Okay, I lied; the rest isn’t exactly silence (I
stole that line from a bad ’90s movie, or maybe Shakespeare) so
much as it is a cacophony of noises that all become one, deafening
noise: the sound of me screaming.
The things that I see happening all around us—after the zombies fall away from me, parts of their heads and brains blowing into my face, getting caught in my teeth, my nose, the corners of my squinting eyes—must surely be emitting some type of sound, but like I said, me screaming. Here are the things I see, all at once, but ordered here for a clarity I don’t possess in the field:
A. As stated, a zombie’s face blown apart by a soundless bullet.
B. A zombie, fresh hole in its head, falling onto Renni as another behind it explodes from the neck up, and falls, decapitated, onto the first zombie. Renni twists beneath them, mouth forming angry words, but she’s pinned.
C. The band of zombies that encircles us silently taking a knee as if in prayer, as pieces of their heads and faces plop onto the soggy ground. Lights jump behind them, casting them into silhouetted relief, which makes them slightly more horrifying as the more or less intact ones continue to advance.
D. A squad of dirt bikes cresting the hill, the people onboard masked by their helmets, swinging baseball bats and tire irons and shower-curtain rods at any still-moving face. Behind these, a Jeep with spotlights, spitting up mud from its roiling tires, the shadows of two or three people leaning out over its open top, firing off rifles at their undead targets.
The bikes circle tightly around Renni and me, still lying, shocked or trapped, on the ground. Even though they kick up more mud on us, I’m overwhelmingly grateful for their presence; they rescued us. Their tight circle forms a protective seal around us, and they stop, kicking out legs to lean on while they brandish their mêlée weapons, and stare out at the dropped zombies, not taking any chances. The Jeep takes a couple laps around them, rolling over zombie flesh and bones with no qualms, popping off a shot here and there, until finally, this vehicle also stops.
As the spotlights on the Jeep click off, I can hear again. I’ve stopped screaming. The dirt-bike engines rumble reassuringly, and people’s muffled voices shout beneath their helmets. A couple of people jump down from the Jeep and approach the circle. Immediately to my right, Renni punches one of the dead zombies in the face, and shouts, “Get this fucker off of me!”
Finally able to move again, I spring into action (momentarily inspecting my pants to make sure they are soaked through from the still-falling rain and not my overactive bladder), bolting up and lugging the second zombie off of Renni. She kicks the other one to the side and fumbles to get up. I grip her forearm and pull, and she grips my good shoulder for leverage. Two of the dirt bikes part like a gate and a dark, imposing figure steps into our inner circle.
He stands at a little over six feet tall, deep black shirt clinging to his barrel chest, the short sleeves frayed at the ends as if his muscles flexed one too many times and tore them apart. He wears black militia-style cargo pants and shin-high black lace-up combat boots, similar to Renni’s, but heavier looking. Crisscrossed over his chest is a double strand of extra silver-tipped rifle rounds. His rifle casually rests over his shoulder, his finger comfortably planted against the trigger, his other hand reaching to his bearded mouth to remove the stub of a soggy, unlit cigar. His short black hair is matted to his large forehead, and the straps of his eyepatch disappear into its scraggly depths. He’s like a more pissed off Nick Fury, crossed with a calmer, taller Wolverine.
“You ladies lost?” he shouts over the rain. His one exposed eye glints at us and he sneers a little.
I’m kind of at a loss for words. On the one hand, he and his people just rescued me and Renni from an ugly death, one I’m not sure even Renni’s physical cunning and action-girl strength could have gotten us out of. But on the other hand, he is kind of scary and I don’t know what he wants.
“What do you want?” Renni just up and asks him. Subtly, and probably not even consciously aware of it, she has straightened up to her full height and circled in front of me, her arms held out protectively at her sides, blocking my body from this guy’s view. She’s instinctively protecting me, which makes me feel simultaneously proud but small, like she thinks in some ways I am still a kid.
The man laughs boisterously. “Well, that’s a fine how-do-you-do!” Renni lets him laugh through her silence. Some of the people on their dirt bikes turn around to watch us, but he doesn’t look at them. Finally, he sticks the cigar back into the corner of his large mouth, and speaks through it, “Come with me if you don’t want to get dead.”
“Where?” Renni demands.
The man cocks his head in the direction over the hill. “Fullmont High School. Base camp. Impenetrable. You ladies can make me dinner. As a thank you.”
He doesn’t wait for a response, just turns around and heads back to his Jeep.
Renni looks at me. I nod at her, confirming that the location of his base camp is also our destination. She nods back, silently agreeing to go with him. She stoops to pick up her dropped axe and rifle, and we follow the guy back to his Jeep.
We climb into the backseat beside a skinny boy dressed all in black. He wears a black beret and handles his hunting rifle like it’s a third arm; slightly awkward, but also natural. He looks incredibly young in the blue tint of the moonlight, the rain washing over the smooth skin of his cheeks. He doesn’t look at either Renni or me but keeps his eyes trained on the edge of the tree line. Up front, the Nick Fury guy takes his seat behind the wheel and pops the clutch, throwing the Jeep into gear and peeling backwards out of the mud. A second man sits in the passenger side, ageless because I can only see the back of his dark, buzzed head. He points his rifle off into the distant fields and his body rocks with every bump and jolt the Jeep takes.
I’m sitting between the young gunman and Renni in the back, so that I have nothing to hold onto as we careen past the dirt bikers, who kickstart their engines to follow us, and lightly lift off from the earth as we shoot over the lip of the hill. I bounce a good six inches off the seat and yelp. I dig my fingers into the padded seat when I come back down, and catch Renni laughing raucously at me out of the corner of my eye. She, of course, has the frame of the Jeep to hold onto. Lucky bitch.
Nick Fury and his lackeys keep silent as we ride along the fields, finally crossing onto the side streets I intended to walk us through, passing the church, the general store, moving into residential territory, then there it is in the distance, the two-story brick building that held my life in suspension for four whole years. The wind picks up as we near it, as if warding us off, and in the distance thunder claps violently and lightning splits the sky. In the tail of its luminescent burst, I can see the dark outlines of a few scattered zombies, lumbering down alleyways, crawling out of the shadows between cars abandoned on the street.
Nick Fury turns wide with one hand, lifting at least two of our four tires off the asphalt, and squawks into the CB radio attached to the dashboard of the jeep: “McMillan, Harm’s Way, coming through.”
It’s almost like a code, until I read by the faded orange light of the street lamps that flicker quickly by, the words “Harm’s Way” etched into the dash above the radio dials. It must be the name of the guy’s Jeep. Pretty clever, I have to admit. “Get out of Harm’s Way.” Yeah, I like it.
“Roger that,” comes the response on the radio. “South entrance,” it says, and Nick Fury makes another one-armed, wild turn. I begin to feel queasy.
We shoot through the parking lot, parallel to the darkened building. At first it looks like all the lights are off, nobody home, but I squint and think I see why: all the windows on the ground floor have been covered by opaque plastic sheeting or planks of wood. Perhaps the lights attract the zombies, and the people inside are trying to pretend like no one is home. But if that’s the case, we sure are behaving counterintuitively, revving our engines seven strong through this parking lot, headlights blazing.
The Jeep pulls up close to the double-wide doors leading to the gymnasium, and the doors open only once our bumper nearly grazes them. Light and heat emanate forth from the depths of the gym and we drive, a little slower now, right into it. The dirt bikes take up our rear, and the doors are closed by two large men, probably basketball players, who wrap a heavy chain around their handles, securing them behind us.
Fury kills the engine, flicks his cigar at a kid who has suddenly appeared at his door holding up a blue bucket. The soggy cigar stub plunks into the plastic bucket, a small amount of water spraying up as the cigar hits bottom. The kid can’t be older then ten, maybe eleven, and he’s scrawny, his twig arms poking out of his horizontally striped Abercrombie and Fitch polo shirt like popsicle sticks on a homemade Christmas ornament. He smiles wide at the large militia leader, as if he is in awe. Fury climbs out of the Jeep and ruffles the kid’s hair, then moves on without a word. The kid shuffles after him.
Our two other companions jump down out of the Jeep and we think it’s best to follow suit. Everyone seems to be heading to the double doors along the far wall, which I remember from years of ditching gym as leading to the hall just outside the library, where the school hadn’t had enough in the budget at the time to place a security camera. There are several people already in the gym, guys and girls, all fairly young, high schoolers maybe, or at least no older than me. Some hang back, eyeing Renni and me suspiciously, while others run up to the dirt bikers and embrace them, or start a conversation. Me and Renni make like to follow the Nick Fury guy out of the double doors, but he turns on his heel and bends down a little to glower at us.
“Uh uh, ladies,” he sneers. “Dinner is a formal affair. Or at least, not a farmhouse pig trough.” He points his considerable nose at the ceiling and sniffs at us. “No, you won’t do. The locker rooms are over there. Get yourselves cleaned up.”
I really can’t be too angry at this guy for pointing out the obvious: Renni and me do stink, and we’re not looking too pretty either, having just spent the better part of at least a half an hour rolling around in the mud and the rain, and, later, some zombie matter. But when I look to Renni to shrug it off and smirk his comment away, she is fuming.
“Who the fuck do you think you are, man?” She pokes him in his barrel chest with her finger, leaving an indentation in his wet shirt. “We don’t take shit from you.”
Nick fury is unfazed. “You do if you want to eat a decent meal. But, of course, you’re welcome to leave anytime.” He flips up the flap on his breast pocket and retrieves a slightly less soggy stogie. He sticks it between his teeth and bites off the end. The kid with the bucket is magically beside him again, all too eager to catch the clipped end.
“We don’t need you,” Renni starts to say, but I elbow her ribs and give her a look. We need to get to the tunnels, my look says. Maybe this guy can help us out. Too bad Renni has kind of a hard time reading minds. “What, Devin?”
“We are kind of smelly,” I say, beseeching. Renni huffs, but turns away from the guy, relinquishing her hold on the debate. I look at the guy, who has just finished lighting the end of his cigar with a lighter shaped like a miniature .44 Magnum. “We’ll meet you in the cafeteria in ten minutes, okay?”
He puffs on the cigar, blowing out smoke like a fog machine. “Make it twenty. Don’t rush yourselves.”
“What’s your name, anyway? I keep calling you Nick Fury in my head.”
His laugh thunders out of the very core of him. He pokes himself in the eye patch with his thumb. “Is it the eye patch?”
“No,” Renni chimes in, deadpan. “It’s your striking resemblance to Samuel L. Jackson.”
The guy laughs again, and shakes his smoking cigar in Renni’s direction. “You resemble somebody as well.” He sticks the cigar back into his smiling mouth. “Fury’s fine with me. See you in twenty, ladies.”
He aboutfaces out the door, and Renni and me trod over to the locker room doors. “I hate that guy,” Renni hisses.
“He could be a white Samuel L. Jackson,” I say. “Pre-Jurassic Park.”
In the locker room, I go straight for my old locker, out of habit, I guess. It’s in the corner closest to the showers. I see a ghostly image of myself as a freshman, looking down at the floor as I unbuttoned my shirt to change into my gym clothes, pausing to steal brief surreptitious glances at the half-naked, towel-wrapped girls coming and going from the shower room. The locker now has someone else’s combination lock on it, and I kick it for no reason.
“Okay, so we’re supposed to shower,” Renni says to the wall, tracing someone’s indecipherable graffiti with her finger. “And then change into what clothes, exactly?”
As if on cue, a tiny old woman scuttles into the locker room like a turtle bearing gifts. She places two sets of folded black clothes on the bench in front of us and then backs away shyly, never making eye contact.
After a beat, Renni says, “That was weird.”
I pick through the clothes, holding up a black cotton sleeve. “Uniforms are kind of drab.”
Then the air becomes weighty with the sudden burden of awkwardness. There’s no more stalling to be done; we have our change of clothes and we have our fresh towels, hanging near the shower room entrance. We’re expected to shower, but are we expected to shower together? And if we shower together, are we expected to not look at each other? Or can we look at each other, but no touching? Or can we touch each other, but no looking? Is twenty minutes enough time for a quickie? I mean, sure, okay, we got caught up in the heat of some ridiculous, hurtful argument that maybe cut deeper than either of us meant for it to, and we expressed our hurt (and our desperation not to be hurt) through the copious use of tongues and hands in certain places. But that was then (like, maybe fifteen minutes ago) and this is now, and now we’re looking at each other like, who undresses first?
“Should we just go in with our clothes on?” Renni asks, smirking a little.
I shake my head and laugh, acknowledging how ridiculous it is to feel this awkward, but still feeling awkward nevertheless. “I know, right.”
“Look, I’ll go first,” Renni says, pulling her mucked up t-shirt off over her head in one fluid movement, and dropping it onto the floor. “You can wait, and go after me, if you want.”
She unbuttons her camo pants without looking at me, concentrating instead on removing the contents of her pockets and grouping everything together with her axe and rifle under the bench. She grabs a towel hanging from the rack and turns into the shower room, waiting until she’s out of sight to slip off her bra and panties. She kicks them out onto the floor, and seconds later, I hear the rush of water as she turns on the shower.
Well. Here I am.
Gah. Fuck. Why does everything have to be so hard? I sit down on the bench to contemplate this, to tally it up. As of now I have two (2) relatively large chunks of flesh missing from various body parts as a result of a couple of hungry zombies, one (1) cheating girlfriend whom I claim to have forgiven (but then what the hell was all that back in the field with Renni?), probably a little less than four (4) hours to get out of this forsaken town before the government napalms it, and exactly one (1) woman who gives a damn about me enough to stick by me and make out with me even after I’ve both broken her nose and puked in her mouth. What the hell am I still doing sitting out here?
My clothes are off in a matter of seconds. I leave my bandages on because the wounds are kind of gross to look at and that would defeat the purpose of my bold charging into the shower room. Of course, once I get into the room, my plan to sweep up sexily behind Renni and take her like some beefed up minotaur out of a paranormal romance novel completely shrivels up like the skin on my toes that is already beginning to prune in the mixture of heat and moisture. I try not to stare at Renni’s naked body as I go to the shower on her left and turn on the hot water, adjusting the cold with a concentration that rivals Michelangelo’s, struggling beneath the Sistine Chapel.
Finally, I get it just right, and then I just stand there.
“There’s no shampoo,” Renni says. I look at her, looking at me, making no attempt to hide just exactly what she’s looking at.
“You’re gorgeous,” I say before I can stop myself.
Renni smiles. “Are you sure you’re really looking at me?”
I stare harder, stare right into her eyes. “I’m sure.”
“Then come here,” she says, and takes a small step back, inviting me into her stream.
I turn the water in my shower off and walk slowly over to her. The hot water from her shower only cascades over one side of me, my bad side, the bandages over my wounds soaking through, the warmth flooding that side of my body with relief, but leaving my entire right side trembling in the relative cold, sprouting gooseflesh. Renni’s skin seems unaffected by either the warmth or the cold. She stands less than a foot away from me, her shallow breathing indicated by the rise and fall of her immaculately toned stomach, which for some reason I can’t look away from. I want to look at her face but I am too nervous. I have all these questions spinning through my head that I really don’t want any answers to: what are we doing? what does she want? what do I want? what about Carmelle? I’m pretty much a top, Renni probably is too, how is this going to work?
Renni reaches out and scrapes her nails lightly across the skin of my scalp, through my wet hair, but that’s the only touch she allows me. “You’re too young for me,” she says.
“I don’t see how that’s relevant.”
She laughs, and looks down at her feet, for the first time behaving like she might also be nervous. “This doesn’t have to be anything, you know?” she says, still not looking at me. She hugs her arms to herself and shrugs, looking at the wall, speaking into the steaming water. “It can just be a dream.”
It’s easier to make an advance when she isn’t looking at me. I take one step closer to her, which presses our stomachs ever so slightly together. Her arms still crossed over her chest, I press my own breasts into her forearms. Keeping my arms at my sides, I lean in, nuzzling my chin in her shoulder, essentially hugging her with only my neck. She rubs her cheek against my ear, and smells my hair. I can’t see her face, but I imagine her eyes are closed, as mine are.
“I just feel,” she says, her whisper dissipating in the steam so that I have to strain to catch her words, “I just feel…undone.”
There are no words to speak after this. She’s nailed exactly how I’ve felt since the first night Carmelle held her headache before her like a shield between us in our bed. And now the only thing left to do is to nail each other.
Except, we don’t get that far. She unlaces her arms from her chest and pulls me into her, and we embrace, moving our mouths to each other and kissing first softly, tentatively, then more intensely. Our hands rove, our lips smack and press and pull, our tongues taste throats, lips, skin, tears, steam. But neither of us makes the move to take it further; her hands stay firmly above my waist, and I copy her. Whatever happened in that field earlier was different than this; that was retaliation—against the people who hurt us, who weren’t there to bear the brunt, so we had no choice but to turn to the closest warm body. This—here, now, wrapped up deep within each other—this is consolation.
I don’t know how long we would have stayed like that, but it feels like we could do this forever, if it weren’t for the water abruptly shutting off. The lights go out half a second later. We pull our heads back from each other, but keep our bodies close.
“What the hell?” Renni says.
It’s pitch dark with no windows in the locker rooms. I can’t even see the outline of anything. I tilt my head to listen but only hear the faint sound of leftover water dripping from the shower head. I feel Renni’s heart picking up speed against my own.
“Power outage,” I breathe. “We should find the others.”
We find each other’s hands in the darkness and slowly make our way out of the shower room, following the walls back to the lockers. We grope around until we feel the pile of folded clothes. It’s quite a circus act, trying to dress in the dark, feeling for shirt tags to make sure they’re on right side out, measuring waistlines of pants to make sure we’ve grabbed the right ones before putting them on, following the curve of a shoe with our fingers so we don’t don two lefts or two rights. Renni scoops up a few of her weapons, and I grab my knife and handgun from my old jeans. Finally, we make it out into the gymnasium.
The lights are out here, too, and no one is milling about, as far as we can see. There’s a little bit of light shining in through the small square windows in the doors leading out into the hall. We follow this beacon and exit out into the hall. Our hair is still wet and sticking to our faces or all tangled and fraying out, we look ridiculous. Despite my best efforts, I’ve put on my shirt backwards. I pull my arms into the shirt to turn it around, and that’s when a young, skinny blonde dressed in the requisite black uniform comes around the corner.
She lowers her rifle when she sees us. “The boss sent me to find you. You okay?”
We only nod in response. “What’s going on?” Renni asks.
“Power outage,” the woman says, confirming my theory. “Don’t worry, we’ve set up a back-up generator, but it’s not powerful enough to extend through the whole school. Come on, the boss is waiting for you in the cafeteria.”
We follow her around a few bends in the halls to the cafeteria, even though I could easily lead the way with my eyes closed. My locker was on the second floor, near the computer labs, surrounded by all the other quiet outcasts and A/V geeks. The popular kids, the ones who played sports or instruments or went to parties, all seemed to have lockers on the first floor, nearest the cafeteria. I would walk by them only twice a day, at lunch time, and be completely ignored. I couldn’t decide, at the time, if this was better or worse than being picked on.
Now the halls are empty, the lockers standing alone and innocent near the cafeteria entrance, no one to turn their combination locks, no one to lean casually against them while they test out the flirtation techniques they picked up in the latest issue of Cosmo over the weekend. We pass them swiftly, and enter through the inward-swinging double doors of the cafeteria.
Most of the rectangular plastic tables have been upended against the row of windows that faces out into the quad. As I suspected when we drove into the parking lot earlier, the windows have been blacked out, though it looks like they were just directly painted over with a few thick coats of black paint. The doors that lead out into the quad are similarly blockaded, and there’s a stocky woman stationed there as a guard, peering out into the darkened concrete yard through a hole in the paint only big enough to fit one squinting eye.
The other tables have been set up in a hard-edged circle in the center of the cafeteria, surrounding the lone circular table at which now sits our very own Nick Fury. There are a few people eating at the other tables, keeping their conversations low and private, not even looking up as we enter the room. Nick Fury eats alone. He spots us coming in through the doors and waves us over.
“What will you have, ladies?” he asks, sweeping a hand over his own tray, which is piled high with microwaved pizza and pudding cups. “We have an absolutely stunning array of frozen pizzas and a fair bit of lasagna. A few vats of Tater Tots. I’m leery of the pre-packaged cheeseburgers, however. They’re a mite over their expiration date.”
A man draped in a white apron comes out of the kitchen, carrying two trays piled high with what looks like a sample platter of all the foods the school’s industrial freezers have to offer. He passes between the outer circle of tables and places the trays gently on the table in front of Renni and me, nods once at each of us, then heads back the way he came, disappearing into the kitchen.
“Ah, well,” Fury says, patting the edge of one of the trays. “Why decide when you can have it all?”
The smell of the reheated food suddenly has me salivating, and I dig in. The taste of the various spaghetti sauces erases the trace flavors of Renni’s mouth, which is regrettable, but I keep on eating. Renni doesn’t touch her food. She lays her weapons on the chair next to her and starts in with her questions.
“Who are you?” she begins the interrogation.
Fury wipes his mouth politely with a small square of paper napkin, making sure to dab especially at the wiry hairs of his beard closest to his lips. “I’m just a man,” he says, “trying to protect his family.”
Renni looks around at the people eating at the other tables, the others standing, checking the doors, marching along the perimeter with their guns. “These people are your family?”
“You’re looking for an origin story? All right.” He pushes his tray of half-eaten food to the side and retrieves a half-smoked cigar from his chest pocket. “I was produced inside a lab. My mother, for all intents and purposes, was a turkey baster; my father, a Petri dish; my nanny, an incubator. My genes were culled together from a vast array of history’s most perfect warriors; I believe you can trace my heritage back to ancient Samurai warlords, to medieval Romans and the shirtless Greeks, back to even Christ himself. I am the result of centuries of genetic tinkering, of splicing and reordering, of failures and near-misses, to produce the perfect, the most diligent, the most focused, the most single-minded, intuitive, relentless, fearless killer of zombies.”
I swallow a chunk of soggy pizza. “What?”
“Me and mine were all created in labs by government scientists to protect the populace in the event of zombie-centric catastrophe, such as the one we find ourselves entrenched in now.” He opens his arms to indicate the people all around us in the cafeteria. “These are my genetic brothers and sisters, each created, to varying degrees of success, for the same purpose. We’ve been living, breathing, eating, shitting zombies since before you were conceived, since Christ was a corporal, since—”
“Wait,” I interrupt him. “Since Christ was a corporal?”
He waves his fingers at me, brushing it off. “It’s a figure of speech.”
“It doesn’t make any sense.”
“It simply means a long time ago.”
“Do you mean ‘corporeal’?” Renni asks. “Since Christ was corporeal?”
“Oh,” I exclaim, slapping Renni’s shoulder. “That makes so much more sense.”
“Right?” She says. “Like he’s able to be touched—”
“Because he was human at one point,” I finish her reasoning for her, “instead of now being like a spirit or whatever.”
“Right,” she nods.
I look back at Fury. “I think you meant corporeal, definitely.”
“Definitely,” Renni echoes.
Fury slams a balled fist onto the top of the table, knocking food off all our trays. “That isn’t even the point!”
“I’m sorry,” I say, picking lasagna noodles off my shirtsleeves. “Keep going with what you were saying.”
“You and your siblings were created in a lab,” Renni repeats, trying to get him back on track. “By who?”
“Who do you presume?” he asks snidely. He produces his revolver-shaped lighter, and almost immediately the kitchen doors swing open, releasing the ten-year-old boy with his blue bucket extended excitedly in front of him. He runs up to our table, all smiles, and patiently waits by Fury’s side as he sucks on the freshly lit cigar. Its smoke smells like bad breath and Cheetos, but I just try to breathe through my mouth.
“Our very own American government,” Fury goes on. “Why create an entire race of zombie hunters when there are no zombies to hunt? The zombie virus, which only infects dead tissue, was initially conceived as a biological weapon during World War the Second. But, due to some bureaucratic bullshit, was never fully launched. Sure, they field-tested it on a few corpses, but that’s as far as the project ever got. Until now.
“Me and mine were created as a fail-safe, in case the virus ever backfired or got out of control, or fell into enemy hands. All in all, we are only a small army, about two hundred and fifty of us. A mere fraction of that followed me in my defection, thirty-two soldiers and this little fellow here.” He pauses to once again tousle the kid’s shaggy hair.
“Defected?” Renni prompts.
“When the alarm first sounded in the subterranean levels of Fort Wagner Air Force Base two hundred miles from here, where our numbers reside, I knew something was amiss. The attacks hadn’t even started yet and we were being called up, instructed where to go and what to do. They pointed us to this town on a containment mission, procedures for which we had been rigorously drilled on for the past few weeks. I found this curious. An advance team of us arrived two days ago, and waited. I had a lot of time to think and form theories during that holding period, and the theory I struck on, the theory that stuck, was that the government got bored, waiting around for another Great War to unleash their newfangled weapons. They got tired of controlled field tests, experiments involving no risks and zero variables. So they released the virus on the unsuspecting public, on this town, on you. And sent us in to clean it up.”
My appetite has completely left me at this point, and the smell of all the greasy food in front of me makes me sick. Renni squeezes my knee comfortingly underneath the table.
“So the government did this?” Renni asks, her voice a rasp of rising anger.
“That’s my theory,” Fury says, sucking on his cigar. “And I don’t like it. Our people shouldn’t be the guinea pigs in this, innocent Americans confronted with this much trauma. It’s not right. I don’t want any part in this little experiment, but I also want to take down zombies. Old habits die hard, as they say. I did get that saying right, didn’t I?”
“The Army is set to invade this city at six a.m,” Renni says. She looks at the numerical clock mounted on the wall above the cafeteria entrance doors. “That’s in three hours.”
Fury nods. “Right. Since we defected, effectively abandoning the project, the brass have had a lot of problems on their hands, trying to contain this incident. The second wave of zombie hunters has probably already arrived, but they’re still planning. I have no doubt they’ll march in here, prepared to take out anything that moves, be it zombie or human. They won’t risk infection.”
“So that’s real?” I ask him, trying not to sound too scared. “If you get bitten or something, you become a zombie?”
Fury looks at me gravely. “Afraid so. The virus mutates from its original state, which attacks the dead tissue, essentially bringing it back to life. Once it passes from one system to another, it becomes a contagion, spreading through living tissue and deteriorating it, killing the afflicted host. Once the host dies, the virus re-launches its attack on the dead tissue, and brings it back to life, so to speak. It’s cyclical.”
I make an involuntary whimpering sound in the back of my throat. Renni says, “How long does that process take?”
Fury looks back and forth between us, his eyes narrowing. “Has one of you ladies been bitten?”
Thankfully, we are saved from having to answer by a commotion at the cafeteria doors. A group of five black-attired militia guys—elite zombie-hunting soldiers, we now know—comes marching in, forming a very military style V-shaped formation. Everyone at the other tables stop their conversations and stand up. The V marches through the outer perimeter of tables and approaches our circular table. The little boy with the bucket sinks back a little, his smile erased. Nick Fury does not stand up.
He looks at the militia guys with some mild disdain. “Report,” he commands.
“Sir.” The tip of the V steps forward and salutes. “We’ve collected a specimen, sir.”
Fury’s eyebrows perk up. He takes the cigar slowly out of the corner of his mouth. “Fully intact?”
The militia guy nods. “Fully intact, sir.”
The excited gleam in Fury’s eyes cannot be contained. He tosses the stub of his cigar carelessly behind him; the little boy has to dive painfully onto his stomach to catch it in his outstretched bucket. Fury stands up. “Is the lab set up?”
“Being prepped now.”
“Let’s go,” Fury pushes away from the table. Renni shoots up from her seat and grabs his arm at the crook of his elbow. He eyes her, and the four militia men aim their rifles at her.
I stand up slowly, cautiously, sending worried glances at the gunmen, then at Fury, then at Renni, finally back to the gunmen.
“You have some sort of objection?” Fury asks, his voice sounding bemused, but his face looking stern, angry.
“What’s going on?” she demands, seemingly unfazed by the danger she’s put herself in by not letting go of the commander’s arm. “What’s he talking about, a specimen?”
Fury smiles then, inviting yet sharp. All at once, he reminds me of a bear, the way Biff Tipping reminded me of a bear; big and scary on the outside, soft and warm on the inside, but unpredictable. “But of course,” he says through his large teeth stained brown from tobacco. “You ladies are invited along to observe.”
Renni doesn’t seem to want to let go of his arm. I reach out and touch her arm. “Come on, Renni,” I say, softly. “He’ll explain on the way.” I look at him. “Won’t you?”
Fury salutes me with three fingers, like a Boy Scout. “On my honor,” he says. Renni reluctantly releases his arm.
The gunmen lower their rifles. “This way, Mister Machina.”
We follow them out of the cafeteria. As we’re mounting the steps to the second floor, I ask Fury, “Mister Machina?”
He smiles tightly. “Ah, you’ve discovered my true name. Deus Ex Machina. It’s Greek. But I like your name for me better. I prefer it.”
We walk through the dimly lit halls of the second floor until we come to the closed doors of the chemistry lab. Two women stand guard like sentries on either side of the door. Fury instructs his men to remain in the hall and ushers us inside in front of him.
In the room, we are immediately confronted with a bit of that trauma Fury was lamenting our exposure to just moments ago. A zombie lies prone atop a lab table, his clothes tattered and torn, his exposed limbs, which have not quite attained the greenish hue of prolonged death, strapped to the table by yards and yards of duct tape. In fact, his whole body is crisscrossed with it, even his neck, so that he can only lift his head a few inches from the table. When we enter, he looks at us with those deadened, glass-like eyes, opens his mouth, black with other people’s blood, and greets us with a low, rattling moan.
“Jesus,” Renni breathes, grabbing hold of my arm. We both stop in our tracks and just stare at the zombie. The smell is atrocious, the view even worse. From the corner of the lab, a man in a white lab coat, lower face covered by a white paper mask, approaches the table, brandishing a bone saw.
“Mister Machina,” he greets our commander, who has come in behind us and circles to the head of the zombie lying on the table. He appears neither shocked or concerned to see this zombie lying here, but rather quite eager.
“Doctor,” Fury says, returning the greeting.
“Shall we begin?” the doctor asks, tapping the dull handle of the bone saw against the fingers of his latex-gloved hand.
“By all means,” Fury says.
“Stop!” Renni shouts. The zombie’s moan grows to match the volume of her voice. “You promised us an explanation.”
Fury sighs, and turns to us. “Of course, ladies. My apologies. I forgot myself in light of this exciting development.”
“Exciting?” I shiver, and move closer to Renni.
“I realize it must seem fairly macabre to you both,” Fury says, stepping in front of the table so that the upper half of the zombie is blocked from view, but we can still hear his long, continuous moan. “But believe me, our experiments here will benefit not only you both, but all of the survivors.”
“There are other survivors?” Renni asks.
“Of course,” Fury says. “That’s why we defected in the first place, to help the survivors, get them out of the city before the government comes in to collect their own specimens, infected civilians, like you.” He looks at me when he says it. My fear catches in my throat. “We’ve collected a small group of survivors, awaiting instructions in the library downstairs. We plan to help them escape at the very last moment, when the government’s soldiers, our comrades, launch their first sweep, the maneuvers of which we are all aware from our training drills. We’ll get them all out, no doubt, but some have been infected and we don’t know what to do for them. Not yet.”
He steps back to reveal the zombie, extending an open palm to him, like he’s a prize on display for some game show. “This unfortunate individual will help us discover a cure for the infection. I’m certain the government has one, but they won’t use it, not for this mere trial run. All your lives are expendable to them. But not to me. You’re Americans. My sisters in nationality. I refuse to lose a single one of you. Of course, we were all bred to be soldiers, killers, not exactly scientists. But we’ll do our best. Now that we have a fully intact specimen, things should run much more smoothly. Do you understand?”
“Not entirely,” Renni admits.
“Ah,” Fury says with a renewed smile, “then you are not a scientist, either.”
As if this should satisfy us, Fury turns back to the doctor and the prone zombie. “Make the first incision.”
My wounds begin to throb again and the ache travels through my body and into my head. I close my eyes as the doctor nods and lowers the bone saw against the zombie’s forehead. Renni wraps me in her arms and for a second, I get lost in her, the closeness and the solidity of her body, the familiar musk of her skin. Then the screaming starts.
The guards stationed outside burst into the room behind us. My eyelids fly open as my heart stops. Fury is against the wall, .44. Magnum—not the little replica lighter but an actual beast of a handgun—drawn and aimed, slightly unsteadily, at the zombie on the table. The zombie who is currently screaming as a stream of bright red blood runs in rivulets down the side of his head.
“Motherfucker!” the zombie screams. “That fucking hurts!”