Last Man Standing (Book 1): Hunger (3 page)

"God knows what the other passengers thought. Most of the wounded, I'm guessing, would have just had broken bones. It was only the ones who were bitten that would have turned. Imagine making it through that hell, escaping onto the train only for your friend to turn in the seat beside you. I don't like to think about it. All I know for sure is that the trains were running on auto. They kept making their stops, even after all the passengers were dead. All along Sukhumvit those fuckers poured out at each station. That's why Bangkok got out of control so quickly. The bloody trains. Over the streets and underground those bastards outflanked us all, right out into the suburbs. We never had a chance."

"So why didn't they stop the trains once word got out?"

"Well that's the problem. I don't think word ever really got out. What do you know of the layout of Bangkok? You were only there a few weeks, right? Well, the trains go everywhere, especially since they added the new stations last year. You can barely go anywhere in the center more than 500 meters from the BTS or MRT. The first most people knew about the outbreak was when it came down their street, through their front door, and the trains just kept running, ferrying the bloodthirsty fuckers efficiently around the city.

"That's how they were waiting for me when I got back to Thonglor. An hour of sprinting through back streets, two more hours of creeping around, and when I got back to safety I found they'd beat me to it. The front door of my apartment block was literally at the foot of the stairs to Thonglor BTS station. I was so pleased when I found that place, and now I was cursing it. Convenience goes both ways.

"I approached through the back streets south of Asok and Phrom Phong. Lots of dead ends, lots of alleyways. I heard screams a few times. Doubled back a time or two. Traffic was non-existent. Bangkok was bumper to bumper most of the time, and the drivers trapped on the main roads would have made handy snacks for the undead. I'd never seen the city so peaceful. Even the air smelled breathable, what with the lack of cars. Shit, hang on."

Paul excuses himself once again, waving for a fresh drink as he walks to the toilet. I light up a Marlboro, take a deep drag and frown at my notes. So far his story bears little resemblance to what had been heard on the news. Paul's official story – the one he'd been spouting on the talk shows every day – was that he'd watched from the flyover as vans sprayed some kind of toxin onto the people on the street below. He'd run down to the street and bravely tried to save as many as he could, killing a terrorist in the process. The body had been recovered by the army, and an investigation of his apartment had found that it had been converted into a lab. The junta had announced that many more such labs had been found across the city, all linked to renters from the Middle East. They'd cited these facts whenever they made a fresh arrest; whenever they confiscated property, deported a foreigner or executed an 'accomplice'.

When Paul returns I ask him why his story had changed.

"Fuck, what does it matter?" he sighs, lighting another foul smelling cigarette. "I liked the idea of being a hero. When I finally made it out of the city and collapsed at the blockade out at Bang Pakong I was too tired to argue. They told me, you see. They told me I had a choice. Either tell the story they wanted me to tell and live like a king, or tell the truth and... they said they'd send me back in."

"So why are you telling me this now? Why did you reach out to me?"

When Paul looks at me it's with eyes much older than his thirty eight years. His voice sounds like it's coming from the bottom of a deep pit far underground, and it cracks a little as he speaks. More than anything, he just sounds tired.

"It doesn't make a difference. They could drop me right back into Silom, and I wouldn't care. Someone should know the truth, before... Anyway, you want to know the worst part? I didn't kill a single zombie. Didn't have it in me. You like to think you'd go all Rambo in that situation. You'd pick up a gun and make a few head shots, at least take a few of them with you before they get you. I just couldn't do it. The moment I got through the security door in my block I cut the power to the keycard reader and pushed a desk in front of the door to wedge it closed. I could hear people banging on it, trying to get in behind me. They were still alive, I know that from the screaming. I just went up to my apartment on the fourth floor, locked the door and waited until the streets were quiet. Three weeks. All I heard were screams. I didn't try to find my wife. I called until my battery died, but the calls would never connect. Maybe she survived. Maybe she was one of the folks screaming at the ground floor, trying to get through the door to safety."

Paul drains his beer in a long gulp, slips another cigarette from his pack and lights it up.

"You always think you'll be a hero, you know?"

He suddenly rises from his chair, throws a handful of cash on the table and walks out of the bar without another word. I wait for half an hour, but he doesn't return.

Paul McQueen was found hanged in his apartment several days after this interview was recorded. He left no suicide note.

You have been tried by God, and found wanting. He gave you free will, and He weeps to see how His children have chosen to abuse the precious gift He bestowed upon us. We have strayed from the path the Lord laid out for us. Men lay beside men. Wives no longer serve their husbands. Children no longer respect their parents. Men no longer respect even themselves. They choose to degrade themselves with pornography, and indulge in sinful pleasures that do nothing but destroy the purity the Lord gave them. God is sickened and disgusted by the path we have chosen.

Bangkok was a warning. An ultimatum. A promise. That sinful fleshpot was nothing but a modern day Sodom. The world is purer now its unrighteous denizens have been sent to face the judgment of the Lord, but it was far from unique. Every inch of this planet drowns in sin, and we must now prostrate ourselves before the Lord or be cleansed from this earth.

We offer this message as our final warning. This is your last chance. The human race has one year from today to embrace the Lord God as its sole savior If you fail to repent you will face the final judgment.

We are his divine messengers.

The Sons of the Father

That was how it started. A simple message, mailed to media outlets and governments around the world. Everyone from the White House to Fox News to the BBC to Buzzfeed got a copy in their mailbox, and the response from most of them was
"Huh, this crackpot has nice handwriting. How come we don't teach kids cursive anymore?"

Of
course
nobody took it seriously. Why would they? They must get hundreds of letters every day from bored pranksters and unmedicated psychos, each of them claiming that the world will end next Tuesday, or that 9/11 was a false flag operation orchestrated by Walmart, or that the dog next door had started to speak, and it was craving baby blood and fish tacos. Most of the time those letters go straight in the trash, and most of the time that's exactly where they belong.

It was the same story when the President was fired on in Savannah last summer. When the Secret Service admitted they'd received a threat from the shooter days earlier the media went batshit, accusing them of failing at their most important job. The mania only died down when the President herself came out and released records of the sheer volume of threats she received every day. Thousands of unbalanced assholes scrawl warnings on the back of a napkin. Hundreds of them still have a tight enough grip on reality to figure out how to buy a postage stamp and use a mailbox, and it's up to the Secret Service to trawl through them and determine whether any present a credible threat. It's not an easy job, and sometimes they call it wrong.

In the case of this particular letter... well, absolutely
nobody
thought it was worth a second look. Smart people with years of experience in threat assessment concluded that no terrorist with the capacity to develop sophisticated weapons of chemical warfare would make a threat that looked liked it was written with a quill. They also wouldn't make such a vague, ill defined demand. How could the entire world agree to accept God as its savior? What would happen is everyone got on board but the Swiss? How would you get the OK from every last Masai tribesman? Every herder working high in the Tajik Pamirs? And even if you
could
somehow get everyone to agree, which God are we talking about? The Christian God with the big white beard? Allah? Vishnu? Bill Murray?

No, none of this fit the profile of a legitimate threat. It was just a bad, weird joke from some addled crackpot who didn't understand the meaning of 'too soon', and it was filed away with the rest of them.

The letter was reported, of course, simply because it went everywhere. Thousands of them were mailed out, each one exquisitely handwritten, and that was enough to make a few reporters sit up and take notice. They didn't believe the warning but they thought it was interesting that someone had clearly gone to a lot of effort to scare the shit out of people. Interesting enough to report it in the
And finally...
segment of the nightly news, anyway.

And then it was forgotten almost as soon as it was mentioned. The President was gearing up for a tough re-election campaign. The Saudis were threatening to flood the market and push oil below $15 a barrel again. There was a mass shooting at Disney World. We all had bigger things to worry about than some random crackpot with excellent penmanship. Hell, even the fall of Bangkok was quickly pushed aside by more urgent news. Sure, millions of people had died, but it happened on the other side of the world and it happened to people who weren't Americans. Bangkok might as well be on Mars for all it mattered to folks from Tulsa.

Even
I
let it slip to the back of my mind, and it meant more to me than most. In the months following my interview with Paul McQueen I couldn't sleep through the night without waking in a sheen of cold sweat, my twisted sheets stuck to my skin and the image of Paul's sunken, haunted eyes burned into my mind like the afterglow from a bright light. I imagined I could smell the acrid smoke of his disgusting Indian cigarettes as I woke, their odor masking the stench of decaying flesh. The nightmares followed me all the way back home where I took a room in a Brooklyn apartment owned by Jim Bryson, an old high school buddy who'd made it big in apps.

This shit
scared
me. I became convinced that Paul hadn't been crazy. The story he told me was entirely true, I was sure of it. The western world was certain that the culprits were Muslim jihadists - a comfortable narrative that fit our preconceptions and helped justify our disastrous ground campaign in Syria - but I knew better.

Paul had described the terrorists as western with shaved heads, and one of the few things anyone had been able to learn about the Sons of the Father was that - before they seemed to vanish from the face of the earth a decade ago - they'd been a small, radical offshoot of the Baptists, almost identical in their beliefs to the crazy bastards at the Westboro Church, only these guys had a weird belief that it was immodest for body hair to be exposed. They shaved every last strand down to the skin.

For months I tried to get people interested in the story. I ran a failed Kickstarter campaign to raise money for a documentary on Bangkok and the threat of the Sons. I self published a book that moved fewer than a hundred free copies. I spent endless hours on conspiracy forums, trying to get someone -
anyone
- to pay attention to the idea that the warning might be legit, but even the tinfoil hat brigade couldn't be distracted from the latest GMO scandal long enough to give me more than a dismissive
'cool story, bro.'
It was frustrating, to say the least.

And then... then I met a woman, a cute barista who worked at my local coffee place. She had dimples in her cheeks. She stole good coffee beans from work for me. She warmed her feet by squeezing them between my thighs as we sat curled up on the couch watching Daredevil on Netflix. I don't want to say I fell head over heels - there have been too many women over the years to kid myself that this one might be
the
one - but it was
nice
. It was comfortable and safe, and that's exactly what I needed.

Suddenly it seemed a little pointless to obsess about my theory. It seemed crazy to sit at my laptop until 3AM, raving on forums while Kate was waiting for me to keep her warm in bed. I managed to convince myself that I'd just gone a little crazy. Meeting Paul just days before he took his own life had sent me off the deep end, and Kate was helping pull me back to dry land.

Gradually, day by day, week by week, I spent less time trying to convince people that the world was going to end and more time enjoying the world I had now. Kate made me forget it all. She made me forget my plan to leave the city for a shack out in the woods. She made me set aside my plan to learn how to shoot, trap game, filter water and dress a wound with my eyes closed. She made me forget everything but those cute little dimples that appeared whenever she smiled.

Looking back, this was a pretty fucking huge mistake.

Dimples aren't worth shit at the end of the world.