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

  Bright rushed over the phone on the wall, picked up the handset and scanned it for a listing of punch codes, found it and entered the numbers.

  “Security.”

  “Hello, I’m Dr. Lucinda Bright from-,” she paused a moment, composed herself. “I need security to the morgue operating room as quickly as possible. We have a patient who’s attacked two staff members and is currently engaging two emergency medical technicians. Please hurry as both staff have suffered serious wounds and are in need of emergency medical treatment.”

  Taking Gruev down had required the use of two Tasers, and even then Gruev had only been stunned long enough for the security guards to fix a pair of handcuffs on him before he had started to try to get up off the floor. Unable to rise, Gruev had spun slowly on the floor, his legs pushing him lazily, aimlessly, relentlessly.

  Ze’ev and the intern had both been taken to the emergency department for treatment and each was unconscious. Marcus Glass was dead, his body had been found down the hallway from the morgue, his throat torn out and right thumb bitten off. Hristo Gruev, pronounced dead only eleven hours earlier, was now strapped to a bed in a room with a two-way mirror, a pair of armed sheriff's officers outside the door to the room, an Internet camera focused on him and monitors of every sort imaginable plugged into his should-be lifeless body.

  But there he was on the other side of the glass wall, moaning incoherently and straining against the bed's leather straps, a fact that totally baffled Bright and Special Agent Hoffman. He turned away from the glass and shook his head slightly, perturbed.

  “We’re sure he was 100 percent dead?” Hoffman asked.

  “Well, I wasn’t the attending, but according to his chart, he died,” Bright said. “There was no heart rate on the cardiac monitor. No active breaths. They did an apnea test and the CO2 was greater than 120 without any breaths. The only thing confusing throughout all of this is that Gruev's body temp never got below 104 despite the environmental cold and lack of any other vitality in the vital signs. His brain was cooked. He was dead.”

  “All the way dead?” Hoffman asked “I mean, there’s no chance he was kind of almost dead, and putting him in the refrigerated drawer in the morgue might have put him in hibernation or something?”

  Bright wanted to roll her eyes in disbelief, but, clearly, something had gone wrong and Hristo Gruev hadn’t died. She shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never heard of something like this happening, but there’s a first time for everything.”

  Hoffman stepped up to the glass and leaned close to it, staring through it at the man strapped to the bed, blood trickling out of the corners of his mouth, his fingers clawing at the sheets.

  “What does he have? Rabies?” Hoffman asked. “Would that make him attack people like that?”

  “I don’t think so,” Bright said. “Some of the symptoms are similar: fever, twitching, the strange breathing pattern. But I don’t know that I’ve ever heard of blood loss like this.”

  “Couldn’t that maybe be the foaming at the mouth you hear about?”

  Bright shook her head. “No, but I’m going to test for it, anyway. Something’s wrong with him.”

  “So, what do we do with the rest of the people who’ve come in contact with him?” Hoffman asked. “I’ve got a dozen people who’ve been waiting in an airport conference room since yesterday and I don’t think I’m going to be able to hold them there much longer.”

  “We're going to hold them another twenty-four hours. If they don't exhibit any symptoms, they should be okay,” Bright said. “We’ll want to notify this guy’s wife we’ve got him here and bring her in so we can get the required authorizations for treatment, but the rest can go to Disneyland if nobody gets sick.”

  “What about the people he came in contact with here?”

  Bright poured a cup of coffee from the pot in the observation room, added some Coffee Mate to it and swirled it into a tan color. She sipped and thought.

  “We’ve got the two injured men in separate rooms, under observation with guards outside their rooms to prevent accidental exposures to unauthorized people, so we should be okay on that account,” Bright said, walking up to the wall alongside Hoffman. “The other man, Marcus Glass, died from his wounds. His body was transferred to a funeral home about an hour ago. I met his parents and explained what happened, as best I could, but they couldn't believe we thought Gruev was dead."

  Bright took a sip of coffee and considered the situation, turned her head to Hoffman and sniffed out a tiny laugh, “I’m sure someone will get sued because of this.”

  Days Go By

  Bridgeport, Pennsylvania – Day 132

  For rotting corpses, zombies don’t exactly smell bad. Rotting corpses are supposed to smell bad. You watch a crime show about a coroner or CSI unit, and they smear that white stuff under their noses sometimes when they’re going to investigate a body. Bodies are supposed to decay, melt into goo and turn into bones. Not zombies. Zombies are kinda like the Energizer bunny: they just keep going and going.

  Until you put a big hole in one’s head. Or chop its head off. Or burn it. Or spray it with enough acid. Or flatten it with a steamroller. Otherwise, they’re sorta like that black knight in that Monty Python movie, you can keep hacking parts off, but they just keep on living, trying to get you. Run, walk, crawl, slither.

  Why they want to eat you is a big mystery to me. They’re supposed to be dead. Or, undead. I’m not exactly clear on that one. Before Kyle got eaten by a pack of zombies on Fourth Street two weeks ago he had been researching zombie history and come to the conclusion that zombies were re-animated corpses, brought back to life by black magic. He thought Holy Water in a Super Soaker might be a way to kill them, so he loaded up a tank at St. Augustine’s and headed down Fourth Street to the Wawa convenience store, which is where a lot of the zombies kind of hang out when there’s nobody to try to eat.

  Almost just like before there were zombies, only back then the people would stand in front of the store with cups of coffee and smoke cigarettes. Now, they groan and shuffle back and forth.

  Anyway, Kyle rode his bike into the parking lot, started squirting at the zombies, and before he could start pedaling away the borough secretary came up on him from behind and grabbed his hair. She must’ve been about sixty before she was turned into a zombie, but one thing about zombies is they’re freaking strong, and all hundred pounds of the lady – Mrs. Scotoline – dragged Kyle to the ground and bit him on the shoulder. A couple of seconds later and Kyle stopped screaming as a dozen or so zombies had him and tore him apart. What’s left of him is still lying in the parking lot.

  Kyle never said how Holy Water would stop black magic, but I thought it was a dumb idea at the time. These are zombies, not vampires.

  But you know what does smell after a while? People. Living people. I’d like to say you get used to it, but you head outside for a while in the fresh air and when you get back home, all you smell is sour stink. Almost makes you want to risk a dash down to the Schuylkill with a bar of soap, but the last person that did that was Marsha something-or-other, and now she’s a one-armed zombie that mostly hangs out around Christine’s hair salon down the other end of Fourth Street. You don’t realize how much that daily shower really does for you even when you don’t think you’re dirty.

  So, life kinda sucked before the zombies. My mom and dad made me do homework first thing every day after school: before dinner, before video games, before anything. Homework. And my dad kept signing me up for baseball and football. Baseball is boring and football practice sucks. I don’t know why I just couldn’t play video games or watch YouTube or whatever, but I couldn’t. Some of my friends had parents like mine, but most of my friends had their own televisions and computers in their bedrooms. Not me. Life sucked. Kinda, like I said.

  And then the zombies came. My friends had told me about them, sort of, at lunch. Weird stories they heard about from their parents about Los Angeles and New York and Europe. Or Russia. Russi
a’s in Europe, I think. Close, probably. Anyway, all I knew about zombies I knew from the movies. So, not much, really. Fast zombies. Slow zombies. All of them want to eat you.

  All that is true.

  The only rule of zombies is there is no rule for zombies.

  Or does that count as a rule?

  Whatever. So, I’ve been mostly living in the second floor of the Point on 23 pub with eight other people. Used to be eleven of us, but you know about Kyle and Marsha, so now there are just nine of us. Been in here for about five weeks, now, and all the food and beer is gone. The toilets don’t work and there’s no running water, no electricity, no anything like before. I mean, not that I’d been in here before the zombies, I hadn’t, I’m only fifteen and not allowed in bars.

  Kyle and I got in here the day the zombies came over from Norristown. They were mostly illegal Mexicans, the shorter, darker brown kind that you sometimes see hanging out in the parking lot of The Home Depot or Lowe’s early in the morning, or like the guys who did most of the construction on the townhouses on Union Avenue last summer. You’d walk by there and all you heard was table saws, hammers and Spanish. Only in America, right?

  So, it was about one o’clock in the afternoon and Kyle and I were at the park on top of the hill behind the grade school when we started hearing the shots. Lots of shots. And then the siren from the Swedesburg fire company went off and Old Man Joe Morris told us to get the hell home because the town was done for. Then he and Don Fox took their rifles and headed toward the school on the other side of the park. Haven’t seen Old Man Morris since, but Don Fox is a zombie that mostly hangs out around the Rib House, only he’s missing both arms and looks like someone set his head on fire.

  I didn’t make it home. Of course, I wasn’t supposed to be outside of home, either. Dad took Mom, Kelly, Molly and Craig up to Pop Pop’s house out in the country with our dog, Rocket, thinking maybe it’d be safer up there away from so many people, since zombies seem to be drawn to people. I was supposed to stay and guard the house, only Dad took the .45 and the shotgun and left me with Mom’s little five-shot .380, which is good for shooting muggers and carjackers, but not so much for zombies. Not that it matters, since I forgot it on coffee table in the living room right next to the keys to the house.

  All because of Kyle, of course, who came by that afternoon to tell me he heard Old Man Morris and Don Fox were going to snipe zombies from the top of the hill and did I want to come watch? He had two pairs of binoculars, so I said sure, and then – you guessed it – click!, the front door locked behind me. And since the windows on the first floor were all boarded up inside and out, well, there was no way back in if you weren’t Spider-Man.

  I’m not Spider-Man, I’m Ralph McGuire.

  So, I ended up in The Point. Just barely. Like I said, some zombies are fast, and there were some fast little illegal Mexican zombies that came across us as we were walking down Grove Street talking about how bad my Dad would kill me if I had to pry off some plywood from a window, break the glass, and kick my way into the house. I knew there was canned food, water, and all my clothes in there. Plus, that’s where my Dad was coming back to after he dropped off my Mom and sisters and brother.

  And then the zombies were just there, kinda running up the alley at us in some sort of stutter-step half-skip run, if you can imagine that. I think they must have played a lot of soccer when they were alive to have been able to run like that.

  So, Kyle and I had to start running down the street looking for someplace to hide, and – of course – every house in town is locked and most of them are boarded up, more or less. So we ran a couple of blocks with those zombie Mexicans on our tails and Kyle sees a bunch of people prying open the door to the pub while a lady with a shotgun is blowing holes in a handful of zombies – the normal American kind – and we ran over to them. Almost got shot, too, but at the last second the lady – Valerie – realized we weren’t fast zombies and didn’t shoot us.

  Plunked a couple of the Mexican zombies, though.

  After we got inside, everyone started pushing things against the door. The first floor windows already had some metal screens on the outside, although most of them were high enough on the walls that nobody – well, no zombie, anyway – would be able to climb up and in through them. After that, nobody really knew what to do, and all the adults started kind of arguing about who should be in charge, almost like we were on that television show Survivor.

  I guess maybe we kind of actually were. Only nobody gets voted off, they get eaten off.

  Valerie was the only one with a gun, and even though she only had seven shells left everyone sort of let her be in charge. I mean sort of in charge, because Steve “I’m a trial attorney” Douchenozzle was always horning in with his opinion on what should be done and how. Not that there was really anything to be in charge of: there were just eleven of us in a bar, it’s not like we needed to write a Constitution or something.

  That first night was the only real excitement. About an hour after sunset, there was a huge commotion a couple of blocks over toward Swedesburg. A lot of gunfire and shouting moving down Prospect Street. A couple of us managed to get up on the roof, but you really couldn’t see anything except a sliver of Fourth Street near the industrial park building. Looked like twenty or thirty people fighting off a horde of zombies while cutting through the chain link fence somebody put up the week before. It wasn’t a real good fence, just one of those temporary kinds they put up around construction sites to keep kids and homeless people from getting hurt or stealing tools. And so Steve can’t sue them for negligence.

  That’s when a security guard came running out of the self-storage locker building and began waving for the people to go away. There was no way to hear anything from the roof of the bar, but you could tell the guard was trying to get them to stop and go away, and he didn’t care about the zombies making their way down the street toward the group of people on the outside of his fence. But they ignored him and managed to cut the chain locking the gate and the entire group rushed in, pushing him off to the side. Then a couple of mini-vans and some dirt bikes drove through the gate before everyone pushed them closed and shot some of the zombies on the outside of the fence. Since then, nothing. But you hear the dirt bikes riding up and down the railroad tracks every so often.

  In fact, there are a lot of people still in town. You see them up on the rooftops during the day, acting like guards. And everyone has the same idea, too: scavenge. But that’s almost as dangerous as the zombies, because if you try to get into a house that’s got people in it, you can get yourself shot.

  I was out with Carla working up the alley between Grove and Bush streets when we saw two older guys trying to pry open the back door to a house when someone from inside just shot through the door and hit the guy with the pry bar. The guy stumbled around the backyard for a minute while his buddy shouted at the people in the house about murdering his friend instead of just telling them to go away. But nobody inside said anything, and the shot guy collapsed in the back yard while the other guy cut through the space between some houses and disappeared onto Grove Street.

  Carla and I had to start hustling because if there’s one thing that will bring zombies, it’s the sound of something loud like a gun. Del said he thinks any manmade sound will bring them, because if you watch the zombies on Fourth Street, they can tell the dirt bikes are running and will start walking down to the tracks. Sure enough, before we made it to Rambo Street on the way back to the bar there were a dozen zombies coming up around the corner from Ford Street, shuffling right at us. Slow pokes, so Carla and I were able to run through some back yards and up a couple of streets until we came to Desimone’s Café.

  That’s where Mom and Dad would go sometimes on something they called “Date Night.” It had a restaurant in the back that served Italian food, and a bar in the front that still lets people smoke cigarettes, and my parents both smoke, so they like to go there. Valerie, Marsha, Del and Lester all smoked cigarettes
, too, until about two days after we got into the bar and they all ran out. Now, the only cigarettes left in town are in the Wawa, and nobody’s stupid enough to try and get into it.

  Desimone’s was burnt-out when we walked by, and there were maybe ten zombie bodies on the sidewalk outside, a couple of them pretty burned up. We peeked inside the building, but there was nobody in there, just charred furniture and broken glass. The place was fine just a couple of days earlier, when I went by it with Carla on my way to check and see if my Dad had come back, yet. He hadn’t - the house was still locked - and we had to run like hell from some fast zombies that had been standing behind some trees in the lawn of Our Mother of Sorrows Church.

  There ought to be a way to figure out the fast zombies from the slow ones, but so far nobody can do it. They all just stand there moaning or shuffle slowly around until they have a reason to go somewhere. These ones were pretty fast, though. If they hadn’t been running across the street, we wouldn’t have heard their shoes slapping on the ground and they might have gotten us. Instead, since it’s so quiet anymore, you could hear them coming across the road, and Carla turned around on the porch while I was standing on a metal garbage can looking through the transom – the only window on the first floor Dad hadn’t boarded over on both sides – to see if he was in there.

  Carla just said, “Shit, runners.”

  I turned around and looked, and sure enough, there were five of them coming across the street pretty fast in a lurching skip-hop kind of run. Anyway, you can’t really fight five fast zombies if there’s just two of you, and all we had were a baseball bat and a cheap-o “industrial” chef’s knife from the bar’s kitchen. My Dad’s kitchen knives are way better than the pieces of crap whoever cooked at the bar had to use, but that’s probably because Dad calls himself a “gourmet cook.” Mom says he just likes expensive kitchen gadgets.