Swarm (Dead Ends) (14 page)

“We’re being told” he began, “that there has been some kind of viral outbreak. We don’t know specifics at this time but you are advised to stay inside of your house. The horrible footage we’ve just shown you took place not even a mile from here so if you are in the city, if you are near our building, please stay indoors. An official message from the CDC will be…” and before he could finish the statement, the catatonic news anchor broke out of her stupor and looked off to the right of where Steve Poole was standing, letting out a blood curdling scream as her eyes focused intently on something just outside of the camera’s purview. Steve Poole tensed and began yelling “Whoa! Whoa! John, what are you doing?” Then a man sprinted into view and took the poor weatherman down in stride. The screen then went blank and about five seconds passed until the video repeated itself.

“Jesus, it’s on a loop like that? What the hell?” I sighed.

“Probably for people like us. So we’d know how serious it was” Jane responded. “Although I’m kind of wishing I could un-see it, like immediately.” Her shoulders slumped down as the realization of what she’d just seen began to settle in.

I nodded, acting like I hadn’t just witnessed her “oh shit, we’re all screwed” moment, and managed a weak laugh in response as we watched the footage several more times, still not believing what we were seeing. Still looking for the special effects, trying to find that little piece of the footage that just didn’t look right. Only it all looked genuine. Genuinely fucked up. Even with everything we had witnessed, our minds would not let us believe it. We kept holding on to the idea that everything would be alright in the end because it was always alright in the end. Things like this don’t happen to Americans. We always thought we were immune to this kind of horror. And now it seems our complacency will be our downfall.

Chapter 13

Silence blanketed the dank confines of our newfound shelter. It was a heavy kind of silence. A wool blanket that suffocated us with worry, with fear, with the sobering realization that we may not make it out of this. I thought about Doc and wondered whether his daughter was even still alive. She lived in the San Juan Islands so it was a distinct possibility that she was. The population is low and the islands are located far away from any major city. Most of the people who lived there year round usually resorted to getting around in boats to go shopping or to do anything really. So pretty much everyone had an easy way to escape the carnage if or when the undead shit hit the fan. If they had survived, maybe they had some kind of stronghold that would keep people safe or maybe some way to contact the outside world. And if they did, the letter I had from Doc to be delivered to his daughter could be our way in. That’s all just a dream for now but it’s definitely something to keep in the back of my mind if things continue to fall apart.

With Zoe fast asleep Jane got to work on dinner, figuring out quickly how to wire everything so as not to burn down the only truly safe place we’ve been in since we met. Baked beans were simmering in one pot, rice in another, and she was cutting up a can of SPAM and preparing to crisp it up in a frying pan. My stomach grumbled as I continued switching the channels, waiting for anything else to come in. Unfortunately with a digital tuner, the station won’t come in unless the signal is perfect so there was an unending black screen staring back at me with every push of the channel button. It made me miss the salt and pepper wars that the old TV’s used to display when I was a kid. At least then, you knew something was happening on the other end. Just when I had given up, the black screen flickered to life. Footage was already rolling of a swarm of the undead enveloping cars and anyone else unlucky enough to be in them as they made their way through the city. There was no announcer, no sound of any kind. Just as one of the swarm, a bespectacled old woman who reminded me of a librarian, slammed her head through the back window of an SUV and began pulling a baby still attached to its baby seat through the shards of glass and preparing for her first bite, the feed switched. It looked like a feed from one of the many DOT cameras that news stations depended on for traffic reports. They were set to cycle every 10 seconds or so. There were no other words on the screen or any “Breaking News: We’re all Screwed!” type headlines. It was a direct feed from the DOT and nothing more. The lack of theatrics lent a sobering coldness to the images as if there were nothing left to do but watch.

Jane and I watched in horror as the feeds cycled through. The U District. Seattle Center. Alki Beach. Green Lake. Pike Place Market. Every one overrun with the undead, their population increasing with each bite. I can’t speak for Jane but I began to have a kind of morbid anticipation for what we would see next. It had only been a few days and already I was becoming immune to the unending gore that seemed to be enveloping the entire Sound. The place I grew up, the place I love was no more. Some kind of evil had managed to swallow it up in a matter of days. Soon, the Emerald City, the only city I have ever called home, would be a wasteland.

The simple meal Jane had prepared seemed like the best thing I had ever eaten. Spending extended periods of time in fight or flight mode burns calories like nothing I have ever experienced. I could already tell I had lost several pounds and I didn’t exactly have the frame that could stand losing too much more. Jane had attempted to feed some chicken broth to Zoe but she was in a deep sleep, the codeine doing what it was supposed to. I glanced over to the bed often, wondering how the hell I was supposed to take care of a sick child and a woman who seemed to be detaching from the moment more and more as time went on. I’m not the hero. Never have been. I’m just shy of 6’2’’, pasty white, and wiry as hell. There are only two reasons that I’ve lasted this long:

1. A freakish hand-eye coordination bestowed upon me at birth that up until this point had only really benefitted me when playing video games and,
   
2. My beta-male tendency to smell the shit before it hits the fan and make sure I’m nowhere near the ensuing spray.
   

I don’t have that heroic, steely-eyed determination of someone who will do anything to make sure everyone is safe. That was Ricky’s job. And I suspect that Jane already knows I’m in no position to take over that role. It’s just not within me to be that person. No matter how hard I try, I have always seen others as a burden rather than a responsibility or a gift. Unfortunately the world going to hell has only strengthened that belief. I’m not proud of it but I have to accept it. My complete inability to stray outside of my own problems made it easy to label me as a bit of an outcast, a rebel perhaps. Someone who didn’t fit in. But in this new world, being comfortable with my own thoughts, remaining unbothered by a lack of human communication? It just might keep me alive. Though I suspect the going rate for a human life is not quite what it used to be.

Conversation was minimal until I looked in the medicine cabinet and found some Percocet. Jane thankfully washed down a couple of pills with a bottle of Gatorade taken from the many pallets of the stuff lining the reinforced dirt walls. I washed mine down with more than a few healthy sips of J&B Scotch, wanting nothing more than to stop thinking for a while. My bones ached and my head pounded and I just wanted to feel nothing for a few short hours. At the same time, I was terrified of going to sleep. Jane and I talked on and off for a few hours, at least it felt like a few hours, I wasn’t sure. The conversation eased some as the pills kicked in. But in the back of our minds we knew that benign chit-chat was the only thing keeping the nightmares trapped in our subconscious from invading our dreams the second R.E.M. sleep had begun.

We talked about jobs we used to have, about our families, about anything other than the unfathomable death and destruction that had taken over the Sound. All of it a desperate attempt at grasping at what’s left of the normal lives we had just days ago. The lives I’m certain we both suspect we will never see again. The change that has happened in Jane in the last day or so is unsettling at best. I obviously hadn’t known her for long but whatever radiance she had, whatever hope for the future she possessed when I first ogled her at the Sportsman’s Paradise is gone. I hadn’t truly noticed it until now but she started to change the moment we left the relative safety of that store. And when she found out about Ricky, any shred of hope was gone forever. It’s slightly embarrassing now but when I first laid eyes on her, I imagined us as part of some crazy post-apocalyptic love story, where the horrible things happening around us only strengthened our bond. It’s a bitch when you realize that the hand labeled “dreams” remains bone dry and devoid of anything tangible while the hand labeled “shit” is almost too heavy to hold up on its own.

After I encouraged her to have a drink, promising her it would make the pills work faster, the mood lightened slightly. I guess that would be my only specialty in this new world we find ourselves in: expert on pills, booze, and anything else that could keep reality just out of reach if even for only a few hours. I couldn’t decide if that would make me more useful or less useful if I ever found myself (God forbid) holed up with a large group of survivors. Once her glass was empty, Jane became rather “handsy” and being that I have never considered myself a gentleman, I felt I was in no position to resist her advances. We kissed sloppily for a while until I moved in closer, taking in her scent – just the right amount of body odor mixed with left over deodorant from the day before – and moving my hand up the inside of her shirt, anticipating the rush of cupping her breasts. And just as I got to the Promised Land, Jane moaning gently for me to keep going, Zoe stirred in the bed at the other end of the dwelling. She was having a bad dream and talking in her sleep. The moment lost, Jane stumbled up and back to check on her. The halting stop of hormones being told to settle back down made me realize just how drunk I was. By the time Jane returned, I was fast asleep. Just my luck.

Chapter 14

Any hope of sleeping through the night sans nightmares was quickly squashed approximately 8 seconds after I passed out. Though thankfully the first dream had nothing to do with the flesh eating freak shows that had populated my waking hours for what felt like weeks. Though in a way, it was much worse than that. I dreamed I was bent over a chair and tied up, bare ass waving in the wind. Just as I get a grasp of my surroundings, my ex Melissa approaches from the rear dressed head to toe in what looks like the leather Gimp outfit from Pulp Fiction. This was scary enough in itself until I looked down towards her waist at the comically large strap-on cinched tight and true to her small frame; the business end getting closer and closer to my sensitive parts with each passing second. And time passes differently in dreams so each second feels like an hour, my ass puckering up to withstand the inevitable drilling it was destined to receive. Melissa’s evil red locks fluttered in some unknown wind that seemed to exist solely for that purpose, adding a dramatic movie-like quality to the whole scene. This wasn’t quick and dirty warehouse porn. This was movie-lot porn. With a story line and everything. I just prayed I would wake up before it came to what would no doubt be a painful and life altering climax for yours truly.

A few days ago, I thought she’d already done me on all fronts. But that wasn’t enough for her. She needed complete and total emasculation. She had to dive deep into my subconscious and in no time she would dive even deeper into my un-holiest of holies. Fuckin’ stone cold bitch. I remember trying to plead with her: “Please stop! That’s a one way street for Christ’s sake!” I kept thinking of things to say that might slow down the foot-long colon destroying missile that was slowly zeroing in on my position. “I just ate. You don’t come back from something like this!” But the words only echoed in my head. Of course it was one of those dreams where I had no voice. Though the look on her face and the incessant laughing that echoed in my head told me there was no stopping the patent-pending “Mandingo” from destroying any sense of manhood I may still have left.

Luckily, mercifully, just as I felt the slightest little tickle in the last place a heterosexual man ever wants to feel a tickle, I woke up gasping for air. The TV was still on, cycling through the citywide horror show. Jane had passed out with her head resting on my stomach, a puddle of drool already soaking into the sleeping bag. Her black-rimmed glasses hung half off her face and her ample breasts struggled to stay within the confines of her bra as they adjusted to the contours of my torso. The dream now behind me and thankfully placed in the
fiction
pile, I remembered how close I was to snaking my long fingers inside the confines of what I can only assume was some kind of state-of-the-art brazier to be able to help those puppies win the battle with gravity. I shook my head, which made me realize just how inebriated I still was, and cursed my bad luck. I glanced to the back of the bunker and I could see Zoe moving around but I was too drunk to do anything about it. She seemed to be standing in front of the bed with a look on her face I couldn’t quite make out but before I could ask her what was wrong, I passed out once again, saying a quick prayer that my dreams would be a little more palatable this time.

What’s that old saying about thanking God for unanswered prayers? I call bullshit on that. Why does nobody ever blame God for the bad shit? We’re so quick to praise him when good things happen yet so unwilling to implicate him when life hands us lemons and we forget the recipe for lemonade. Just once I want to see a professional athlete throw God under the bus for missing the winning field goal or striking out with the game on the line. While we’re at it let’s blame him for cancer and war. Politicians and the Kardashians. Because surely an entity capable of such amazing feats as turning water into wine could also be capable of turning a canyon of gold into an unending river of feces. The current condition of a good deal of the population should be evidence enough for that. So of course my prayer of hoping to get a few hours of shuteye without being sleep-raped or served up as the main course in a flesh buffet went unanswered. So fuck you God, fuck you right in the ear.