Zombie Fallout
This book is a work of fiction. Names, Characters, places and events are a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual names, characters and places are entirely coincidental. The reproduction of this work in full or part is forbidden without written consent from the author.
Copyright @ 2010
Visit us at marktufo.com
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Mark-Tufo/133954330009843
http://zombiefallout.blogspot.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/ZombieFallout
Cover Art by Shaed Studios, shaedstudios.com
Dedications
I want to dedicate this book to my wife without whose encouragement this would have remained a file on my computer. She is the light that shines my path and for that I will be eternally grateful.
I also need to send out an honorable mention to my brother, no matter what he may say to the contrary the sickest thing you will read in this book came from his festering mind.
I would like to take a second to also add Mo Happy into my dedications. She has taken her considerable talent and helped to soften and polish the many rough edges that this book used to possess.
To all the brave men and women, that are currently on active duty or who have ever served in the armed forces, police or fire department! I salute you all my brothers and sisters in arms!
Prologue
Late Fall – 2010
Reuters – Estimates say that nearly three thousand people nationwide and fifteen thousand people worldwide have died of the H1N1 virus (otherwise known as Swine flu). Nearly eighty thousand cases have been confirmed in hospitals and clinics across the United States and the world, the World Health Organization reported. The influenza pandemic of 2010, while not nearly as prolific as the one that raged in 1918, still has citizens around the world in a near state of panic.
New York Post (Headlines October 31st) – Beware! Children
Carry Germs! – Halloween Canceled!
New York Times – (Headlines November 3rd) – Swine flu claims latest victim – Vice President surrounded by family and friends at the end.
Boston Globe – (Headlines November 28th) – Swine Flu Vaccinations Coming!
Boston Herald – (Headlines December 6th) – Shots in Short Supply – Lines Long!
National Enquirer – (Headlines December 7th) – The Dead Walk!
There would be no more headlines.
It started in a lab at the CDC (Center for Disease Control). Virologists were so relieved to finally have an effective vaccination against the virulent swine flu. Pressure to come up with something quickly had come from the highest office in the land. In an attempt at speed, the virologists had made two mistakes. First they used a live virus, and second, they didn’t properly test for side effects. Within days, hundreds of thousands of vaccinations shipped across the U.S. and the world. People lined up for the shots like they were waiting in line for concert tickets. Fights broke out in drugstores as fearful throngs tried their best to get one of the limited shots. Within days the CDC knew something was wrong. Between four and seven hours of receiving the shot roughly 95 percent succumbed to the active H1N1 virus in the vaccination. More unfortunate than the death of the infected was the added side effect of reanimation. It would be a decade before scientists were able to ascertain how that happened. The panic that followed couldn’t be measured. Loved ones did what loved ones always do. They tried to comfort their kids or their spouses or their siblings, but what came back was not human, not even remotely. Those people that survived their first encounter with these monstrosities usually did not come through unscathed. If bitten they had fewer than twenty-four hours of humanity left; the clock was ticking. During the first few hysteria ridden days of The Coming as it has become known, many thought the virus was airborne. Luckily that was not the case or nobody would have survived. It was a dark time in human history; we may never be able to pull ourselves out of the ashes.
CHAPTER 1 – Dec 8th, Denver, CO – 7:02 p.m. Journal Entry - 1
This wasn’t supposed to be how it began…dammit! I had just turned the shower on and was preparing to scrub the dirt and grime away that I had amassed during the day on-the-job. I worked for the highway department fixing potholes. At one time in my life I was what you would consider a white-collar worker. I was a Human Resources Generalist for a Fortune 500 company. To put it delicately, I made bank. And then President Bush saw fit to end my salad days. Was it really his fault? I don’t know, but he was an easy scapegoat. After the unemployment benefits petered out and still with no hot prospects, I took a city job. It was dirty, backbreaking work and I made less than when I was collecting unemployment, go figure. I made more sitting on my ass playing the Wii. But at least it was honest work. Never once in the three months that I had been working there did I wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat and stress out about having not filled in a hole on Havana Avenue. There were benefits to blue-collar work, lack of stress being one of them.
But I digress. So there I was, sticking my hand into the shower to see if it was the right temperature. I had even begun to spread some body wash on myself in preparation for the invigorating feeling of being clean. (Yeah BODYWASH, you got a problem with that?) I have two pet peeves in life. Well shit, if I’m being honest I probably have about seventeen but who’s counting? In particular two come to mind, and I’ll explain. The first is being dirty. I just hate feeling dirt and grime around my neck. I hate the way my shirt collar will stick just a little bit. It irritates the living crap out of me. The second pet peeve is feeling dried soap on my body. I don’t know if any of you have ever been to New Orleans. The water is ‘soft’ or ‘hard,’ I don’t know which. I always get the two mixed up. Anyway, the water just won’t wash the soap off of you, so you walk around all day with this invisible film on you. Everything's sticky. Your clothes stick to your body, shit, your own body sticks to you. Just bend your arm, you can barely straighten it back up. So you walk around all day like a scarecrow with a stick up its ass. Yeah I know, I know!! My wife tells me all the time I have problems! Shit, where was I? Yeah, so there I am about to hop in the shower when I hear my wife scream this bloodcurdling shriek. Now you’ve got to know my wife, she wouldn’t scream if I fell down the stairs and broke my arm. Hell, she’d probably call me a klutz and get me into the car for the ride to the emergency room, all the while calling the kids to tell them Dad hurt himself again. She’s just not that into histrionics. So when I heard the scream I knew something bad was up. I stared longingly at the shower I was foregoing as I grabbed a towel and headed downstairs.
“What the fuck….” I yelled, but the rest of my expletive sentence died on my lips as I saw the terror in my 15-year-old son’s face. Nothing scares Travis, not even me, and I’m a former Marine. Hell, just last week I watched him tear a phone book in half and not of some little town in Nebraska either. The kid was starting middle linebacker on his freshman team. And he was scaring the hell out of the starter on the JV team. The boy didn’t care who was coming after him, or who he was going after. Well I guess that’s a lie, they have to be living.
He never looked up when I came down the stairs. “Mom, lock the door!” he yelled. “LOCK IT!” he screamed again.
"I can’t figure out the lock!” my wife yelled back.
I didn’t know whether I should laugh or be worried. To be honest it was a funny scene. My wife frantically trying to lock the security door with no luck while my linebacker son, who normally towers over his mother, was cowering behind her. I couldn’t see out the door from my vantage point. When the front door is open it blocks off the landing, so I rushed to push it closed, forcing my wife and son away from the security door. I had no sooner shut the heavy gauge steel front door when
I heard the glass pane in the security door shatter. (We had to move to a townhome in a less than desirable neighborhood after I lost my job, and security was a big issue. We even had bars across all the lower windows, THANK GOD!
I was a millisecond away from opening the door and severely chewing the ass off some neighborhood punk who was going to cost me a hundred dollars to repair the glass.
“NO!” my wife and son yelled in unison. My wife slammed up against the door to reiterate her point.
“What the hell is going on?!” My adrenaline was pumping. My pet peeves were throbbing, all seventeen of them.
“Look out the peephole,” my wife whispered.
I put my eye to the hole expecting to see some little shit gang-bangers out there tearing things up. What I saw was a tongue.
“I see a tongue! Some asshole is licking my peephole,” I said, then I laughed a little bit. That sounded a little gross even to me.
My wife didn’t see the humor, her face still hadn’t regained her color and my son looked like he was starting to hyperventilate.
My wife told me to look out the window but she made no move to look with me. I’m not the brightest bulb on the string but even I knew at this point something was really messed up. I put on my best male bravado and stepped over to the window. I rolled up the shade and to this day I don’t know how it happened but I simultaneously felt my stomach lurch into my throat and my balls fill in the abandoned spot my belly left behind. There had to have been at least a couple of dozen dead people milling about our communal lawn. Okay, so they weren’t dead in the traditional way, they were still moving, but they were dead all the same.
My quasi-nightmare dream had come true. ZOMBIES were afoot. Now, I know this is a sick fantasy so bear with me. I had always wished for this. I had watched nearly every zombie movie, from the early Dawn of the Dead, with the slow shuffling brain eaters, to the newer 28 Days Later flicks with the fast, semi- intelligent brain eaters. Hell, I even liked the films that made fun of the style, like Shaun of the Dead and Boy Eats Girl. If it involved a zombie I was game.
Now back to the slightly insane part of my fantasy. I guess if you get right down to the guts of it, no pun intended, it would be a way to escape the responsibilities (and boredom) of everyday life. Forget the 9 to 5 grind, the mortgage and clothes shopping, it would just become all about survival of the fittest. I had been planning for this day for almost twenty-five years of my life. I know, pathetic, right? I had a gun safe full of multiple caliber rifles and pistols. I told my wife it was for hunting. I’ve never even BEEN hunting. Either she was REALLY gullible or she was just turning the other cheek. We all have our own crosses to bear. I’ll be honest though, my fantasy involved more the slower, shuffling zombies than the ultra-fast Resident Evil kind. Like it or not, it appeared that IT had finally happened. I closed the blinds as fast as I could, hoping that I didn’t attract any undue attention. My brain was in overdrive.
“Tracy! I yelled a little louder than I meant to. I wrestled with my emotions and tried to calm my flittering heart. “Turn on the TV please.”
She was still in a little bit of shock. “Talbot (our family name), this is no time for ESPN,” she responded waspishly.
“You know, I would like to know how the Giants did tonight, but I was hoping for the news,” I answered sarcastically.
“Oh,” was all she could muster as the thin film of terror began to peel away from her vision.
“Travis.” He didn’t move. “Travis!” I said a little louder.
He finally broke away from his mother's back, confusion and fear still warring for control over his features.
“Go look out the back window, if our deck is clear I want you to make sure the back gate is locked.” Now before you go getting all out of sorts at me, our backyard is about as big as most people’s master bathrooms. The kid would be perfectly safe as long as the gate was still closed and our yard hadn't yet been breached.
But still Travis looked at me with pleading eyes, not believing that his own father would put him back in harm’s way.
“Oh for fuck’s sake! I’ll do it!” I sighed disgustedly. The relaxation on his face was clearly perceptible. I should take it easy on the kid, he was shaken up, and I was going to need his help before this was all over with. I peered out the back, through our vulnerable French doors. We hadn’t been able to afford security bars for them yet. "Oh crap," I muttered, I could see the gate was open. ‘Nothing to it but to do it right? If I die in a towel I’m gonna be pissed though.’ I was able to tell in less than a heartbeat that our postage stamp sized back deck didn’t have any unfriendlies on it. But what I wasn’t able to discover from my present vantage point was if anything (or anyone) was on the other side of the gate. It was a full picket gate and did not afford me the luxury of seeing through to the other side. I opened one of the French doors and immediately wished I hadn’t. The smell was beyond putrid; it smelled like sour milk mixed with a hint of steaming broccoli (which I hate) and a healthy dose of shit all stirred in for the fun of it.
The walking dead weren’t in my backyard but they were close. If they came through the gate now, this was going to be a short novella. My towel caught on the next-to-useless excuse for a lock on the door. I didn’t even stop to grab it. Somehow it seemed more noble to die naked like a savage than with a terry cloth towel around my waist. I moved as quickly as I dared, when it happened! I felt something warm and squishy give way under my right foot. My first thought was BRAINS but then the unmistakable smell of fresh dog shit wafted up to my nostrils. I had to vigorously defend against the revulsion that welled up in me. I so wanted to vomit but I pushed on. I was two steps away from the gate when I heard the telltale shuffling. Did the smell of the shit draw them or were they already close? I threw myself against the gate, quashing down my rising panic, frantically trying to drive the lock home.
You know when you see this crap in the movies, you are always like, “Oh come on, just lock the gate, how effen hard can it be?” Well I’ll tell you. When your heart is going like a trip-hammer and your arms are shaking like you’re on ground zero on the San Andreas Fault during The Big One, it’s unbelievably hard. I felt an impact as something or somebody pushed against the gate from the other side. It wasn’t a concerted effort, which was a good thing; I might have abandoned ship and headed screaming for the house. It was one good push that sent the gate about six inches my way. I pushed back so hard that I almost pushed the gate through the backstop, which obviously would have caused its own set of problems. I was able to drive the bolt home, but I didn’t hang around long to revel in my victory.
“Talbot, get in here!” my wife bawled.
‘MAN,’ I said to myself, doesn’t she realize I almost died out here? Yeah, I was being a little melodramatic but I think I had an appropriate excuse. I was about to ask her "what," when she pointed to the television. The picture was horrible. I knew I shouldn’t have switched from cable to satellite. Why was I getting lost in the details when the situation was so serious? Maybe it was my way of coping, who knows. I tried to minor in psychology in college but couldn’t stand it. The newscaster looked like she had been dragged out of bed to do the report. She probably had been.
"…By all accounts it appears the threat ('OH for God sake's lady! Call it like it is, a spade is a spade already') is overwhelming our ground troops! Estimates have it that nearly a third of our country is already in enemy hands and spreading fast. Do not let one of the infected scratch or bite you. In a matter of hours the virus will kill and then reanimate you. If you or someone you know becomes infected the only way to stop them is to destroy the brain. Do not approach them. Do not try to reason with them. The worst is yet to come," she continued. "It also seems the pathogen is airborne!" (My heart skipped!) "Even if someone were to die of means other than direct contact with the infected, they also will become reanimated within a few hours of their death."
“What does that mean?” my wife asked. I knew she knew the answer bu
t she was dealing with her shock in the only manner she knew how…denial.
“It means we’re in a lot of trouble,” I answered solemnly.
“What the hell is that smell?” she snapped, as she also snapped out of her stupor. She was looking directly at the source of the stink. I wanted to blame it on the zombies but I had Henry's crap halfway up my ankle. Henry was our English bulldog and I loved him to death. Before this I would have even said his shit didn’t stink, but I can now tell you that is a lie. Gotta love English bullies, the world was going to hell in a hurry and he hadn’t even left the comfort of his dog bed yet to see what was happening.
My son Travis still seemed fogged over so I wanted to give him something to do to keep his mind and body occupied.
“Travis, go load the guns,” I said.
“Which ones?” he countered.
My heart leaped when I realized he was rebounding. “All of them,” was my reply. Just as quickly as my feeling of elation rose, the spirit of dread brought me crashing back. “Where’s Justin?” I asked my wife. Justin is my middle child. He’s 19 and had recently moved home after a brief stint living with his sister up in the town of Breckenridge. He’s a good kid with a huge heart. He doesn’t always prioritize his life correctly, but then again how many teenagers do? I needed him here, not only because he’s our kid and I wanted to make sure he was safe, but he’s a hell of a shot and I needed the third man of our fire team present and accounted for. Preparing like I had been for the aforementioned zombie invasion entailed taking my two boys to the shooting range as often as possible. I made sure that they were well versed in the ins and outs of handling firearms correctly, no matter the caliber. They could shoot everything from my illegal (shhh) fully automatic M-16 to my small cannon (my 30 aught 6) to the various .22 caliber rifles and pistols I owned. I needed my flank men!