Zombies! Episode 3 - Love Bites

Zombies! Episode 3 - Love Bites

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2010 by Ivan Turner

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***

What has come before.

Shawn Rudd, a high school senior in a hurry
to meet up with his secret boyfriend, encounters a zombie on the
streets of Brooklyn. With no hesitation, Shawn confronts the
zombie, stabbing it and then bludgeoning it with a lead pipe. He
then turns on the zombie's hapless bite victim, killing her with a
blow to the head as well.

Investigating the crime, Detectives Johan
Stemmy and Anthony Heron are confounded and chilled by the fact
that the man Shawn killed had been dead for twelve hours at the
time of the incident. Their investigation takes them to the
apartment of the Koplowitz family where they

confront Mrs. Lucy Koplowitz, and her eight
year old daughter Zoe, already zombies. Zoe bites Stemmy in the
leg, thus infecting him. He dies hours later and Heron sees to it
that he will never turn.

A week later, a customer, of
Push Ups
gym, Karl Rappaport, becomes ill while working out and drops a
weight on his foot. Abby Benjamin wheels him to the
Sisters of
Charity
ER and waits for a doctor to attend him. While waiting,
Karl dies from the infection. The doctors bring him straight back
and try to revive him but to no avail. Minutes later, he awakens on
his own. A nurse comes to help him only to be bitten by the zombie
that he has become. Her wound is severe and it only takes seconds
for her to die. Shortly thereafter, there are two zombies in the
ER. While the chief of emergency medicine tries to get everyone
out, a young doctor named Peter Ventura recognizes the threat and
locks down the ER.

Coincidentally, Anthony Heron is also
at
Sisters of Charity
that day, visiting with the surgeon
who is scheduled to operate on him the next day. Heron has been
diagnosed with lung cancer. The situation in the emergency room
draws his attention however, and he takes charge of the situation
outside the locked down ER.

Before long, there are three zombies in the
ER, as a security guard, attempting to subdue Karl, is himself
overrun and partially eaten. The ER chief, Abby, Ventura, and three
others barricade themselves inside one of the exam rooms. One of
their number is bitten and they all know what her fate will be.
When the zombies break through, the chief uses their bitten
companion as bait and winds up trapping herself inside while the
other four escape. Her success, however, effectively traps the
zombies in the room and the police are able to come in and dispatch
them.

Dr. Denise Luco arrives on scene to begin
gathering samples and run tests. She has been researching the
zombie infection ever since discovering it in Johan Stemmy a week
before. The mayor authorizes Captain Lance Naughton of the NYPD to
assemble a
Zombie Task Force
at the head of which he puts
Detective Heron. Heron names Francis Culph as his second in
command. Naughton makes a statement to the press and chaos
ensues.

***

IT
took three weeks for the city to
normalize once the story behind the incidents at the
Sisters of
Charity
emergency room broke. The initial reaction was one of
disbelief, but then pictures were released. Someone in the ER had
used a camera phone and snapped a couple of shots of Karl. These
were posted on the internet and people began to grow frightened.
Canned goods and bottled water began disappearing off of store
shelves. The mayor issued a mandate limiting the purchase of such
goods. Looting became a problem. Store owners hired private
security people to guard their wares and half of the security
people wound up stealing from them as time wore on.

Day after day, the mayor, the police chief,
and police captains, with Naughton at the forefront, came on the
television to tell the public that things were under control and
people should go about their normal lives. People weren't having
it. Men and women stopped showing up for work. Shops were closed
down. The schools were practically empty. The governor declared a
state of emergency and FEMA stepped in.

Meanwhile, other states and cities were
preparing for the worst. Governors and mayors all over the country
took to the airwaves to assure the public that no cases of
zombieism had been reported anywhere else in the country. It was
recommended that people consider this a particularly ugly form of
the flu and go about their lives.

Still not having it.

People got in their cars, trucks, and vans,
and got the hell out of town. And not just New York. The big cities
were deserted. As if you could just outrun a plague. With millions
of people trying to get out of a city, didn't even one of them
think that the plague was going with him?

But the truth was that it wasn't really a
plague, was it? After all, three incidents in three weeks hardly
constituted a plague. In a week, the city seemed like a ghost town.
So many people had left and those who had stayed had stocked up on
food and barricaded themselves inside their residences. Those brave
souls who actually dragged themselves out of the house every
morning and went to work were giddy about the complete lack of
traffic. Plague or no plague, they considered it the best time of
their working lives.

But then no one else died. No other incidents
were reported (although there were a few that the police squashed
nicely). The population of New York City and the United States in
general began to realize that they couldn't hide forever. Like
groundhogs after a long winter, they stuck their noses out of their
doors, wiggled their whiskers, and ventured into the well known.
People began to go back to work and school. Shops opened up again.
The supermarkets were able to restock and provide goods to the
public at a regular rate. Evacuees began to trickle back into the
city.

The traffic got bad again.

And the president informed the mayor of New
York City personally that the next time Hollywood encroached upon
reality, his police captain should think twice about making a
public statement. It was going to take everything he had to get
other nations to allow travel to and from the U.S. and the economy
was as upside down as it ever had been.

It was a bad three weeks.

***

JOHN
Arrick was a teacher of English
at
Clinton High School
. He taught just a few blocks from
Push Ups
gym where he sporadically worked out after school.
He liked
Push Ups
. He liked Abby, the clerk at the front
desk, and Whitaker who was her assistant. He had never met the
gym's owner. Abby had introduced him to her husband once, a nice
bloke from London. But they hadn't had anything in common except
the side of the Atlantic on which they'd been born. Arrick was
never quite sure why Abby had introduced them but he suspected her
husband was having trouble getting on in the states socially. It
wasn't so different from the UK but it was different enough.

When Arrick had first come over to the States
from Scotland, he'd been a little bit lost. Just a teenager then,
he'd heard about all these Americans who'd backpacked their way
across Europe, staying in hostels and living day to day. That had
seemed like such an adventure to him. But, as the favorite son of
some very rich parents, he'd seen most of Europe already. He'd seen
a fair bit of Australia and Africa, too. It was the United States
he'd never seen. Despite its prominence in the world and on the
television, his parents had never seen fit to travel there. So he
figured he'd turn the backpacking thing up on its other end and go
to the States.

It didn't last long. Apparently, as the
favorite son of some very rich parents, Arrick was not prepared for
the rigors of hoofing it cross country. The planning of his trip
was flawed and things began to go awry almost immediately. He'd
barely made it out of New England when his parents all but ordered
him to come home. When he'd stubbornly refused, they cut him off
financially. His father said that he wasn't going to throw good
money over the ocean so his idiot son could waste it. From there it
was a work Visa, some education, citizenship, and eventually
teaching. Without his parents' money, the adjustment to the new
country had become that much more severe. He didn't love the U.S.
He didn't hate it but it didn't draw him the way it did others. At
first, he'd stayed purely out of stubbornness. His father
continuously ordered him home while his mother just got on the
phone and begged. So he'd dug in his heels and made a life for
himself.

Even still, it never really seemed permanent
until his father had died. That had been almost ten years before.
It had been summer when it happened and the memory of the phone
call was as vivid as it ever had been. He could relive it day to
day if he liked.

"John?" his brother, Malcolm, had said
through a staticky phone line. "I'm with mother."

Already that sent up warning bells. "What's
wrong?"

"Dad took ill a few days back. He didn't make
it."

"Didn't make it? You mean he's dead?"

"You've got to come home, John. Can you come
home?"

Arrick remembered thinking that it was all a
hoax. He remembered his doubt and, most of all, he remembered his
anger at his parents having dragged Malcolm into the whole thing.
Of course, he'd spent more money than he'd had on a plane ticket
the next day and arrived home to find that it was no hoax. His
father had really died and he would never see him again. There
would be no way to make amends for having left and never coming
back. After the funeral and the subsequent sorting of affairs, he'd
stayed with his mother for almost six months. He'd helped her
through the grief long after Malcolm had grown tired of the circus
and returned to England where he made his home. And then one
morning, as he stared out at the beautiful mountains of Scotland,
he realized that he didn't think of that country as home anymore.
Though the life he'd built in the United States seemed thin by New
York standards, it was his life. He missed it and wanted to go
back. After another month of helping his mother prepare herself for
life alone, he boarded a plane and returned to the United States
and New York City and teaching English.

So three weeks after the confirmation of the
existence of zombies, life was beginning to return to normal.
Arrick had stuck around, fearful of the things he heard on the news
yet perceiving it in a way that one perceives the news of
catastrophe in another nation on the far side of the world. There
was no evidence of it in his day to day life except the
disappearances of so many panicked people. So he went to work and
bought his groceries miles away at the one store that was open. And
he did whatever it was he had to do until the everyday returned in
full force. With the reemergence of the paranoid into society,
shops began to open and buses and trains began to run on schedule.
Class schedules were put right and Arrick began running his regular
lessons again. Even Shawn Rudd came back to school, which was odd
because Shawn's truancy presumably had had nothing to do with a
fear of zombies. He'd gone missing a full week before the news
broke. The guidance department had sent a note out to Shawn's
teachers two days later simply stating that they were aware of his
absence and that it would continue indefinitely. With a hundred and
fifty other students to worry about, Arrick had simply shrugged his
shoulders and thrown the note away. Shawn was a decent student and
a likeable enough lad but if guidance was aware of the issue then
Arrick was perfectly happy to let them handle it. He'd later heard
that Shawn had been arrested but didn't put much stock in that
rumor.

At the end of the day, Shawn came to Arrick
to ask for any makeup assignments. Arrick had a few things
collected but wasn't particularly organized. The truth was that not
too much had happened. With the city in disarray and attendance at
an all time low, there hadn't seemed much of a reason to teach
anything. They were all playing catch-up.