonny Boy is the grand inquisitor here.”

  “Sonny Boy?”

  “Sergeant-Major Sonny Boydson. Known as Sonny Boy behind his back. He’s a sadist and a psychopath who believes he is the sole instrument of God’s will on Earth. You’ll want to stay on his good side. Even if you’re not religious, my friend, pretend that you are.”

  I had been captured and tossed into the arms of a police state lorded over by a Hitleresque demigod with a vicious bully boy at his side to route out the witches, heretics, and enemies of the state. Pops told me that I would be taken out soon and that within days I would be out with one of the extermination squads, which were called “Bio-containment Units” by Brightwater. That I was down here was because I was an outsider and I had to be “softened”. Beat down before I was allowed to stand up. Brightwater believed it was human nature to bite the hand that feeds, therefore, it was important to learn to fear the hand first off.

  Even then, I was planning.

  Even then, I was thinking of how I would escape.

  “So, basically, step lightly around Sonny Boy. The others aren’t so bad. No worse than any living beneath the rule of a totalitarian despot. However, like in any such situation, people here are constantly watching each other and ratting each other out over the slightest infraction in order to ingratiate themselves to their superiors. Pretend it’s Berlin in 1943 and the Gestapo is everywhere, and you’ll survive.”

  We talked for hours and eventual
ly came around to the subject of The Awakening. I told him how I’d first seen it in Iraq, how it had been called Necrovirus then, how it had been contained and then, five years later, broke loose globally. “Did you hear anything toward the end? Anything about a vaccine or anything? Some way to fight it? Did they come up with anything?”

  “Well, yes and no. Before I was rounded up, I hid out with a woman named Clarice Dunhill who was a CDC pathologist and a member of their EIS, Epidemic Intelligence Service, who tracked outbreaks of infectious diseases around the globe. She knew a few things. Now first off, I’m sure you know that in their desperation more than a few countries used tactical nuclear weapons. They were dropping left and right in Asia and the Middle East. Of course, it wasn’t always to control the outbreak but for military reasons. Hell, we used them against the North Koreans. But these were strictly stopgap measures and solved absolutely nothing other than killing a lot of living, breathing human beings. I’m sure you heard about all that. Now, here’s something you didn’t hear about. At the end, Necrophage was isolated and, contrary to popular belief, it was not a virus at all. It was a bacterium. A saprobic bacterium that exists naturally in the human gut but is not activated until death at which point, of course, it begins feeding on the remains and commencing the decomposition cycle. This was the culprit. It mutated. It became something nature never intended it to be.

  “Now, in the desperation of the powers that be, certain bio-agents were released globally by airborne dispersal to try and halt the spread of the Necrophage bacteria…or should we say not so much the spread but the activation. Regardless, one of them was a genetically engineered baculovirus of the sort that generally infect insects. Parasitical by nature like any other virus—and with a new and deadly gene sequence spliced onto it—this baculovirus was supposed to latch onto Necrophage and cause the latter to go absolutely mad, in a biochemical sort of way. Shifting into reproductive overdrive, Necrophage—now invaded by the virus—would destroy itself in replicating the baculovirus until soon enough, the bacteria was destroyed and the host body was converted into nearly pure virus, which caused an enzyme to be released that would liquefy the skeleton.”

  “And how was that supposed to make things better?”

  “Well, the idea was that it would literally make the zombies destroy themselves. They would, at the cellular level, auto-cannibalize themselves and that in a matter of months there would be no more zombies.”

  “But couldn’t that create a super viral Necrophage?”

  “No. And the reason for that is as soon as Necrophage invades a living human host, our immune system releases a protein that literally neuters the bacteria and starves its parasitic virus.” I heard him breathing in the dark, long and pained. “It was good science, Steve. Brilliant science, really. And if it had worked, the walking dead would have been wiped out within a few months or so and Necrophage would have been neutered, as I say, in the human body. And all would have been as nature intended. But, I’m guessing it didn’t work because the dead seem pretty active and it’s many months now. Anyway, that was one of the things that were tried, Clarice told me. There was also some sort bioengineered grave mold, which would have devoured carrion at a fantastic rate…but it doesn’t appear that worked either. Nature tends to have its own systems of checks and balances where invasive organisms are concerned.”

  He went on to tell me how the Necrophage bacterial infection of a living human being mimicked viral symptoms and that got everyone thinking it was a virus. A series of viruses were isolated from infected corpses and were thought to be the culprit, but later the CDC realized that the viruses themselves were harmless and in their dogged, determined hunt for a mystery virus, they had overlooked the simplest of culprits: the saprobic bacteria, of which there were endless varieties. In laboratory trials, the existence of these bacteria did not even raise an eyebrow because they naturally occur in carrion. It was so simple that it was overlooked. Most bacteria respond to antibiotics, but this particular pathogen proved extremely resistant. The only antibiotics that worked were so powerful that they killed the host in their weakened state.

  We discussed what happened to me in Iraq where I first saw the dead walk.

  “Interesting,” he said. “Clarice never mentioned an earlier outbreak. But it was very localized, you say?”

  “Yeah, I never saw it anywhere else or heard so much as a rumor about it.”

  “Strange.”

  Then I asked the question that still had not been answered. “You said Necrophage occurs naturally. That it’s nothing more than a mutated carrion bacteria. Okay. So what mutated it?”

  “Ah, yes. Exactly. Well, Clarice and her people had a theory on that.” He moved closer to me as if he was about to share a state secret. “Do you know what a gamma ray burst is?”

  I didn’t, but he told me. Gamma ray bursts are pulsations of gamma radiation resulting from supernova events and the collapse of massive stars into black holes. The released energy is more than our own sun will produce during its entire existence. These bursts are happening regularly in distant reaches of space. The ones that our telescopes and satellites pick up are millions of years old because it takes so long for the energy to reach Earth at the speed of light. Pops said that significant bursts could explain extinction events on our own planet.

  “The bursts that we’re interested in come from the Magellanic Clouds, which are sort of satellite galaxies to our Milky Way. Massive explosions, the result of star births, in the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds millions of years ago have released energy pulsations similar to those caused by the Big Bang itself. Carried in these gamma rays appears to be a sort of exotic radiation that has mutated the saprobic bacteria in the human species,” he told me. “And hence, we are in this horrible situation as the result of ancient energies randomly directed into an area of space that we now occupy.”

  Finally, it all made sense to me…or as much sense as it can when you’re living out the plot of a horror comic. I had long wondered what possible vector could spread Necrophage so quickly, and then make it infect the entire world in a matter of days. Well, here it was. The gamma radiation burst must have blanketed the Earth, probably only for a matter of seconds, but long enough to mutate the saprobic bacteria in not only the living but the dead. There would have been no protection against it. It would have gone through every conceivable barrier, even reaching down into graves to infect corpses. If my high school science memories were correct, the Earth was regularly bombarded by gamma rays and cosmic rays, many of them from the sun itself. They passed through every living thing every day of our lives. But the ones from the Magellanic Clouds were of a special sort.

  Pops said he thought what happened in Iraq must have been a small precursor to the larger event that would occur five years later. As he talked, I listened and thought about those bioagents that had been released. I just wondered what they might be up to, combined with the global release of radiation from tactical nukes.

  But I had no time to ask because we both heard the trapdoor being unlocked.

  “My guess is they’re coming for you,” Pops said.

  The soldiers pulled me out. It was daytime and the light was so bright after my long confinement in the darkness that I had to shield my eyes. I felt like some mole, some subterranean worm. The brightness made me dizzy. The soldiers shoved me along and dragged me when I didn’t move fast enough.

  “Sergeant-Major wants to see you, shitbag,” the black dude who liked to hit me with water bottles said.

  It was time to meet Sonny Boy.

  HE CRAWLS IN THE DIRT LIKE A REPTILE

  Well, they weren’t about to let me see Sonny Boy in my present condition. They took me to a bunkhouse and showed me where the shower was. It was lukewarm, but nothing ever felt so goddamn good as stripping out of my rancid clothes and cleaning the layers of caked filth off my body with soap and water. It was luxurious. Unless you’ve lived in a hole as a prisoner you cannot completely appreciate this. T
hey said I had five minutes in the shower, which was better than the rest got, being they only had a meager two minutes a week to save on water. I enjoyed my entire five minutes. When I was done, I found a fresh set of BDUs and boots waiting for me.

  But my royal treatment wasn’t finished just yet.

  They brought me to the cook shack and I ate fried chicken, potatoes with butter, carrots and fresh bread, pickles and oranges, butterscotch pudding and drank all the coffee I wanted. Afterwards, they gave me back my cigarettes and I started to say no, but my addiction had other ideas.

  While my friends watched me closely with their TR-15 carbines, I smoked outside the shack. The black dude kept glaring at me and I glared right back. Usually, it’s nothing but bullshit between tough guys, territorial nonsense, but in this case I meant it. He had messed with me when he could have been kind. He treated me like a dog and I hadn’t forgotten. I was going to fuck him up and I wanted him to know it.

  I was taken to a Quonset next, and into an office where a tall, lanky white guy with a gray bristle brush crew-cut awaited me. He wore BDUs, too, and his face was craggy with age and experience, but his eyes were wild and shiny like those of a mad dog.

  This was Sonny Boy.

  He refused to look in my direction, but I had a feeling his eyes were on me all the same. “What’s your name?”

  “Steve,” I said. “Steve Niles.”

  “Sit down, son.”

  When I did, both he and his adjutant, a tough-looking Hispanic dude in BDUs, just ignored me. They were playing poker and I had to wait for them to finish. When they did, they both stared at me. The adjutant’s eyes were filled with raw hate, so he was easy to peg, but the Sergeant Major was a different story. He kept staring at me with a stark, almost hungry look and it made me feel like a bleeding man in a shark tank just waiting for the teeth.