Cities of the Dead: Stories From The Zombie Apocalypse Read online

  Cities of the Dead:

  Stories from the Zombie Apocalypse

  The Complete Stories

  By William Young

  *****

  Cities of the Dead: Stories from the Zombie Apocalypse

  Copyright 2012 by William Young

  The Days of the Apocalypse:

  Death Takes a Holiday

  Days Go By

  Killing Country Music

  Waiting for the Great Leap Forward

  All Hell Breaks Loose

  The Lazarus Question

  Gold Guns Girls

  The Undeath of Rob Zombie

  The Third Time is the Harm

  What are Little Zombies Made of?

  Comedy of Horrors

  The War on Horror

  Detroit Motor City

  Fight Club

  The Road Warriors

  The Coroner’s Report

  The Road

  The Only Way Out is Through

  What Hristo Gruev Saw

  The Final Solution

  Death Takes a Holiday

  Los Angeles, California – Day 1

  Dr. Lucinda Bright was escorted through the off-stage corridors of the airport, her mind buzzing at her sudden importance in the scheme of things. As the on-call medical liaison specializing in bloodborne pathogens for the Southern California District Anti-Terror Task Force - a title that was supposed to be little more than a resume enhancer - she'd been called away from home in the middle of the night to provide her expert opinion on what to do with a handful of Eastern European tourists who'd been exposed to a passenger's blood on the way to Los Angeles.

  She had never really expected to be called by the authorities as a result of volunteering for the task force several years earlier – and she didn’t consider herself among the authorities simply because she had a laminated plastic badge hanging around her neck – but here she was, being escorted by Transportation Security Agency officers to examine a tourist on his way to Disneyland for the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. Tourist, not terrorist, she thought to herself, but protocols were protocols and she had volunteered all those years ago to do this job if need be.

  The group turned a corner and then banged through a door into a hallway and passed conference rooms, exam areas and interrogation cells into which only the unluckiest of travelers were ever escorted. The fluorescent lighting, worn low pile carpeting and dull off-white walls lent a bureaucratic dreariness to the areas which only enhanced their sense of foreboding. It was a décor perhaps intentionally designed to maximize a person’s sense of irresolvable frustration and unrealizable anger: you are helpless, submit.

  “Dr. Bright?” said a man in a suit, detaching himself from a small cloud of uniformed government types from a variety of emergency services branches.

  Bright nodded and smiled, “Cinda, please.”

  The man hesitated a second as he shook her hand, “Cinda, I’m Special Agent Charles Hoffman with the FBI,” he said, dropping her hand and quickly flapping a wallet open with a badge inside before slipping it into his jacket. “Come with me, please.”

  “I understand we have some sort of issue with a passenger vomiting blood on a plane from Europe,” Bright said as she followed a half-step behind Hoffman, his stride quick and purposeful.

  “Oh, yeah, something like that,” Hoffman said over his shoulder.

  They passed through the group of paramedics, firefighters and airport police officers and stepped down the hall toward a wall with a long window. Bright felt the presence of the first responders behind her as they trailed silently along, waiting for an expert opinion on what to do next. Bright stopped and stared through the two-way window at a collection of men, women and children.

  Bright looked through the window at the group and saw a bunch of faces staring back at her. They all seemed bored.

  “Why are we holding these people?” Bright said, turning to look at Hoffman. “I was told we had a patient who had been vomiting blood on the plane.”

  Hoffman nodded. “Yeah, he was taken to County General a couple of hours ago when the first responders were trying to figure out what to do with him. Apparently the TSA agents told them he would have to be classified a potential terror risk because of the vomiting, but since he was unconscious they let the medics take him out. These guys, though, are another matter. Our subject vomited a spray of blood over them.”

  Bright looked at Hoffman. “You allowed them to shower and change?”

  Hoffman nodded.

  “Do we know if he bled on anybody not in there?”

  Hoffman shook his head. “Just them. Family members and friends. And an unrelated couple from Italy. The flight crew reacted pretty quickly and moved him to a galley area after he started coughing up blood, but he obviously got a lot of people covered beforehand. According to them, this guy apparently stood up to go to the bathroom and just barfed over two rows of passengers.”

  “Was he sick when he got on the plane or was it something he ate?”

  “According to is wife, he was coming down with something when they boarded the plane in Sofia, but she said it didn't seem like anything to worry about. She said she thought it might be the airline food he ate,” Hoffman said. “And he didn't barf on these folks until they were only about half-an-hour out from LA.”

  Bright frowned and checked her watch. It was 2 a.m., and these people had been in the room for nearly six hours. She sighed.

  “Well, we’re going to need to keep everyone in the conference room in quarantine until we figure out what this guy is sick from,” Bright said. “If he hadn’t vomited blood on them, we could let them go, but they could be infected so they’ll just have to wait until we know.”

  By the time Bright made it to County General later in the morning, Hristo Gruev, 37, was dead. His body had burned through with fever and now sat in the air-conditioned morgue in the basement. The blood samples taken from him were currently going through lab analysis, leaving nothing for Bright to actually do other than wait for the results. She sipped on a cup of stale cafeteria coffee while sitting in the pathologist’s office waiting area – an end table and two plastic chairs – when her phone trilled its text message tone. It was her supervisor:

  “Patient died? Others still in quarantine? Tell staff autopsy is highest priority from highest authority. Probably nothing. Keep me informed of any changes”

  The door opened and a fiftyish man with thinning hair and a white Van Dyke beard entered, the embroidery on his lab coat read “Yul Ze’ev, MD.” He was carrying a paper cup of Starbucks coffee, the aroma of which quickly permeated the room and dwarfed the tiny coffee-like scent her cup had been offering. Bright suddenly lusted for his coffee. She stood up and unconsciously motioned toward him with her deficient cup of java.

  “Dr. Ze’ev?” she asked.

  “Yes, and you’re Lucinda Bright from the anti-terrorism task force, no doubt?” Ze’ev said, nodding his head amiably and smiling. “I guess we’ve got something interesting to figure out in short order, which is more than I can normally say.”

  “You don’t get a lot of business here?”

  “Oh, sure, but it’s all cops wanting me to hurry something or reporters trying to find something out, never an actual mystery that needs to be solved.”

  “A mystery? You haven’t seen the body?”

  “Had my assistant email the file to my phone, read it over breakfast. First guess is Ebola, though it doesn’t exactly fit all the symptoms,” Ze’ev said, motioning for Bright to follow him as he pulled open the door to the examining room. “Plenty of other diseases to consider, to
be sure, but not many that have someone bleed out so quickly. It’s going to be a while, though, before any of the blood tests come out with anything. Holidays and what. But if there’s anything obvious, we should know in a couple of hours.”

  “Ebola?”

  “Probably not. We should know something in a day or two.”

  “I’ve got more than a dozen people in quarantine at the airport in a conference room. A day or two? Really?”

  Ze’ev shrugged. “You can move them somewhere, right?”

  Bright let out a bitter laugh. “Yeah, according to protocol, the county jail, but that’s already over capacity, so, no.”

  Ze’ev sipped his coffee and then laughed. “Yeah, that’s the government for you, it makes all sorts of plans on how to deal with things, but doesn’t do anything to actually prepare for the things it might have to deal with. You have to wonder why FEMA and the rest are surprised and off-guard every time a hurricane hits. I mean, there it is on the weather channel, building up in the ocean, moving slowly toward land, turning and turning and getting closer every day, and then when it makes landfall, everyone in government acts totally surprised at the damage it causes. Idiots.”

  Bright had no idea what Ze’ev was talking about and she motioned to the wall of refrigerated storage compartments. “The body’s in one of those?”

  Ze’ev nodded, sipped his coffee. “Yup. Lemme see,” he ran his finger down a roster on a computer print-out lying on a desk. “Seventeen.”

  He pulled the door open and slid out the table. Ze’ev checked the identification tag on the body and looked up at Bright, “Hristo Gruev?” Bright nodded and Ze’ev walked over to a phone on the wall, tapped in a few digits and spoke into it. He turned to Bright, “It’ll be a little while until they move the body onto the examining table. Come, let’s see if we can’t find anything on the preliminary intake report.”

  They left the room and went into Ze’ev’s office, a cluttered space with an obsolete desktop PC, a reasonably modern laptop, and manila folders strewn about the flat surfaces of the room. The walls had dozens of photographs in black and white of what Bright assumed were Ze’ev’s trophies from autopsies: an X-ray shot of a steak knife in a skull, a photograph of a keychain in a stomach, an 8x10 of a male with a gag ball in his mouth and a cell phone in his rectum. Bright rolled her eyes.

  “Let’s see,” Ze’ev said, tapping on a tablet PC he had pulled from under a stack of papers. “Admitted about thirteen hours ago, dead for nearly ten. One-oh six point three temp, severe dehydration, skin lesions and blood loss from the mouth, nose, ears, penis and rectum – well, that’s all the holes. He was unconscious and pupils unresponsive. Breathing was slow, heavy perspiration. They gave him an IV solution and pushed him into a room to wait for you and your team to arrive.”

  “He showed the first symptoms about twenty-four hours ago. It’s a fast-acting bug, whatever it is,” Bright said.

  “That it is; nothing I’m familiar with off the top off my head,” Ze’ev said. “Seems to go at the body’s fluids, from the looks of this, almost as if it’s trying to squeeze everything liquid out, almost as if it's trying to turn the victim into an instant mummy.”

  There was a clatter from somewhere outside the room, muffled by distance and walls but still discernible as metal banging into metal. Ze’ev rolled his eyes. The banging continued for a few more seconds and then stopped. Ze’ev looked at his watch.

  “I’ll give them a few minutes to pick everything up before we head down and start the autopsy, this way we can all pretend nothing weird just happened,” Ze’ev said.

  Bright followed Ze’ev down the hall and into the autopsy room and stopped in her tracks. The drawer with Hristo Gruev’s body in it was pulled open and an empty gurney lay on its side nearby, the body of a medical intern lying next to it, pooling blood onto the floor. Ze’ev rushed through the room to the fallen man, but all Bright could do was stare.

  “Jason! Jason, are you okay? Can you hear me?” Ze’ev bent over the intern’s body and checked for a pulse. “He’s alive.”

  Bright regained her composure and walked the rest of the way into the room. “He’s bleeding from the arm,” she said as she came alongside Ze’ev and kneeled down.

  Ze’ev scrunched up the intern’s shirt sleeve and both looked in consternation at what appeared to be a bite wound on the intern’s forearm, a deep, lacerating cut which had removed a chunk of flesh.

  “Is that a bite wound?” Bright asked.

  Ze’ev half-nodded. “Yeah, but not a normal one: this is a bite for eating, not to inflict pain.”

  “Get bandages, I’ll apply pressure,” Bright said, motioning for Ze’ev to move aside. “Is he hurt anywhere else?”

  “Banged his head pretty good hitting the floor,” Ze’ev said, standing up and hurrying to the other side of the room. He picked up the phone, “I need a first responder unit to the morgue stat, we’ve got an injured staff that needs immediate emergency treatment.”

  Ze’ev returned and placed a bandage on the wound.

  “What would have bitten him?”

  Ze’ev half-stood and banged his head into the open tray door.

  “Jesus!” he said, his eyes rimming with tears as he shoved the tray back into the wall. He paused for a moment and focused on the intense point of pain on the crown of his head, willing it to fade away. He took a long, deep breath and opened his eyes.

  Ze’ev turned to Bright and shrugged. “Who, you mean, and why?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “No ‘what’ bit him. That’s a human mouth bite on his arm. Believe me, I’ve seen hundreds of them, maybe thousands. Usually they’re just bruises with indentations, maybe once in a while you’ll get a body in here with punctures from somebody’s mouth, but that’s rare. This wound, this bite, you never get that from a person. Dogs, yeah, sometimes. People, never,” Ze’ev said. “Which means you have to ask, ‘who bit him?’”

  “And why?”

  “Exactly,” Ze’ev said, turning to the intern and patting through his clothing for any obvious signs of other trauma.

  Bright looked around the room and immediately noticed a puddle of blood on the floor near the equipment table, and a small rotary saw lying on the floor. She walked over to it and saw a spray of blood across the counter and onto the wall. The various tools were in disarray, a smear of blood across them as if someone had been desperately snatching for them.

  “He doesn’t have any cut wounds on him, does he?” Bright asked.

  “No, why?” Ze’ev said.

  “There’s a rotary saw and some autopsy tools here that have blood on them.” Bright noticed a bloody palm smear on the table.

  Ze’ev gave her a curious look. “Those tools should all be clean and ready for the autopsy.”

  He got up and walked across the room and looked down at the equipment. Ze’ev gave Bright a look of mild bewilderment and almost shrugged. “Let me see if I can’t get a hold of Marcus. He should have been here helping Jason. Maybe he knows what’s going on.”

  Ze’ev picked the phone off the hook on the wall, punched in a code, and spoke. Overhead, the speakers let out the muffled, softened sound of Ze’ev’s voice calling for Marcus Glass to come to the morgue examining room. Behind them there was a slight groan and the gentle sound of a pair of double-doors swinging to a close. Ze’ev turned.

  “What the fu—yee-oww!” Ze’ev said, his voice changing from deep confusion to clear pain.

  Bright spun around and stared for a moment at the sight of Hristo Gruev biting deeply into Ze’ev’s neck, Gruev’s hands clasped tightly around Ze’ev’s right arm and shoulder, blood coursing down Ze’ev’s shirt and gurgling up across Gruev’s bared teeth and lips. Ze’ev smacked Gruev with his left palm several times, his hand making dull slaps on Gruev’s forehead but doing nothing to phase Gruev. Bright took a pair of steps sideways and tried to make sense of what she was looking at: Gruev should be dead.

  Yul Ze’ev let ou
t a second yell now. It was an animalistic plea for help from the heavens, a sound uttered by uncountable numbers of prey as they realized the bite they were suffering would be fatal, the grasp of the claws un-releasable; that life was rapidly coming to a close should some divine intervention not materialize. Bright recognized the sound on some primal level, and she moved forward quickly and grabbed Gruev’s right arm at the biceps and elbow, trying to bend it up and away from its grip on Ze’ev.

  But Gruev did not budge. Beneath her fingertips she could feel the thick deadness of Gruev’s arm, as if she were grabbing modeling clay. His body temperature should have been that of the morgue’s storage tray’s refrigeration, but instead he was burning hot, a warmth that should not have been inside of a dead body. She could hear him breathing as he resisted her attempt to move his arm, a slow, almost-silent in-and-out of air that would've been lost in the sound of the room's ventilation were she not so close to him. She flicked her eyes to Gruev’s face and watched as he slowly moved his head from side to side, trying to bite off a piece of Ze’ev’s neck. Gruev’s eyes were slits, his brows furrowed with intense concentration.

  The air was filled with sudden noise and commotion, and a half-second later she was pulled away from Gruev and Ze’ev while a pair of paramedics wrenched Gruev off of Ze’ev, each medical technician taking one of Gruev’s arms at the shoulder and breaking him off of the pathologist. Ze’ev collapsed, his arms around his neck, blood seeping through his fingers.

  Bright turned and watched the paramedics as they struggled with Gruev, a lump of Ze’ev’s neck in his mouth. Gruev wriggled to break free of the paramedics while he continued chewing, his naked body streaked with rivulets of blood. Although he was supposed to be dead, Gruev was winning the wrestling match with the two paramedics, slowly breaking their grips on him.

  “Call security,” the paramedic on the left said to her, his voice tinged with annoyance more than fear.