Necrophobia - 01 Read online

“Dick,” I said. “Come on. Elena’s dead, dude. Come with me.”

  That’s when Tuck arrived.

  “I ought to fucking feed you to them,” he said.

  I put a finger to my lips and we both listened for a few seconds as Dick talked to the dead and it almost seemed like they were listening to him, maybe understanding him. I didn’t think such a thing was possible, yet I couldn’t deny what I was seeing.

  I hooked Dick by the arm and Tuck did the same.

  We led him away. The zombies watched us. But they did not approach the fence. Maybe they already had earlier and had gotten a shock. It was hard to say. The voltage was non-lethal, but it was enough to give you a good kick in the ass or to burn your hand if you grabbed hold of it. Still, I doubted they were smart enough to care: meat was meat to them.

  When we got back to the tower, Jimmy led Dick inside and Tuck and I stood there a moment.

  “What the hell did he think he was doing?” Tuck said, lighting a cigarette.

  “He probably wasn’t thinking at all.”

  Tuck blew smoke into the beam of a motion light. “It was weird, Booky, and you know it. He was fucking talking to them.”

  “Seemed like it.”

  “He was and you know it. I bet if you go down there and stand next to the fence, they’ll rush it, they’ll try to get at you. Or me. But not Dick. Why not? That’s what I’d like to know: why not?”

  Tuck was right: it was weird. But it didn’t necessarily mean anything and I refused to jump to any conclusions or take any wild leaps of logic. Sometimes the human mind can be over-analytical and read too much into too little. Maybe something was going on, but if that were the case, I didn’t know what so I refused to speculate.

  “I’m going in,” I said. “Coming?”

  He shook his head. “Well, the dead know where we are now. Tomorrow night there’ll be twice as many out there and the night after, twice as many again,” Tuck said. “By this time next week we’ll have hundreds. Like fucking moths at a streetlight. They’ll keep circling until they find a way in. I just hope that way in isn’t Dick.”

  INTO THE BREACH

  Tuck, Diane, and I took a run over to Tuckahoe, partly to reconnoiter things and also to do some scavenging and lay in a few extra truck batteries, something Tuck admitted he should have done weeks ago. But then, who expects something like this?

  We used the back gate because there were no zombies mulling around there and we’d already counted fifteen of them congregating by the main gate. Tuck was right: they’d found us and now they would keep coming. He said we’d give it a few days but if they kept massing we’d have to clean them out.

  The vehicle we were using was a Jeep Wrangler with steel panels bolted over all the windows except the windshield which was impact-proof, bullet-resistant polycarbonate. It was ugly as hell, but Tuck had customized it for playing hard with Ram bumpers, a roll cage, and a mean 360 V-8 under the hood that could deliver all the juice you could want. It was about as close to a main battle tank as you could get in an SUV. There was even a locking sliding hatch on the roof that could be used for shooting.

  Jimmy unlocked the back gate and we took off, Tuck bouncing Diane and me around as he drove through gullies and up over hills, fording a stream in a spray of water and spinning out on a secondary gravel road, doing a couple wild looping pissies and screaming out like a sixteen-year old in his brother’s hot rod.

  When we made the main road I had a few gray hairs and Diane was gripping my arm so hard her nails left ruts.

  “Even when the world has gone to shit,” Tuck said, “you gotta have your fun.”

  “You’re way out of control, man,” Diane told him.

  “Don’t I know it.”

  We passed by the front gate and the zombies stood and stared at us. None of them tried to get in our path but I knew from experience that they did not generally associate a speeding vehicle with prey, but if you slowed down it was a completely different story. As we made our way to Tuckahoe we saw very little in the way of human life. We saw a pile-up of six or seven cars that were burnt black that had not been cleared away, scorched corpses…or parts of them…hanging from windows.

  “You know what that is?” Tuck said, jabbing his thumb at the pile-up.

  I looked at him.

  “To a zombie that’s a barbecue.”

  Diane tittered but I said nothing, looking at a few near-devoured corpses sprawled in yards.

  “Fast food,” he pointed out.

  A helicopter passed high overhead and in the distance I saw crows or buzzards circling in the sky meaning there was death somewhere and lots of it. Somebody took a shot at us once and a block later a naked man came running across the road. He was carrying a sack of potatoes over his shoulder.

  It was disturbing, of course.

  I knew everyone wasn’t dead, dying, or crazy, but those people stayed indoors. The village of Tuckahoe which was really just part of Eastchester had been a pretty little town of well-maintained older homes, brick and clapboard, set on quiet leafy streets. Lots of historical buildings and the money to maintain them. As we drove on, I noticed that there were a lot of dogs running wild. I suppose that was to be expected. The houses all looked like crypts to me and I had the weird urge to jump out and go house-to-house, knocking on doors, just to see what might answer them. The air was redolent with the odor of burning wood and we all saw plumes of smoke rising over the trees. The farther we got into the town we could see that a fire had raged recently, consuming houses and stores and trendy shops. Most of them had burnt down to frames and nobody had come to put them out.

  On the side of a white clapboard house somebody had painted the following:

  THE RAPTUR IS HEAR NOW

  CHRIST JESUS HAS GATHERD HIS FATEFUL

  THEY SHALL BE WELCOMD TO THE BOSUM

  THE SINNERS SHALL SUFFER

  MEET NOW THY ABOMNATION

  None of us commented on that. What was there to say? It was expected, spelling errors and all. What was going on would bring all the nut jobs and wackos out of the woodwork. Many of them were to be pitied. Others, those with guns and fatal visions, were to be feared.

  We came up to a nice, well-manicured park and some guy came running out in the street. Not a zombie, of course, just a crazy. He was an old guy with white hair. He was barefoot. Tuck stopped and he ran right up to the front of the Jeep and slapped his hands on the hood. His face was covered with sores and his teeth were rotting out of his mouth. I got the feeling he probably made his home in an alley before all this happened.

  “BEWARE AND BE WARNED!” he shrieked in his lunatic voice. “THE MONSTERS ARE IN THE STREETS! THEY ARE HERE NOW! THEY WILL COME FOR YOU! THEY WILL FEED ON YOU! BE WARNED!”

  He stumbled off to spread the word and Tuck drove on. “Consider that our inspirational message for the day,” he said.

  Diane lit a cigarette. “I keep thinking what if it’s only crazy ones like that who survive all this?” she said. “What then?”

  “Then the world will look a lot like LA, like Hollywood Boulevard on a Friday night,” Tuck said.

  Never having been there, I decided to take his word on that.

  He toured around the park and there were corpses everywhere. We saw the truly dead, well-picked by birds and dogs and unmoving, which had for some reason congregated there, as if some strange primal impulse had forced them to crawl out in the open to die. We also saw the sick, the near-dead. They were wandering around, some naked, some wearing pajamas and nightgowns. They weren’t zombies. Not yet. A lot of them were delusional, chatting away and calling out to invisible friends. A few were on the ground, contorting and convulsing much the way Dick said Elena had right before she died. I saw dogs chewing on the cadavers, fighting over scraps. Ravens sat atop heads, picking at eyeballs and soft tissues. The stink of death was nauseating. Over near the ball field, the walking dead were putting in an appearance. They were marching in uneven rows, many of them holding their arms out befor
e them like sleepwalkers. They did not move fast, but they kept coming and coming, shambling ever forward. Like the sick, they were in various stages of dress and undress. Some wore burial suits and dresses, others were naked from the mortuary slab, still others in hospital johnnies, and many more dressed in the trappings of the wealthy suburbanite.

  “Gotta be a hundred or more,” Diane pointed out.

  “Good reason to get the hell out of here,” Tuck said.

  Sig-Sauer P226

  Type: 9mm Semi-Auto

  Kill Range: 130 feet

  Magazine: 20 rounds, 9mm Parabellum

  DAY OF THE LIVING DEAD

  We wasted no more time.

  Ten minutes later we pulled into the lot of Westchester Tractor which was just outside town. It was a big place with rows of agricultural tractors and harvesters, lawn tractors and compact excavators. There were a couple pick-ups in the parking lot but we were pretty sure their owners would not be about.

  We took the safeties off our Sig-Sauers and left the Jeep.

  We got inside easily enough because the front door was wide open.

  “The batteries are back in the parts department,” Tuck told us. “The cages will probably be locked so I’ll have to shoot the locks off. You two stay out here, keep your eyes open.”

  He took off into the back with his shotgun and we waited there amongst the rows of shiny green tractor implements—aerators and cultivators, harrows and tillers.

  “My whole building went to hell, man. “

  “What?”

  Diane looked through the plate glass windows at the parking lot. “The virus they were talking about. It spread through my whole building. That day you found me out walking…was that last week or the week before? I don’t know. That’s what I was getting away from. They were all infected. And I mean infected. That’s what killed me about the whole thing, Steve. I mean, how could a virus move that fast? Think about it. How could it?”

  I had been thinking about it and I had been tying it together with what I saw in Iraq, but it still made very little sense. A virus needed time to spread, it needed a vector to carry it person-to-person. That day last week when the dead started rising—The Awakening, as it was known—that was really the first that I had heard mention of a virus. But within hours, apparently, it was everywhere. Nobody in the government had actually admitted to isolating the bug. Yet, they were certain it was a virus. And were they basing that on scientific speculation or were they just assuming that this was the Necrovirus of Iraq going global? And with that in mind, had they suspected this might happen? Was the response we had seen since something that had been blueprinted years ago when it had first appeared in the Middle East?

  I had too many questions and no answers.

  But the entire thing was spooky and weird.

  There was a common denominator, I knew that, and there were people in power who knew what it was, but we were not being told. I threw some of this at Diane, leaving out the Iraq stuff for the time being.

  “Yeah, it is spooky, Steve. Traveling that fast. It’s fucking mad.” She shrugged. “We’ll never have answers. Not good ones. The media are controlled by corporate interests and everything you hear has been carefully spun by their perception managers. The real truth of anything is kept from us. I mean, why do you think we’re inundated with news stories—if you want to call them that—about the royal wedding and Kim fucking Kardashian and Charlie Sheen? It distracts attention from what’s really going on. Keep ‘em dumb, man, keep ‘em dumb and uninformed.”

  Diane said it had all started during the Vietnam War when the media ran wild and free and started reporting the truth. That made the politicians and corporate mercenaries uneasy. The peace movement was a threat. And even those who didn’t like hippies and the anti-war stuff were getting their noses rubbed in the grisly reality of war on a daily basis and it wasn’t much like the John Wayne movies we’d been raised on. People were angry. American soldiers burning huts and exterminating villagers? That wasn’t how Americans fought wars. That was the kind of shit Nazis and Russians and Third World despots indulged in…but not Americans. The truth became a threat to the established power structure. Because if people kept getting more and more pissed off with the reality of war and the lies that were spun to pretty it all up, they were going to want change. They were going to want to tear down the house and build a new one and the politicians and their rich corporate backers would find themselves out on the street and out of the game, and the masses would demand a government that was really For the People and By the People.

  “After the Vietnam thing, Steve, the corporations very quietly bought up the media so they could control them and further their own interests without fear of exposure,” she went on. “There’s an answer to all this, to what’s going on now, but we’ll never know what it is. Not unless some whistleblower spills the beans.”

  Wow. I never thought Diane was unintelligent, just dazed and unconcerned with the world at large. I stood corrected. She was watching all the time and she had cut right to the heart of the matter like a sharp knife. I had to agree with her and only because when I was in Iraq, what was being reported on CNN and FOX (especially FOX) and in the newspapers was not what was going on over there. It barely resembled the truth. We had a few embeds with us, but they were strictly controlled by the Army and the Pentagon. There were things they were allowed to say and things they were not. Which was bullshit. The fourth estate exists (we learned in school) to report the truth to the people, not carefully-sanitized, politically-correct spin. And the truth coming out of Iraq was no more factual than the propaganda spewed by newsmen during World War II: just as controlled, just as contrived.

  “A lot of people don’t want to believe what you believe,” I said.

  “They’re scared. It threatens them. You can’t blame ‘em,” she said. “When they hang their flag out they want to believe in what it stands for, they don’t want to think that it’s all been corrupted by greed and power plays. They don’t want to admit to themselves that it’s all a very carefully crafted façade, that it’s synthetic and artificial. That what they’ve based their lives and beliefs upon has been a lie, that the wars their sons died in were unnecessary. Would you?”

  “No,” I said. “Sometimes it’s easier to keep your blinders on.”

  She nodded. “And that’s why we’ve become these spoon-fed, blank-eyed zombies who believe what we’re told. You ever seen that movie The Manchurian Candidate?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s us on a national scale: brainwashed.”

  Up by the counter there were racks of junk food to seduce shoppers—chips and beef jerky and candy. Diane started loading as much of it as she could squeeze into plastic bags. I knew right then it wasn’t for herself: it was for Paul.

  She walked off and started nosing around in one of the offices and I followed her. There were some newspapers on a desk and she started leafing through them. I did the same. They were all a week out-of-date, but we read them anyway. I browsed through The Journal News from Yonkers. There was an interesting story about the nuclear power plants being in jeopardy with no one to run them, people falling sick left and right. The military supposedly had taken over quite a few but they weren’t immune to Necrophage either. The debilitated state of the country put our nuclear resources in danger from terrorist attack. The AEC said there was nothing to worry about, but people were worried. They were worried about core meltdowns at Indian Point here in Westchester County, Haddam Neck, and Millstone Stations in Connecticut. There were nuclear power plants all over New England and the Northeast and nobody wanted a repetition of Chernobyl.

  And then in black and white I found it: an open admission by a CDC source that preferred “not to be named” concerning the Necrophage virus. This person said it had not been isolated, but was acting in every way like a virus. Thus far, it was proving itself to be immune to antibiotics. It had multiple symptomology which pointed at viral. CBC blood tests and WB
C counts confirmed this. The CDC were not completely ruling out a bacterium, but it seemed that “the offending invasive organism was most certainly a pathogenic virus.”

  “Check this out,” Diane said.

  She handed me a copy of the New York Post, which is probably the singularly most entertaining newspaper in the world now that the Weekly World News went balls-up. The Post didn’t skimp on coverage of the infection and the zombies it produced. Lacking any good zombie photos, they just culled some creepy scenes from Night of the Living Dead and plastered them all over the cover. VIRAL DEATH SPREADS! BROOKLYN PLAGUE WARDS! NIGHTMARE IN NEW YORK CITY! Any other time I would have laughed shit like that off…but it was all very unfunny. There were more copies of the Post, the most recent being four days old. Apparently, getting shots of the living dead by that point was fairly easy (something I didn’t doubt) because they had all kinds of them. One showed a dozen of them standing outside a house in Bensonhurst over in Brooklyn, another showed a little boy walking naked through Central Park dragging something behind him that could have been a very large doll but was probably the well-gnawed corpse of another child. Inside, there was a spread of blown-up full-color photos which were enough to put you off meat for a month: a group of the dead exiting a doorway above which clearly read STEIG FUNERAL HOME. All were naked except for one man in a suit. They were horrible, faces eaten down to the bone in some cases. One man was horribly bloated and a young woman was lacking her left arm. A particularly gruesome close-up showed an elderly woman with blank white eyes and clear evidence of maggots sprouting from a split chasm in her skull.

  “What was that?” Diane said, stepping towards the doorway and pulling her gun.

  I set my newspaper aside and went with her. I thought I’d heard something, too.

  We stepped out into the immense showroom and started peering around. I didn’t smell anything dead so I was pretty certain it was not the zombies. We stood there next to each other…then we heard running footsteps.