Zombie D.O.A. Read online

  Suddenly, our usually quiet suburban street erupted into chaos. People started pouring from the buildings on either side of the road, piling their belongings and their families into cars. Horns blared and there were shouts and curses. A heavily laden SUV plowed into a sedan and the two drivers got out and flew into each other.

  I decided to go downstairs and try to find someone, anyone, who knew what was happening.

  At street level it was even more chaotic. A crowd had gathered at the corner market and was being held at bay by the Indian guy who ran the store. He had a shotgun, but still the crowd pushed in, throwing threats and curses. Shots were fired and things got pretty quickly out of hand after that.

  The crowd closed in on the shopkeeper and literally tore him to pieces with their bare hands. The man had probably been on first name terms with many of them. I heard the plate glass window shatter as the crowd surged forward.

  In the midst of the chaos, I saw a guy I knew. I’d first met Dom Buchanan one day at the supermarket. He was a fight fan and recognized me and we got talking about fights and fighters.

  After that we’d shoot the breeze whenever we bumped into each other, not really buddies but on good terms nonetheless. We’d been to a Mets game together one time. And his wife Shelley and he had had dinner at our apartment. He was an easy-going type, but today he looked to be on the verge of a breakdown.

  “Hey Dom, wait up,” I said grabbing him by the arm. He yanked his arm free, then looked at me as though seeing me for the first time.

  “Have you seem my, son?” he said. “My boy, Michael, little red headed boy, about so high, have you seen him.”

  “No, but…”

  “I need to find my boy,” he said turning away and disappearing into the crowd.

  A looter ran past me with his bounty of Captain Crunch and toilet paper. I heard a shot fired and a scream and then someone sobbing, “No, no!”

  The crowd was beginning to dissipate. People carried looted provisions back to their cars and homes. A number of vehicles drove off at high speed and it’s a miracle there were no further collisions.

  I thought I heard Dom Buchanan calling, “Michael!” And then as quickly as it had begun, it was over. The last car pulled away from the curb, and the street fell as silent as a battlefield after a firefight.

  It resembled a battlefield too. I saw a number of bodies, both dead and dying. A woman cradled a dead child in her arms and when I approached her, she screamed and ran away. The last of the looters evacuated the supermarket carrying a few cases of Coors.

  To my left I heard shouting and a black guy in a business suit running down the middle of the road at full tilt. He neatly sidestepped the guy with the Coors, but his pursuers were not as nimble. They collided with the Coors guy, sending him crashing to the ground.

  The suited guy flew past me and shouted, “Run!” without breaking stride. I heard screaming and looked back to see the Coors guy being attacked by about eight men. I recognized one of them as Bronson Chavez, the leader of a local street gang called the Level 42’s.

  The 42’s had the Coors guy surrounded and he was on his knees crying and blubbering while they circled him. Chavez knelt down next to him and put an arm around the guy. Coors guy started to sob and Chavez leaned in and seemed to whisper something in his ear. Coors began to tremble violently and then to struggle, as Chavez held him.

  When he pulled away Coors started to scream and to hold his hand to the gaping hole in his head where his ear had been. Chavez held the severed ear between his teeth and chewed on it like a piece of beef jerky.

  His followers seemed to take this as a signal, and fell on the man like a pack of starving wolves, ripping and tearing with teeth and nails. They tore off his clothes and started biting at his buttocks, legs, chest and arms, ripping off bloody strips of flesh and devouring them. That’s the best word I can find, devouring, the way a predator devours prey.

  Without realizing it I had moved off the street and found cover on the stairs that led up to my apartment building. Even after what had happened to Rosie and what I’d seen in Brad’s apartment, I found what I’d just witnessed impossible to comprehend.

  I’d just seen a man torn apart and eaten alive by another group of men on a suburban New York street. What was this? Some kind of a virus? A biological weapon released in a terrorist attack? Some kind of zombie apocalypse like your saw in the movies? Crazy as that idea was, it seemed very plausible right then.

  The 42’s were finishing off what was left of the Coors guy. From my hideout on the steps, I couldn’t see them any more, but I could hear them squabbling over the remains. I also thought I heard them gnawing on bones but I quickly convinced myself that that was my imagination.

  I had to get off the street and back to the relative safety of my apartment, before the 42’s finished their meal and came looking for new prey. As cautiously as I’ve ever done anything in my life, I climbed the steps, walking backwards, squatted down and using my hands to avoid losing my balance.

  I’d reached the door when I heard new noises to my left. Ripping noises, snarling noises, eating noises. There’d been no screams or cries so I figured the 42’s had started feeding on some of the corpses left behind.

  I had to get indoors and quick, but I as soon as I tried to door I realized I’d made a monumental mistake, I’d allowed the door to latch. I was locked out. I needed someone to buzz me in.

  There were 6 apartments in our building - us, Kranski, Brad, Liebowitz on the second floor. Two larger apartments on the third, Jenny Lee, a cellist currently on tour with the New York Philharmonic, and another guy who no one ever saw and who Kranski was convinced was a drug dealer.

  Mr. Liebowitz was bed-ridden and had a day nurse (although not today, I suspected). That left Kranski or the drug dealer. I tried the drug dealer.

  “Yeah?”

  “I need to get in.”

  “Sure thing.”

  He buzzed me in and I took the stairs to my apartment three at a time.

  I crept to the window which was letting in the golden rays of an early fall afternoon. Peering over the sill, I could see a few of the 42’s milling around aimlessly. One of them had lost an arm and another had a gaping wound in his abdomen, others had what looked like severe head trauma.

  In fact, none of them was without some injury that would put any normal man in the ground. None of them except Bronson Chavez.

  I wanted to draw the shades but was afraid that the movement might attract attention, so I lay down in the warm afternoon sun and despite what had happened, what was happening, I felt myself starting to drift off.

  That was when I heard the baby crying.

  At first I thought it was my imagination or that the sound was coming from somewhere else, but there it was clear as day, a baby’s cry, coming from our bedroom. And then the sound of an off-key melody, a song I knew well, “The Greatest Love of All.”

  On a day when the whole world seemed to have gone insane, this was a new tweak on insanity. My wife and daughter were dead. I’d seen them, held them, put my hands on their wounds. I’d cradled their broken bodies. There was no way either of them was alive. Yet, I could hear them in the next room.

  The urge to run was strong. Every cell in my body, every molecule of my being, told me to go, to just keep running and not look back. To tell myself that what I’d heard was my imagination, or my grief playing tricks on me, or my mind trying to make sense of the unfathomable.

  But if you’ve ever loved someone, you’ll know why I didn’t leave, why I couldn’t, why I had to go into that room and see for myself.

  I crawled from the window on all fours, standing only when I was sure that I was out of the line of sight from the street. In the room the baby had fallen silent, but I could still hear the lullaby. It was a scene I’d looked forward to since Rosie had told me she was pregnant, my wife singing our daughter to sleep. I never suspected that it would fill me with terror.

  Panic started to well in me
and I steadied myself with a deep breath and stepped cautiously in the direction of the bedroom. There was a sideboard against the wall and I picked up one of my boxing trophies from it. I hefted the trophy in my hand and the weight of it felt strangely reassuring. Then, I quickly stepped towards the bedroom before I lost my nerve.

  The room was dark with the curtains drawn and the only source of light coming from the half open bathroom door. Rosie was sitting on the bed, back to the headboard, the baby suckling at her breast. The little one was hungry and the sound of her feeding was like the rasping breath of a dying man. Blood ran down Rosie’s breast as the baby suckled.

  Rosie looked up at me and smiled and even in the half-light her teeth looked somehow like those of a carnivore and her eyes had the faraway look of a veteran junkie.

  “There you are you, goose,” she said in a voice that wasn’t quite hers. “Come over here and meet your daughter. She’s called Ruby, like we agreed.”

  “Rosie” I said “I’m so sorry…”

  “Oh, honey” she said “Don’t be. I’m just so hungry and I wish you’d come over here and kiss me and hold our daughter.”

  “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea, sugar.”

  “Oh, but it is honey bunny. I need you.“

  She drew out the word “need” and ran her blackened tongue over her oversized teeth. Then suddenly she screamed and ripped the baby from her. “Yikes, fucking little bitch. I look like meatloaf to you.”

  The baby had bitten deeply into her breast, almost severing the nipple. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The gaping hole in her stomach looked putrid, and the viscera that hung from it resembled fat, parasitic worms.

  She rose slowly from the bed, the smile of a corpse playing on her lips. “Come here sweet meat,” she said. “Come to mama.”

  “Rosie, I…”

  “Ah, pork chop,” she said and moved in.

  I swung the boxing trophy without thinking, and it caught her solidly to the side of the head. Rosie was sent backward into the bathroom, landing flat on her ass and sliding till her back crashed into the tub.

  She was up in a flash and came at me, nails flailing. “You son of a bitch,” she screamed. “I’ll kill you.”

  But I was through the door and had it closed before she could get to me. I held onto the handle while she pounded on the door and screamed obscenities.

  When we’d moved into the apartment two years before I’d taken all the keys from the internal doors and dropped them into a storage jar. Now I had reason to curse that decision.

  I looked around for something that could be used to bar the door. The sideboard was about six feet away and I didn’t think I could reach it without releasing the door handle.

  The only other options were to let go and hope to make it to the front door before Rosie got to me, or to let her out and somehow try to fight her off. That would probably mean I’d have to kill her, and despite what Rosie had become, I didn’t know if I could bring myself to do it.

  I decided to make a try for the sideboard. I turned and rested my back against the door, and slid down onto my butt. I figured I could keep some pressure on the door while hooking the sideboard with my feet and pulling it closer. Then I’d somehow force it under the door handle to keep Rosie locked in while I decided what to do.

  Rosie meanwhile had given up on cursing and was back to trying to convince me with a barrage of sweetums, and snookums and honeybuns.

  I was flat on my back and just about to hook the sideboard with my legs, when Dom Buchanan walked into the apartment. He looked dazed, shell-shocked, and walked with a shuffling gait, dragging what looked like a badly fractured leg.

  It also looked like he’d taken a shotgun blast to the face. Half of it was missing and the other half scarred with bloody pockmarks. Air whistled from his exposed windpipe in steady, measured breaths. His shirt was ripped, exposing the blood soaked t-shirt underneath. He carried a revolver loosely, almost absent-mindedly, in his hand.

  He shuffled further into the apartment, surveyed the room, and sniffed the air like a predator scenting prey or danger. He seemed not to notice me, which was a good thing. I was flat on the floor and if he’d decided to attack right then, I was done for.

  Slowly I curled my feet under me and got myself into a position where I could move quickly if I needed to.

  I’d managed to get into a half-kneeling position when the cell phone, Rosie’s phone, started ringing in the bedroom. “Don’t answer that!” I heard her shriek, and then she screamed like an injured beast and attacked the door.

  Dom swung his head languidly towards the sound and that’s when he noticed me. Somehow his ruined face managed the semblance of a grin and he lurched towards me with surprising speed.

  At that moment Rosie finally forced her way into the room and charged headlong at Dom, catching him in the midriff and sending him to the ground. The gun was knocked from his grip, went skidding across the floor, and came to rest under a chair.

  I scrambled to retrieve it while Rosie and Dom struggled on the floor. Rosie had the upper hand and straddled Dom, screeching like a banshee and tearing at him with her nails. She began throttling Dom then leaned forward and sunk her teeth into his ruined face. There was a crunching sound and then a rip as Dom’s nose was torn off.

  The thing that had once been Rosie looked towards me with her insane, bloodied face, the nose visible in her mouth for a second before she woofed it down. Then she returned to working on Dom.

  I walked up behind her, closed my eyes, and fired a single shot into the back of her head. Rosie slumped forward pinning Dom to the ground. While he struggled to free himself I aimed the gun at him and pulled the trigger. The hammer fell on an empty chamber. I pulled again and again with the same result - the gun was empty.

  I dropped the revolver to the floor in disgust, picked up my boxing trophy and slammed it into Dom’s skull. I didn’t stop swinging until his head was pulverized into a bloody grey jelly and then I fell on the floor and sobbed like a jilted teenager.

  Afterwards I dragged Dom’s body into Brad’s apartment. Then after some thought I moved Rosie in there too.

  Chapter Two: Ruby Tuesday

  When I got back to the apartment, Rosie’s cell phone was ringing again. It had woken the baby and she was throwing a tantrum. I ran into the bedroom and found the phone wedged between the headboard and mattress.

  It was Blaze. “Chris” he said. “Thank fuck, I‘ve been trying to get you for hours. You okay, man? Is Rosie okay? What’s that noise in the background? Is that a baby crying? What the…?

  “Blaze, Blaze, slow down. Do you know what’s going on? How’d you get through to me? All the phones are down.”

  “Well, I got fifteen of the fucking things, innit.” Blaze said in his British accent that had always sounded slightly fake to me. “This is the last one that works but I don’t know for how long, so shut up and fucking listen, alright.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Now listen, I don’t know a lot, but here’s what I do know, stay off the fucking streets, okay. There’s a shit storm going on down here. Police, army, national guard, the shebang. It’s out of fucking control, man.”

  “What is this shit? Does anyone know?”

  “You haven’t seen on the TV?” I admitted that I hadn’t. “Well, don’t bother. Turned it all off now haven’t they. Wouldn’t want a panic?” Blaze laughed and broke into a coughing fit.

  When he recovered his composure, he said, “Now listen, you keep yourself safe, you keep Rosie safe. Get some water and some food, get a gun if you can. Lay low until they get this under control.”

  “Get what under control? The army? The National Guard? What the hell’s going on Blaze? Why aren’t they telling us what’s going on?”

  “All I know is this, brother. It started at the hospital, not Mount Sinai, the small one. Not St Vincent’s, that’s closed now, innit?”

  “Lenox Hill.”

  “Yeah, that’s the on
e. Anyway, that’s where it started. Some nip tourist was brought into the emergency room and attacks a nurse. I mean, rips her fucking face off is what I heard. Then, details a bit sketchy here, hospital security shoots the poor bastard, but not before he makes sushi out of a few of them too. Next thing you know, there’s a riot, patients, doctors, staff, the shebang. The cops get called in and before you know it it’s spilling out into the streets.

  “They think it’s some kind of virus or something. People are fucking killing each other, slaughtering each other on the streets. They’re fucking eating each other like in some fucking Zombie movie.

  “Whatever you do don’t get bitten, this stuff is as contagious as the clap, and a whole lot more serious. We’ve been sealed in. Quarantined. All the bridges closed, tunnels jammed with traffic. They got the coast guard patrolling the rivers. They got tanks in Times Square for Christ’s sake.”

  “What about you? You okay?”

  “I sound like I’m okay to you? Like I said, you lay low. Look after that lovely wife of yours. It will all blow over. And don’t get yourself hurt playing no fucking hero. I got plans for you, brother. Who knows, maybe even a title shot.

  “Listen, before this fucking thing cuts off. I’m heading out to the park. It’s only a few blocks. The army has got a base set up there. They got doctors, the CDC, the shebang. I heard they got some kind of refugee camp. I’m gonna head out there and I’ll make sure they send out a patrol to get you. You be cool brother, stay low. I’ll…”

  The line went dead. I tried redialing but there was no signal. I never spoke to Blaze again.

  The baby had worn herself out and was quiet now. Ruby, Rosie had called her. Ruby was the name we were going to give our daughter but I didn’t want to call her that because…because I knew what I had to do.

  I went over to her now. She was lying on the bed squirming around, the way normal babies do. She looked at me and seemed to smile and I pulled back instantly. This was no normal baby because normal one-day-old babies do not have teeth.