Countdown: A Newsflesh Novella Read online

  The disaster that had been averted when the Colorado Cancer Research Center burned began with a woman, widowed and bereft of her only child, walking barefoot onto the sun-baked surface of the road. She looked dully to either side, not really tracking what she saw—not by any human definition of the term—before turning to walk toward the distant shouts of children playing in the neighborhood park. It would take her the better part of an hour to get there, moving slowly, with the jerky confusion of the infected when not actively pursuing visible prey.

  It would take less than ten minutes after her arrival for the dying to begin. The Rising had come to Denver; the Rising had come home.

  * * *

  Please return to your homes. Please remain calm. This is not a drill. If you have been infected, please contact authorities immediately. If you have not been infected, please remain calm. This is not a drill. Please return to your homes…

  July 26, 2014: Allentown, Pennsylvania

  The people outside the prison could pretend that the dead weren’t walking if they wanted to. That sort of bullshit was the province of the free. Once you were behind bars, counting on other people to bring you food, water, hell, to let you go to the bathroom like a human being…you couldn’t lie to yourself. And the dead were walking.

  So far, there hadn’t been any outbreaks in Brandon’s wing of the prison, but he knew better than to attribute that to anything beyond pure dumb luck. Whatever caused some people to get sick and die and then get up again without being bitten just hadn’t found a way inside the building. It would. All it needed was a little more time, and it would.

  Brandon was sitting on his bed and staring at his hands, wondering if he’d ever see Hazel again, when the door of his cell slid open. He raised his head, and found himself looking at one of the prison guards—one of the only guards who was still bothering to show up for work.

  “You’ve got a visitor, Majors,” said the guard, and gestured roughly for him to stand. Brandon had learned the virtue of obedience. It was practically the first lesson that prison taught. He stood, moving quickly to avoid a reprimand.

  There had been other lessons since then. None of them had been pleasant ones.

  The guard led Brandon through the halls without a word. Some of the prisoners shouted threats or profanity as they passed; Brandon’s role in the Mayday Army was well-known, and was the reason he was placed in solitary. As the situation got worse, his future looked more and more bleak. Outside the prison, he would probably have already been lynched. As if it was his fault somehow? That bastard Kellis was the one who built the bug. He should be the one getting the blame, not Brandon—

  The guard led him around the corner to the visiting room. There were only two men standing there. One was the warden. The other was a slim, dark-haired man Brandon felt like he should recognize. Something about him was familiar.

  “Brandon Majors?” asked the man.

  “Yes?” Maybe he was from the governor. Maybe he had come to pardon Brandon and take him away from all this; maybe he understood that it wasn’t his fault—

  “My name is Alexander Kellis.”

  Hope died. Brandon stared at him. “I…you…oh, God.”

  Alexander looked at Brandon—the little ringleader who had managed to bring about the end of the world, the one whose name was already dropping out of the news, to be replaced by Alexander’s own—and said, very quietly, “I wanted to meet you. I wanted to look you in the eye while I told you that this is all your fault. History may blame it on me, but neither of us is going to be there to see it, and right here, right now, today, this is all your fault. You destroyed my life’s work. You killed the man I loved. You may very well have brought about the end of the world. So I have just one question for you.”

  “What?” whispered Brandon.

  “Was it worth it?”

  After five minutes passed with no answer, Dr. Kellis turned to the warden. “Thank you. I’d like to go now.” They walked away, leaving Brandon standing frozen next to the guard.

  That night, Brandon’s cell was somehow left unlocked. He was found dead in the hall the next morning, having been stabbed more than a dozen times. None of the other inmates saw what happened. At least, that’s what they said, and this one time, the warden chose to believe them. It wasn’t his fault, after all.

  * * *

  If you have not been infected, please remain calm. This is not a drill. Please return to your homes. Please remain calm. This is not a drill. If you have been infected, please contact authorities immediately…

  July 27, 2014: Berkeley, California

  “Get those walls up! Cathy, I want to see that chicken wire hugging those planks, don’t argue with me, just get it done.” Stacy Mason rushed to help a group of neighborhood teens who staggered under the weight of the planks they’d “liberated” from an undisclosed location. At this point, she didn’t care where the building materials came from; she cared only that they were going to reinforce the neighborhood fences and doors and road checkpoints. As long as what was inside their makeshift walls was going to make those walls stronger, they could start tearing down houses and she honestly wouldn’t give a fuck.

  Berkeley, being a university town in Northern California, had two major problems: not enough guns, and too many idiots who thought they could fight off zombies with medieval weapons they’d stolen from the history department. It also had two major advantages: most of the roads were already half blocked to prevent campus traffic from disturbing the residents, and most of those residents were slightly insane by any normal societal measurement.

  The nice lesbian collective down the block had contributed eighty feet of chicken wire left over from an urban farming project they’d managed the year before. The robotics engineer who lived across the street was an avid Burner, and had been happy to contribute the fire-breathing whale he’d constructed for the previous year’s Burning Man. Not the most immediately useful contribution in the world, but it was sufficiently heavy to make an excellent roadblock…and Stacy had to admit that having a fire-breathing roadblock certainly gave the neighborhood character.

  “Louise! If you’re going to break the glass, break it clean—we don’t want anyone getting cut!” They really, really didn’t want anyone getting cut. The transmission mechanisms for the zombie virus were still being charted, but fluid exchange was definitely on the list, and anything getting into an open wound seemed like a bad idea. “We gave you a hammer for a reason! Now smash things!”

  The distant shrieks of children brought her head whipping around, the hairs on the back of her neck standing on end. Then the shrieks mellowed into laughter, and she relaxed—not entirely, but enough. “Damn dogs,” she muttered, a smile tugging at her lips. “Exciting the children and stopping my heart.”

  “Mrs. Mason? I can’t figure out how to make the staple gun work.” The plaintive cry came from a young woman who had been Phillip’s babysitter several times over the summer. She was standing next to a sheet of plywood with a staple gun in her hand, shaking it helplessly. It wasn’t spewing staples at the moment—a small mercy, since the last thing they needed was for anyone to get hit by friendly fire.

  Stacy shook off her brief fugue, starting toward the girl. “That’s because you’re holding it wrong, Marie. Now, please, point the staple gun away from your body…”

  The comfortable chaos of a neighborhood protecting itself against the dangerous outside continued, with everyone doing the best that they could to shore up their defenses and walls. They’d lost people on supply runs and rescue trips, but so far everyone who’d stayed on the block had been fine. They were clinging to that, as the power got intermittent and the supply runs got less fruitful. Help was coming. Help had to be coming. And when help arrived, it would find them ready, healthy, and waiting to be saved.

  Stacy Mason might be living through the zombie apocalypse, but by God, the important word there was “living.” She was going to make it through, and so was everyone she cared about
. There was just no other way that this could end.

  * * *

  If you are receiving this broadcast, you are within the range of the UC Berkeley radio station. Please follow these directions to reach a safe location. You will be expected to surrender all weapons and disrobe for physical examination upon arrival. We have food. We have water. We have shelter…

  July 27, 2014: Denver, Colorado

  Denver was burning. From where Dr. Wells sat, in the front room of his mountain home, it looked like the entire city was on fire. That couldn’t possibly be true—Denver was too large to burn that easily—but oh, it looked that way.

  In the house behind him he could hear the sound of shuffling, uncertain footsteps as his wife and children made their way down the stairs to the hallway. He didn’t move. Not even to shut the door connecting the living room with the rest of the house. He was lonely. His city was burning, his research was over, and he was lonely. Couldn’t a man be lonely, when he was sitting at the end of the world and watching Denver burn?

  Daniel Wells lifted his scotch, took a sip, and lowered it again. His eyes never left the flames. They were alive. Even if nothing else in the city he called home was alive, the flames were thriving. There was something comforting in that. Life, as a wise man once said, would always find a way.

  A low moan sounded from the hallway right outside the front room. Daniel took another sip of scotch. “Hello, darling,” he said, without turning. “It’s a beautiful day, don’t you think? All this smoke is going to make for an amazing sunset…”

  Then his wife and children, who had finished amplification some time before, fell upon him, and the man responsible for Marburg Amberlee knew nothing but the tearing of teeth and the quiet surrender to the dark. When he opened his eyes again, he wasn’t Daniel Wells anymore. Had he still possessed the capacity for gratitude, it is very likely that he would have been grateful.

  * * *

  This is not a drill. If you have been infected, please contact authorities immediately. If you have not been infected, please remain calm. This is not a drill. Please return to your homes. Please remain calm. This is not a drill…

  July 30, 2014: Reston, Virginia

  It had taken six of the Valium pills John kept hidden at the back of the medicine cabinet, but Alexander Kellis was finally ready. He checked the knot on his rope one more time. It was good; it would hold. Maybe it wasn’t elegant, but he didn’t deserve elegant, did he? He’d destroyed the world. Children would curse his name for generations, assuming there were any generations to come. John was gone forever. It was over.

  “I’ll see you soon, sweetheart,” he whispered, and stepped off the edge of his desk. No one would find his body for weeks. If he reanimated, he starved without harming anyone. Alexander Kellis never harmed anyone.

  Not on purpose.

  * * *

  Please return to your homes. Please remain calm. This is not a drill. If you have been infected, please contact authorities immediately. If you have not been infected, please remain calm. This is not a drill. Please return to your homes…

  July 30, 2014: Atlanta, Georgia

  The bedroom walls were painted a cheery shade of rose-petal pink that showed up almost neon in the lens of the web camera. Unicorns and rainbows decorated the page where the video was embedded; even the YouTube mirrors that quickly started appearing had unicorns and rainbows, providing a set of safe search words that were too widespread to be wiped off the internet, no matter how many copies of the video were taken down. The man sitting in front of the webcam was all wrong for the blog. Too old, too haggard, too afraid. His once-pristine lab coat was spattered with coffee stains, and he looked like he hadn’t shaved in more than a week.

  “My name is Dr. William Matras,” he said in a calm, clear voice that was entirely at odds with his appearance. “I am—I was; I suppose I’m not anymore—an epidemic researcher for the Centers for Disease Control. I have been working on the issue of the Kellis cure since it was first allowed into the atmosphere. I have been tracking the development of the epidemic, along with my colleague, Dr. Christopher Sinclair.” His breath hitched, voice threatening to break. He got himself back under control, and continued. “Chris wouldn’t sanction what I’m going to say next. Good thing he isn’t around to tell me not to say it, right?

  “The news has been lying to you. This is not a virulent summer cold; this is not a new strain of the swine flu. This is, and has always been, a man-made pandemic whose effects were previously unknown in higher mammals. Put bluntly, the Kellis cure has mutated, becoming conjoined with an experimental Marburg-based cure for cancer. It is airborne. It is highly contagious. And it raises the dead.

  “Almost everyone who breathes air is now infected with this virus. Transmission is apparently universal, and does not come with any initial symptoms. The virus will change forms under certain conditions, going from the passive ‘helper’ form to the active ‘killer’ form of what we’ve been calling Kellis-Amberlee. Once this process begins, there is nothing that can stop it. Anyone whose virus has begun to change forms is going to become one of the mindless cannibals now shambling around our streets. Why? We don’t know. What we do know is that fluid transmission seems to trigger the active form of the virus—bites, scratches, even getting something in your eye. Some people may seroconvert spontaneously. We believe these people were involved with the Marburg trials in Colorado, but following the destruction of the facility where those trials were conducted, we have no way of being absolutely sure.

  “Let me repeat: We have been lying to you. The government is not allowing us to spread any knowledge about the walking plague, saying that we would trigger a mass panic. Well, the masses are panicking, and I don’t think keeping secrets is doing anybody any favors. Not at this stage.

  “Once someone has converted into the…hell, once somebody’s a zombie, there’s no coming back. They are no longer the people you have known all your life. Head shots seem to work best. Severe damage to the body will eventually cause them to bleed out, but it can take time, and it will create a massive hot zone that can’t be sterilized with anything but fire or bleach. We have…God, we have…” He stopped for a moment, dropping his forehead into the palm of his hand. Finally, dully, he said, “We have lied to you. We have withheld information. What follows is everything we know about this disease, and the simple fact of it is, we know there isn’t any cure. We know we can’t stop it.

  “Early signs of amplification include dilated pupils, blurred vision, dry mouth, difficulty breathing, loss of coordination, unexplained mood swings, personality changes, apparent lapses in memory, aphasia…”

  * * *

  If you have been infected, please contact authorities immediately. If you have not been infected, please remain calm. This is not a drill. Please return to your homes. Please remain calm. This is not a drill. If you have been infected…

  July 31, 2014: Berkeley, California

  Marigold felt bad.

  There had been a raccoon in the yard. She liked when raccoons came to the yard, they puffed up big so big, but they ran ran ran when you chased them, and the noises they made were like birds or squirrels but bigger and more exhilarating. She had chased the raccoon, but the raccoon didn’t run. Instead, it held its ground, and when she came close enough, it bit her on the shoulder, hard, teeth tearing skin and flesh and leaving only pain pain pain behind. Then she ran, she ran from the raccoon, and she had rolled in the dirt until the bleeding stopped, mud clotting the wound, pain pain pain muted a little behind the haze of her confusion. Then had come shame. Shame, because she would be called bad dog for chasing raccoons; bad dog for getting bitten when there were so many people in the house and yard and everything was strange.

  So Marigold did what any good dog in fear of being termed a bad dog would do; she had gone to the hole in the back of the fence, the hole she and her brother worked and worried so long at, and slunk into the yard next door, where the boy lived. The boy laughed and pull
ed her ears sometimes, but it never hurt. The boy loved her. She knew the boy loved her, even as she knew that the man and the woman fed her and that she was a good dog, really, all the way to the heart of her. She was a good dog.

  She was a good dog, but she felt so bad. So very bad. The badness had started with the bite, but it had spread since then, and now she could barely swallow, and the light was hurting her eyes so much, so very much. She lay huddled under the bushes, wishing she could find her feet, wishing she knew why she felt bad. So very bad.

  Marigold felt hungry.

  The hunger was a new thing, a strong thing, stronger even than the bad feeling that was spreading through her. She considered the hunger, as much as she could. She had never been the smartest of dogs, and her mind was getting fuzzy, thought and impulse giving way to alien instinct. She was a good dog. She just felt bad. She was a good dog. She was…she was…she was hungry. Marigold was hungry. Then she was only hunger, and no more Marigold. No more Marigold at all.

  Something rustled through the bushes. The dog that had been a good dog, that had been Marigold, and that was now just hungry, rose slowly, legs unsteady but willing to support the body if there might be something coming that could end the hunger. The dog that had been a good dog, that had been Marigold, looked without recognition at the figure that parted the greenery and peered down at it with wide-eyed curiosity. The dog, which had always been ready with a welcoming bark, made a sound that was close to a moan.