Necrophobia - 02 Page 5

  We were all staring at Phil and he was squirming. “Listen,” he said. “No insult to any of you, but if you think your existence here is some kind of state secret, you’re very much mistaken. ARM has been watching you guys. You’re the ones with the Strykers. You’ve killed ARM troopers. You shot down one of their helicopters. You think they’re just going to forget that? They got their eye on you. They want those Strykers and they plan on having them. They also plan on having payback.”

  What he said rang true. We had been a thorn in their side. If they indeed had us under surveillance—and that seemed perfectly reasonable to me—then sooner or later they were going to start causing us trouble. A full frontal assault with armor, troops, and helicopter support would have been my guess. But if they didn’t want to lose a lot of men, they might try something sneakier. Say, like letting zombies flood our compound, taking out our security measures, maybe throwing a little ambush at us in the form of a mortar barrage.

  “Most of the people with ARM aren’t military types,” Phil admitted. “What you have is a lot of weekend warrior types; wanna-be mercenaries and survivalists, but mostly just people trying to get by. But some of them, on the other hand, are hardcore. They have people from the Marines and Army, weapons specialists and pilots, infantry troopers and medics…you name it. One of them is named Bladek. Henry Bladek. He’s a Special Forces guy, or was. He’s a real pro and he runs a team of special ops types. My guess is that it was these guys who took out your chain and snipped your wire. Those guys are real good. And they’re the ones that have been watching you so it stands to reason. They’ll start with sabotage, maybe some sniping, boobytraps, IEDs out in the road. By the time ARM swings in here, you people will be worn and paranoid.”

  “And how do you know all this?” Jimmy asked him.

  “Because, Sir, I have ears and ARM is nothing if not a gossip mill.”

  We left Phil sitting there by himself, while the rest of us convened one of Tuck’s war councils just out of earshot. There was a lot of arguing and general disagreement. Not surprising. We were acting from a position of fear, always had been, only Phil had made it a lot worse with the things he had told us. We were targeted and ARM was intent on destroying us.

  “Well,” Riley finally said. “We should give him a chance. If I or any of you were in that position, we’d want the same.”

  “That guy might be Bladek for all we know,” Sabelia said.

  “Could be, but we can’t know that.”

  It went on for some time. Finally, I said, “All right. We give him a chance. We watch him. We make sure he’s never alone. We make him prove himself. If it turns out he’s okay, great. If not…”

  “If not, I know how to handle it,” Tuck said.

  It was agreed then. We went back over to Phil, who looked so nervous I thought he was going to have kittens. His eyes roamed from us to the floor and back again. In my heart, I did not believe this guy was Bladek, but that didn’t mean I believed anything else he said, though.

  “You can stay,” Diane told him.

  “We’re trusting you now,” Jimmy warned him.

  “And if you fuck up,” Tuck told him, his fist wrapping around the K-Bar combat knife on his belt. “Well…you get the picture. I’ll be watching you. If I think you’re threat, you won’t get a warning…you understand?”

  Sweating, and rightly so, Phil nodded.

  And that was how he became part of our little community.

  NIGHT TERRORS

  I was pretty proud of Paul. The world he had known had crumbled and fallen. His mother was killed. He was forced into a survival situation with the rest of us. But he handled it like a man. He really did. There were a few moments when he weakened, but mostly he was tough. I think after awhile, I started thinking of him less as a boy and more of as a little man. But that was stupid on my part. Because he was still a boy. A boy who was traumatized at a tender age and was having trouble coping with his feelings.

  About a week after Phil showed, Paul woke up screaming in the night. My bunk was next to his and I was right there at his side, calming him.

  In the darkness, he said, “Dad? Are we really here at this base?”

  “Yes,” I said. “We are.”

  “And mom’s dead?”

  I swallowed. “Yes.”

  He just stared into the darkness. His eyes were shiny and wet. I could almost feel the fear, frustration, and grief coming off him and I was utterly helpless to do anything about it.

  “It’s going to be okay, though. It really will. We’re going to put things back to right. It’s just going to take some time is all.”

  “You’re lying,” he said to me. “You are, and you know it. Nothing’ll ever be right again. It’s always going to be like this. Just a…a…a goddamn mess.”

  “Paul…”

  “I miss my mom. Why did you let her die? Why did you let any of this happen?”

  There it was, and it cut deep. It wasn’t anything that I didn’t ask myself a dozen times a day…yet, and I hate even admitting this, I wanted to slap him right across the mouth. I was never heavy-handed with him, but what he said was too close to the truth and too near the heart of my own guilt. And it hurt, God, how it hurt. I thought of all the fighting, struggling, scavenging, and scheming that I’d done since the world fell. I had done it to keep us alive and, more so, to protect him. Him above all else and the fact that he thought so very little of me and my efforts was painful.

  Diane was with him by then.

  She tried to comfort him, but he shrugged her off.

  “Listen to me, Paul,” she said, her voice going stern and sounding so much like Ricki’s I felt weak inside. “None of us are real happy with the way things are, but crying and whining about it won’t change anything. You’re only going to make yourself and everyone else upset. You’re dad has done everything humanly possible to keep you alive and keep us safe and you should appreciate that.”

  “I just want my mom.”

  The words cut deeper each time he said them.

  Diane took hold of him. “Your mother’s dead. I miss her, too. So does your dad. If she were here now, she wouldn’t like what you’re doing because she would know that you’re better than this.”

  He burst into tears and she held him, rocking him, giving him the kind of maternal bonding I just couldn’t provide. I sat there, my head hung low as I remembered Ricki’s death and how it might have been avoided.

  After a time, Paul said, “I’m sorry, dad. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “It’s all right,” I said.

  But it wasn’t all right. I couldn’t see how it would ever be all right again. I left him with Diane and stalked out of there. I walked out into the corridor where I could be alone and the strength just went out of me. I didn’t even have the ability to take one more step. My back against the wall, I slid down to the floor and wanted to weep. Hell, I even tried to, but it was like there were no tears left inside me. I felt beaten. I felt that I had reached the point where I just had nothing left to give. I was squeezed dry. True, I was sinking in a morass of self-pity, but regardless I was just used up.

  Then a voice in the darkness said, “Kids say things they don’t mean.”

  For one crazy moment of pure joy and pure terror, I thought it was Ricki and I almost shouted her name. But it wasn’t Ricki; it was Sabelia. She was leaning up against the wall about ten feet from me and I had never even seen her.

  “Oh, he means it,” I told her. “And I honestly don’t blame him.”

  She ignored that. “Kids have no targets other than their parents, so they lash out. They empty the badness inside them. They have to get it out. If they don’t, trust me, it leads to very, very bad things,” she said as if she had gone through it herself and probably had. “So, no, he doesn’t mean it. That’s just his pain crying out. Misery loving company and all that. There’s nothing more to it than that.”

  She sat by me, put her arm around me, and then I wept. I
hate to admit it, but everything inside me had totally crashed and flat-lined and it came out. I wept. I shook with the guilt and anxiety that poured out of me. It came and went fast enough, but Sabelia never let go of me.

  “It’s better this way,” she said. “Get it out where it won’t do any more harm.”

  THE AWAKENING

  When stories started surfacing on CNN and the like about a major viral outbreak, people were scared. In fact, they were terrified. The unknown virus had something like an 80% communicability rate and a 100% mortality rate. It was reported that within the first four days, over two million had died in the United States alone. It was nearly as high in Europe. In Asia, it was five times that. And it just kept rolling. It wasn’t long before the CDC in Atlanta and the World Health Organization overseas had isolated the virus. They called it Necrophage V-X, the last two letters having something to do with proteins it synthesized.

  When the President mobilized the National Guard, recalled military units from around the world, and declared nationwide martial law, he went on the air and said the following:

  “The origin of the virus is unknown at this time. However, those infected exhibit flu-like symptoms followed by coma that lasts anywhere from two to six hours. Upon awakening, the infected are irrational and violent, often clawing and biting anyone that gets within close proximity. This is a time of great peril for our nation.”

  Nice, but nowhere in his speech did he mention the fact that when these people died, they came back or that millions of corpses in the country (and around the world) were leaving their graves to feed.

  It was a war and we were losing on all fronts.

  After 5,000 years of civilization, a bug so tiny you couldn’t see it unless you had an electron microscope was beating the human race. Not only were people dying in droves, which was bad enough, they were returning, playing upon one of mankind’s oldest and most pervasive fears: the fear of the dead. The human race was locked in mortal combat with Necrophage and they were losing. People, all people, are basically survivalists by nature. Some are better at it than others. But it’s in all of us—the inherited need to survive at all costs. A basic and overriding tenet of nature. In the wake of Necrophage, all the weirdos and fringe-types kept down by a rational society came crawling out of the woodwork. Rational society was no longer rational: it was diseased and mentally unstable. So it came as no surprise that the crazies came to drink at the trough of destruction: religious weirdies and survivalist enclaves, militias and hate groups and suicide cults. It was knee-jerk time and the world was filled with jerking knees and various creepy crawlies that looked much like our neighbors.

  And the living dead proliferated.

  They were in the streets of every city, every town, and every village until there were more dead than living, and the latter group were definitely under siege, hunted by animate dead things, mindless ghouls with an overwhelming need to feed on human flesh. They came out of graveyards and chapels, mortuaries and morgues, hospitals and funeral homes. They swarmed in the streets, and day by awful day, people dropped like proverbial flies, returning to join the swelling ranks of the ghouls. Nobody even made any serious attempts to calculate how many cannibal corpses were in the streets, but then they didn’t have to. Anyone whose mind was still functioning could easily see that the dead outnumbered the living a hundred-to-one by the end of the first week, and by the end of the first month, it was probably a hundred times that.

  The military and National Guard fought hard.

  They put down a lot of zombies, but often their greatest hurdle was dealing with a panicked population and the various militias that seemed to bloom like flies fighting over the same turd. Army, Marine, and Guard units kicked the shit out of the militias at every turn. Often, when faced with a real combat unit, the militias just ran. But they did not go away. And as the infrastructure of the country collapsed, so did the military. Soldiers were infected with Necrophage and died. Others joined militias. Still others joined cults or created their own armies.

  The war, as it was, began for me in Iraq some five years before the Necrophage outbreak. I saw the dead walk there in a nameless village in the Sunni Triangle. The virus was then called Necrovirus. It was contained, as were the dead. At least, that’s what I thought until five years later. So when the dead started returning and infesting my little neighborhood in Yonkers, I was shocked, yes, but not truly surprised.

  So war was waged. I gathered up my son and my wife, my wife’s sister—Diane—and Jimmy LaRue from across the street. There really wasn’t anyone else left. We drove out into the country to the one place and the one man I knew that could keep us alive: Tuck. J.J. Tucker. A veteran hard case, ex-Marine Recon who had picked up the name “Sixty-Five” in Vietnam because he’d once dispatched that many enemies in a single day. Tuck had a tower on a razor wire-enclosed farm. The tower was high-tech, high-security. The perimeter was mined, trip-wired, you name it. We did well there until we were hit by airstrikes. I guess they thought we were an ARM encampment. No matter. After that, we were on the run. We hid out at a run-down airfield. That’s when Riley showed up. She and Jilly. Riley had been a tough, inner-city cop. But when I met her she was a victim. As was Jilly. Both had been held in a rape camp run by ARM. She needed help to liberate the other women there.

  To make a long story short, we fought hard against ARM and the zombies in the mean streets of the Bronx, but we got most of the women out. Though they could have run or scattered to the four winds, the ladies—Sabelia, Carrie, Ginny, Susan, Mia, Dorothy, Kasey, and Brittany—stayed. I suppose they stayed because they were grateful on one hand that we had gotten them out of there, and on the other, because we represented stability along with those things we refused to let die with civilization: morals and ethics.

  That is, as they say, the long and short of it.

  We had been holed up ANG Pelham ever since, scavenging, killing zombies, and harassing ARM units. Now, if what our new friend Phil said was true, there was every possibility that that was about to come crashing to a halt.

  HOMEFRONT

  “Maybe you want to see it from my perspective,” Phil told me about two weeks after he joined up with us. “Nobody trusts me, nobody likes me. I pull every shit job, every dirty detail. I try to be a friend, but I’m treated like the enemy. I’m watched, I’m picked on, I’m threatened. Well, you know what, Steve? Fuck you and your little dysfunctional family. I’ve had it. I don’t like to be treated like a dog so I’m getting the hell out. I’m going back to the city.”

  I wanted to tell him it wasn’t so, but it was.

  Nobody had really warmed to the guy. I tried to chat it up with him and I know for a fact that Diane and Jimmy gave him the benefit of the doubt, but the others kept their distance. Sabelia was openly hostile to him. The other girls ignored his presence because he had been with ARM. The kids were nice enough to him, particularly Maria who was sweet on everyone, but other than that, yes, he was treated like a dog.

  And the worst one was Tuck.

  He hated ARM, of course, and anyone connected with it was trash in his book and they got no slack whatsoever. He went out of his way to treat Phil like shit. He intimidated him, he tormented him, and he threatened him. At first, of course, I thought it was all some kind of hazing…ride the new guy, see what he’s made of. But it went on and on. I had even tried to intervene on Phil’s behalf and that only caused a rift between Tuck and me. I thought he was overboard; he thought I was naïve, gullible.

  “You can’t trust him,” Tuck said.

  “He’s been here two weeks. Lighten up already.”

  “I lighten up and that piece of shit will be calling his boys in. Maybe you and the others are buying his crap about not being part of ARM anymore, but I don’t.”

  I tried to be diplomatic. “Tuck…if he was going to do something, he would have done it by now. Regardless, at the very least go easy when the kids are around. You’re making them nervous.”

  “Listen,
Steve. I love those kids and I’d do anything for them. And that’s why I’m not taking my eyes off that puke. He’s up to something. I can smell it on him. And the way I see it, I’m all that’s standing between those kids and him. Sympathy is fine, Steve, but yours is misplaced.”

  “Just go easy.”

  “Hell, I will.”

  It was pointless to argue with Tuck. Absolutely pointless. His shorts were in a bunch and nothing I could say or do would straighten them out. He was a notoriously stubborn man. Essentially good and loyal, but sometimes his aggression overcompensated.

  “It’s bullshit,” Phil told me. “You have no idea what I go through. I wake up in the night and there’s that fucking jarhead, sitting up in his bunk, staring at me, scraping his knife along the back of his hand. ‘Ready anytime you are,’ he says. How do you think I’m sleeping knowing that kill-happy bastard might slit my throat?”

  “He wouldn’t do that.”

  “Don’t be naïve, Steve. He’s not right up here,” Phil told me, tapping his skull with his finger.

  Naïve. I guess I was naïve. Naïve enough to believe that Phil might be okay down deep and that Tucker wasn’t a psychopath. Of course, the truth was that if you were the enemy, then Tuck was a psychopath. He was merciless when it came to things like that. He kind of saw us as his family, his property, and anyone that was a threat to that was in for a world of hurt. Guardian protector, that was Tuck. Though I can argue about a few things that annoyed me about him, one thing I can’t argue about is that he was more loyal and fierce than any ten guard dogs. And like them, he was a killer at heart.

  “Phil, just listen to me,” I said. “Give it a month. Can you do that? Give it a month to settle down.”

  “No. I’ve had my fill. I think you’re okay, Steve, but I’m getting out.”

  I sighed. “Tuck still thinks you’re part of ARM. He thinks you’re some kind of mole. If it hadn’t been for the fact that you showed up at the same time that chain was cut and the tripwire was snipped, it wouldn’t be like this. Somebody did that and he thinks that somebody was you.”