Pandora: A Novel of the Zombie Apocalypse (8 page)

“I love you too,” he said. “Please, please be careful.”

The call ended, but Jack was still looking at the cell phone in his hand. He said a little prayer for Nicole’s safety.

Sean and Linda came downstairs holding hands, so everything was apparently all right again. The four of them made dinner together then sat down to eat and talk. It was good for them to be together. All the stress they were feeling lightened a little.

When eleven o’clock came, they all decided to go to bed. As they were shutting down the house, Jack’s cell phone rang again. He looked and saw it was Nicky again. Answering right away, he said, “Hi. Are you okay?”

“Yes,” she said. “We made it to the ferry terminal. I can see it at the end of the street. There are about a dozen of those things down the street, but they’re behind us. It’s dark around here, so I don’t think we’ll be noticed. Look, Jack, my battery is just about dead, so I’m going to turn my phone off until we get to the other side of the river.”

Just then Jack heard the sound of someone knocking over a garbage can.

“Oh, shit,” Nicky hissed. “I’ve got to go. They see us.”

Just before she turned off the phone, Jack heard someone yell loudly, “Run! Here they come. Just run!”

Jack looked at his friends, who were watching. “There’s trouble, but Nicky is resilient. She’s tough. If anyone can get through this, she can.”

With that somber closing note, they all retired for the evening.

The cell phone on Mike’s nightstand was ringing. Bleary-eyed, he reached for the offending device. He saw it was quarter after two in the morning.

“Mmm, hello?” he mumbled.

“Michael?” a female voice asked.

“Yeah.”

“Michael, it’s Sue.”

Now awake, Mike sat up. “Sue, is there a problem? Is there trouble there?”

“Yes,” she replied. “Some of the infected got free of their bindings and attacked the other patients. Betty Pasko, one of the RNs on my floor, was bitten and killed. We finally succeeded in killing the undead that broke away, when the other victims started turning also. The head of the ER, Dr. Patel, and some other doctor from the CDC had made it up here earlier, and they tried to hold off the zombies so we could get away, but soon there were too many. They pushed a hospital bed across the
doorway to the wing and held it there, but the zombies came up and just climbed over and fell on them like animals.”

“Sue, you’ve done enough there,” Michael said firmly. “It’s time to get out of there before they kill you too.”

“I know, I know,” she agreed. “Several of us have fled and made it to a passageway used by maintenance. It leads out to a door by the right side of the emergency-room receiving area. There’s a tree near there and a pipe that runs up the wall at the side of the door. Mike, can you get here and pick us up?”

“Of course I can,” he said. “Let me throw my clothes on, and I’ll be there in twenty minutes or so.”

“Great, Mike.” She exhaled in relief. “When you get here, pull up the ramp and to the right. When you see the door, blow the horn, and we’ll come running out.”

“Okay, babe, see you soon,” he said. He hung up and quickly dressed. He opened his bedroom door and quietly walked down the stairs and out the front door. After starting his car, he pulled out of the driveway and made his way to the hospital.

The trip there was frightening. Although all the streetlights were still on, the nighttime darkness was unnerving. Mike noticed a number of zombies roaming the streets—not a great horde but enough to worry him. Fortunately he was able to drive by them and kept the gas pedal pushed hard so he wouldn’t wind up leading a zombie parade. There were a few fires too, but only one had a fire company fighting it. The firefighters were protected by armed soldiers who were firing at any zombies that got close. A few miles down, he passed a late-model car that had rammed into a tree. Steam was rising from the broken radiator. Mike slowed down then stopped. Both the front doors were wide open, and there was blood smeared on the upholstery. A rustling came from the bushes nearby, and a number of zombies lumbered out. All had bloody hands and faces, and several seemed to be carrying body parts. They were heading for him. Mike sped away.

Finally Mike arrived at the hospital. He pulled up to the entrance ramp and stopped. The normally busy emergency room was deserted. A
sign that stated emergency room closed lay on its side at the edge of the ramp. A single bloody handprint dripped over the two
O
s. Mike switched off the SUV’s headlights and slowly made his way up the ramp. He stopped again when he reached the entranceway to the brightly lit waiting room. Several figures were standing inside. Idling where he was, far from the doors, all he could discern was that they all seemed to be blood smeared. Mike also saw that one of them was wearing a police uniform.

Slowly continuing to roll down the pavement, as far from the doors as he could get so he wouldn’t draw any attention to himself, he reached the far right side of the building. It was dark and unlit in this part of the lot, but he did notice a door farther down. It had a single bulb over it and a pipe running up the wall, near a tree. Aiming for this, he slowly rolled toward this target. His headlights were still off.

After pulling parallel to the door, he stopped and then, in three short bursts, sounded the horn. Two seconds later the metal door opened about a foot, and Susan Tolliver’s head peeked out. Seeing Mike’s GMC Yukon parked outside, she pushed open the door, and she and several others ran out. As they quickly piled into the vehicle, a young male nurse, the last to exit, paused briefly under the door’s light.

Suddenly he was attacked by two zombies who appeared out of the blackness. Everyone was yelling and screaming at the same time. The rear door was still open as a nurse turned and yelled, “Brandon!”

Mike shouted, “Close the goddamn door!” and flipped on the headlights. As the lights illuminated the formerly pitch-black area, everyone saw that there were a half dozen walking corpses in front of them. Mike was about to shift into drive when his muscles turned to water. There, directly in front of the Yukon’s grille, stood Brian Dunn. Brian’s white button-down shirt was hanging open, and both it and his pallid body were smeared with blood that started at his chin. Dark veins were evident on his gray skin. Mike sat there, his mouth gaping, as his former friend and housemate opened his mouth widely. Gore and blood ran from it, down his chin and onto the hood of the car. The new passengers were yelling at Mike to drive and pounding the back of his seat.

Regaining his wits, Mike shifted the transmission into drive and, as Brian was rounding the fender on his way to the driver’s-side door, floored the gas. Wheeling expertly around and down the exit ramp, Mike looked in his rearview mirror to see Brian and the rest of the walking dead head toward the kicking feet of the male nurse, who now lay under a growing pile of zombies.

10

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hroughout the world, the slow deterioration of official authority often left important and usually crucial decisions to local commanders. The rich and powerful were no more immune to the Pandora virus than the poor and vulnerable. The very rapidly increasing infection rate included national leaders and government and military personnel. This in turn led to either political impasse regarding what to do or critical choices being made by the less capable.

Russia’s criminal underworld was having a field day, as different
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vied for control of Moscow. The Russian military was too busy dealing with the undead to pay much attention to the mob war ensuing. Mass desertions also put a stranglehold on the armies, as individual soldiers, worried sick about their families, left to try to save their own.

India and China already were being written off. In the ensuing days, new Chinese Communist leader Xi Jinping, former chairman of the military, took it upon himself to use small tactical nuclear bombs on two large interior cities where the dead had taken control. This wasn’t a national decision but a personal one, and its vast unpopularity was evident from his immediate assassination. Meanwhile the country’s fragile infrastructure was falling apart. Communication and media came to a complete halt; transportation, both public and commercial, stopped; and the power grid in that part of the world winked out, one block at a time.

The rest of civilization also was having a hard time staying afloat. All essential services were being maintained by less-than-skeleton crews. As impossible as this situation seemed, it grew even direr as existing workforces were reduced by attrition from zombie attacks or workers just giving up and going home. Amazingly the Internet still worked. And although television did too, the number of active stations shrank to only the four major networks; cable was all but nonfunctioning. Brownouts were commonplace in all of the large industrial countries. Not only were there not enough people to operate the energy superstructure, but also there was the fact that heating and air-conditioning and electrical appliances still operated nonstop in homes now occupied only by the dead. This led to a number of gas and electrical fires in towns and cities around the globe. As local fire departments were severely depleted of capable members—and in some cases were unable to respond because their firehouses were besieged by zombies—a great number of these small fires soon raged into giant infernos. Sometimes whole neighborhoods were consumed.

The Middle East was in turmoil as extreme fundamentalists placed all the blame on Israel and the “infidel West,” and soon rocket attacks and suicide bombings escalated to carpet bombing and then nuclear solutions.

As the weeks rolled by, Europe was turning back into a continent of besieged, walled, feudal cities. The mortality rate of the Pandora 2 Mutation now had surpassed that of the Black Death of the Dark Ages.

In the United States, the borders were completely closed off, except for the one it shared with Canada. Along its southern border, army tanks and vehicles constantly fired on the masses fleeing north to perceived safety. People both undead and alive were strafed and slaughtered on sight. With the United States being a nation of constitutionally armed citizens, ad hoc militias formed, and their members fanned out throughout their localities to kill zombies. From highly organized ex-military to redneck yahoos, from renamed street gangs to neighborhood vigilantes wanting to help, the United States became a very dangerous place to be. Unfortunately, as many of these untrained zombie hunters were entering
abandoned houses and apartment buildings, either to look for survivors and supplies or just to loot, as was their wont, they encountered an increasing number of walking dead behind closed doors. Having freed the zombies, who fed upon their liberators, they became just more zombies.

US servicemen and women were brought back from other parts of the world to initially protect our domestic bases and weapons and to form a force to take back and establish safe zones. Each zone was to serve as an area to house survivors and a staging ground for the next safe-zone acquisition. This turned out to work better on paper than in actuality. Whether hampered by desertions (though they weren’t as prolific as in other countries), strategic or logistic problems, or the occasional territorial firefight with local militias, the real reason the United States—and in fact the world—was in such dire straits was the simple mathematical formula that with 30 percent of the population turning into zombies, then attacking others to kill them and, in turn, create more zombies, the numbers grew to favor the dead.

By the start of the third week of the Pandora 2 Mutation, the human race was no longer the dominant predator on the planet. Zombies now freely shambled their way across Earth’s landscape.

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hings had started to organize themselves in the Sullivan–Quinn–Di Meola house. The eight new members of the household integrated themselves into the dynamic with a difficult albeit workable homogeny.

Sean and Mike’s girlfriends, Linda and Susan, were already known and well liked, so they fitted seamlessly into the house. Jack hadn’t heard another word from Nicole after that last unreal call. The other six newbies consisted of four nurses and two doctors. The nurses included Helen Evans, a forty-six-year-old mother of two and head nurse of the oncology wing. She was stoic about not seeing her husband and children but seemed determined to find them. In the days that followed, she tried calling them and even had Sean take her to her house, but they were gone.

Mariam Hernandez, originally from the Dominican Republic, was a twenty-one-year-old with shoulder-length black hair. Fiery yet sweet, she was liked by everyone she met.

It seemed at first glance that Naomi Washington wasn’t a likable person. A short, heavyset black woman of thirty-eight years, Naomi always seemed to be mad. She was not, in fact; it was just that she seldom smiled. Her saving grace was her bitingly sarcastic sense of humor. To strangers it may have seemed meanspirited, but as people got to know her, they realized her comments were just devastatingly funny.

The last nurse who had escaped was, on the other hand, not funny. Carol Pinchak was neither funny nor warm nor very pleasant. The tall, thin thirty-year-old was about as bland and drab as one could be. Mousy, with shoulder-length hair, she seldom spoke, never laughed, and rarely smiled. Although she was a smart and excellent nurse, if it weren’t for her ability to become a piece of furniture when in a room, she would have been uncomfortable to be around.