Killer Z (6 page)

11

L
arry slumps against the tunnel wall and pulls out a
small flask of whiskey. Its artificial heat hits the spot. The Asian kid stands
wide-eyed and mute next to him. A thin pole holding a blue identifier flag
sticks out of the backpack. It shakes as the kid shakes. Larry rips the pole
from the backpack.

“Ni zai zuo shenme?” the boy asks.

“Don’t get you’re panties in a
bunch kid, it’s just a stupid flag. I found you.”

“Buyao peng wo! Zhu!” the kid
shrills and grabs the broken flag from the floor.

“Oh shut up, you’re giving me a
headache.”

“Ni wen qilai qilai xiang yige he
zuijiu de shu.”

Pixel, sitting obediently at
Larry’s side, whines as the kid drops the flag. Larry doesn’t acknowledge the
dog or meet the kid’s eyes but takes a second drink. The whiskey moves through
his system with comforting warmth.

“Wo xiang hui hia?”

“Are you Japanese or Chinese?”

“Zhongguo ren! Err, Chinese.”

“What’s your name?”

The boy looks at him mutely.

“Are you in shock? Tell me your
name.”

Larry grabs the kid’s backpack and
finds a passport. The name is too long to read or pronounce. The boy points to
the passport photo and then to his own chest.

“How about I call you Chuang for
short?” 

Chuang nods.

“Good. Let’s go.”

Larry gives the backpack and
passport to Chuang.

They walk down the tunnel and turn
a corner. He startles at the sight of a nicely dressed woman leaning against
the wall. Her shoulders shake and a thick fall of shiny sable hair obscures her
features.

“Are you alright, ma’am?”

The woman doesn’t answer.

“Ma’am, I’m a police officer. Can
you please respond?”

The continued silence unnerves him
and his hand twitches over his gun. She raises her head and fixes him with
red-rimmed, bright blue eyes. Pixel gives her a comforting lick across her
cheek. She pets the dog’s thick fur and smiles.

“You’re a bobby?” Her cool English
accent licks over his ears like velvet.

“A bobby, ma’am? No, I’m a cop.
Larry Anderson, D.C. Metro Police.”

“Yes, that’s what I mean, a police
officer. We call you Bobbies back home.”

A low rumble shakes the tunnel.

“Ma’am, you should come with us.”

“I suppose so. Help me up?”

Her small, smooth hand slips
perfectly into his as he helps her to her feet.

“Thank you. I’m Dr. Mary Kinlan.”

The slapping of shoes resonates
through the tunnel. Pixel gives a sharp bark. An African American man followed
by a Caucasian couple hurry towards them.

“Is there a way out ahead?” Mark
gasps. “Mary!”

Rebecca rushes around Mark and
impulsively hugs the British fellow.

“Mary, you’re ok! How did you end
up down here?” Rebecca gushes.

The two women cling to each other.

“I don’t know. I just ran...” Mary
says.

Larry looks nervously at the
ceiling as several tiles crash to the floor further down the hallway.

“Who are you people?” Larry asks.

“I’m Michael. This is my wife,
Rebecca. That’s Mark and you’ve already met Mary.”

“What’s the beautiful dog’s name?”
Rebecca asks.

“Her name is Pixel. How’s the Jefferson Building?”

“There’s a raging fire,” Michael
says. “What about the Capitol Building?”

“It’s not great,” Larry says.

“Where’s Irina?” Mary asks.

“There was an explosion,” Michael
says as Mark looks to the floor. “She didn’t make it…”

“Let’s try the Capital Building,” Mark interrupts.

Larry thinks they’re stupid but
reluctantly follows. A roaring of voices greets them as he opens the doors
leading to the Capital Building. As they exit the tunnel they are absorbed into
the evacuating crowd.

The lawn is filled with hundreds
of injured, emergency personnel and newly arriving soldiers. Emergency
officials try directing the mass of survivors to follow the evacuation route.
Officials from various agencies argue over conflicting commands and procedures
and nothing is getting done.

In the middle of the chaos are
Susan Bishop and her cameraman. Susan repeatedly thrusts her microphone in the
faces of officials but is continually brushed aside. She catches sight of
Larry’s uniform and thrusts the microphone in his face.

“Officer, can you please comment
on what’s happening today?”

Larry blinks and nervously looks
around. Mary takes his hand reassuringly. His larger hand tightens around hers.

“These soldiers are part of the
National Response Framework.”

“What is the National Response
Framework?” Susan asks, happy someone’s finally talking.

“The NRF is a federal agency
assigned to deal with the gaps between state and federal agencies during
disasters.”

Larry warms to the unexpected
spotlight and Mary’s support. In the background several upper level officials
heatedly argue as first responders await further instructions. For two minutes
he rambles about how FEMA and the America government aren’t properly prepared
for disaster mitigation.

Mary interrupts his two minutes of
fame by saying, “Disaster mitigation in America is impossible because
politicians don’t bloody care about the people. They only want to be re-elected
so they sell out to special interest groups who don’t care.”

Face turning beet-red, Larry
blurts, “Our domestic disaster policies say that each state and city has to
deplete local resources before the Federal government gets involved. It’s not
the politician’s fault.”

“Turn that damn camera off,” a
soldier barks.

A second soldier says to Larry,
“Get these civilians out of here!”

With Mary still holding his hand,
Larry struts through the disaster strewn streets following the blue evacuation
signs as the others follow. Fire billows from the Supreme Court Building’s second floor windows. A man leaps from a window on the third floor and the body
smacks into the steps with a thud. Emergency responders check other bodies
sprawled on the granite courthouse steps.

“Film the suicide jumpers, Berry,” Susan says.

“That’s awful,” Rebecca cries.

 Berry films the devastated
courthouse as the others navigate along cracked sidewalks. The Hart Senate
building has collapsed on itself. The building’s floors are stacked like
flattened pancakes. Dust hangs in the air leaving the taste of chalky drywall.
Water mains gush gallons into the street. Smoke, sirens, and mass destruction
have warped the regal city into a warzone.

“It makes sense they’re gathering
people at the fallout shelter in Union Station,” Mark says.

“I don’t want to be buried alive
in an underground shelter,” Larry says.

Outside of Union Station hundreds
of people mill around in confusion. A mounted police officer warily watches the
crowd with a heavy baton in hand. The cop and horse both look haggard, bruised
and scraped.

Without warning, a filthy man
lunges at the mounted officer and sinks his teeth into the man’s thigh. The cop
brings his baton down on the assailant’s head repeatedly, forcing the man to step
back. The assailant groans and jumps at the horse instead, biting its shoulder.
The giant beast rears and bursts into a run, sending the attacker flying
backwards.

The crazed man gains his feet and
groans. He fixates on Mary and lunges. Larry fumbles with his gun.

“Help,” Mary shrieks.

The man flings her to the
concrete. Mary wails and bashes at his head as he tears into her neck and
chest. Pixel sinks her teeth into the attacker’s leg, snarling.

“Get off of her, piss ant!” 
Larry yells.

The cop wraps his arms around the
assailant’s neck and tears the man from the shrieking Brit. Arterial blood
sprays into the air as her ravaged neck is exposed. Her eyes roll backwards.
Larry steps back and points his gun.

“Fuck you,” he curses, thinking
the crazed man must be a junkie high on PCP.

The 9mm recoils slightly with a
pop
as he shoots the man in the chest. His shot is followed by the sharp
crack of a rifle. A high caliber bullet whizzes inches from Larry’s ear and
obliterates the man’s head.

He stands in stunned silence as
several military soldiers approach from the left. The soldiers wear full
biohazard gear and carry assault rifles. People in the crowd openly stare while
others ignore what’s happening.

“Always aim for the head,” a
soldier matter-of-factly says and shoots Mary in the head with a
crack
.

“Hey!” Larry yells, shocked.

The soldiers take out two black
body bags and collect the man and Mary.

“Did you see that? He was eating
Mary,” Mark stutters.

“Why did they shoot her?” Rebecca
gasps.

“I wasn’t expecting that,” Michael
stammers.

Larry stares at the blood stained
concrete as they take the body bags away.

“We were going to have sex…” Larry
whines.

“Are you serious?” Rebecca gasps.

“Rebecca!” Michael says.

Pixel looks at Larry with confused
brown eyes.

“I’ve seen addicts go crazy
before,” Susan says.

“Yeah, like those Killer Z junkies
we filmed yesterday,” Barry says.

“Killer Z?” Mark asks.

“A new drug on the streets,” Barry
says.

“They can catch it on the six
o’clock news,” Susan interrupts.

“I’m hearing the lower levels are
flooded in the station,” Michael says. “How are we going to get out of the
city?”

“We have a news bus,” Barry
volunteers.

“They can’t come with us,” Susan
says.

“Look, they have families,” Barry
counters.

“Ok, fine. We’ll play disaster
taxi,” Susan says at length. “It’ll make a great chapter in my memoir.”

They walk a block away from the
station when Pixel barks and races ahead.

“Come back stupid mutt,” Larry
bellows.

The canine digs at a pile of
rubble burying the entrance of a Burger Baron restaurant. The national guards
are waiting for orders across the street.

“Maybe people are trapped inside?”
Rebecca asks.

“What can we possibly do for
them?” Michael asks.

While they discuss what to do
Chuang walks to the pile of rubble and starts moving lose bricks one at a time.
The others look sheepishly at one another. Barry puts down his camera and joins
Chuang.

“Fuck this shit,” Larry mutters
and walks across the street.

“Maybe the National Guard can
help,” Rebecca says as she points to a National Guard truck parked down the
street. “I’ll be right back.”

After a few minutes of intense
talking and pointing, Rebecca convinces the soldiers to help remove the rubble.
Larry watches from across the street and snorts. He wants a drink, badly. As
the group works to free those trapped inside he wanders off.

12

A
chunk of ceiling clanks onto the table and Juliet
cringes. Heavy dust hangs in the air. Soft coughing carries through the
darkness. The aftershocks have diminished to an occasional low tremor. No one
in the restaurant can move the rubble blocking the door.

“When are they going to get us out
of here,” Juliet mutters.

Her muscles ache from hiding
underneath the table.

“It could be worse,” Harry replies
from her left.

“How could this get worse?” Sara
asks to her right. The girl presses buttons on her cell phone. “This sucks
monkey balls.”

“Monkey balls?” Rodger asks from
the next table.

“Ugh, you’re so ancient,” Sara
retorts.

“Don’t worry about it, Rodger,”
Juliet says.

“Oh I get it. My muscles are
cramping under here,” Rodger says.

“I want to go home,” Sara cries.

“It feels like a sauna in here,”
Juliet says and wipes sweat from her brow.

Juliet hits the send button on her
cell phone again and again but nothing happens.

“How’d you lose your arm?” Juliet
asks Harry, needing a distraction.

“I lost it in Korea when I jerry rigged a stick of dynamite to a RPG and a soviet tank.”

“Doesn’t that make you near 80?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Did it suck like this? In Korea, I mean?”

“Oh, it was much worse.”

Sara sighs, “Yeah, right.”

“It was ’49,” Harry continues.
“The Korean Peninsula was run by the Japs and had a heavy soviet influence. In
‘45 the allied powers divided the Korean Peninsula at the 38th parallel, but
the Forgotten War, my war, did not officially start until 1950. Lost my hand at
the 38
^th
parallel actually,” he pauses, flexing his remaining hand.

“The northern territory had soviet
troops,” Harry says. “I was stationed in the South, but it isn’t like what you
see in the movies. We attacked each other like pirates. The politicians called
it ‘skirmishes’.”

“Is that when you lost your hand?”

“No, that came later.”

“Why’d they send you to Korea?”

“I enlisted to fight the evil
communists. I lied about my age and joined the service at seventeen. My mom
cried at the bus station. It was the last time I saw her. She had a heart
attack while I was stationed in Seoul.”

“That sucks.”

“My unit was ordered to sabotage
free elections by undermining the local insurgents.”

“Like the CIA?”

“Not really. We hid in foxholes in
the poppy fields. Someone thought free elections weren’t possible as long as
communists fed their ideology to rural villages. The only way to stop them was
through good old fashioned cloak and dagger espionage.”

“Cool.”

“Our barracks weren’t much
different from sitting under these tables. They were made of mud and bamboo and
always fell apart. Koreans back then didn’t have plumbing like we do. We had
honey wagons that collected our shit. I had to sit in the same rice fields they
fertilized with our shit.”

She wrinkles her nose at the
thought of being surrounded by human feces.

“The war was hard on us. We lost
over 40,000 guys. One of my duties was to collect US soldiers who
committed suicide after jumping from a big bridge in Seoul. Within hours the
fish ate their faces and it was my job to identify the corpses.”

“Gross. Wait a minute, Harry. I
have to use the restroom, or at least what’s left of it.”

“I need to go too,” Sara says.
“What if those men try something again?”

“They won’t do anything with
everyone watching,” Harry says.

Juliet stands stiffly and notes
Seth and Andrew hiding underneath a far table. She moves cautiously down the
hallway then stops. The dead bodies are gone.

“Calm down, girl,” Juliet mutters
as her lower lip trembles. “Please tell me Harry moved the bodies?”

Sara shrugs. “I don’t know. I
guess so, where else would they be?”

Chiding herself for acting like a
chicken shit, Juliet peeks inside the woman’s restroom. The stalls are
collapsed on themselves.

“Never mind, I don’t have to go
that bad,” Sara says, realizing they have to use the men’s room. “I’ll just
wait in the hallway. I can’t go back in there.”

“I understand. Just give me a
minute.”

Inside the men’s bathroom the
doors on both stalls are shut. The first door doesn’t give but the
second opens with ease. She places her flashlight on top of the toilet paper
dispenser and unzips her pants. A slight aftershock shakes the building and her
light falls to the floor. Her heart freezes as she sees Dawn’s pink sneakers
shuffle in the adjoining stall. She zips her pants.

“Is somebody there? Dawn?”

The silence is unnerving. Juliet
knows Dawn is dead and wonders if one of the homeless took her shoes. She snags
the flashlight from the floor and cautiously opens the stall door. The second
stall swings open and a something grabs the side of her stall. She forgets to
breathe as her knees weaken. The flashlight illuminates a charred blistering
hand with a high school class ring.

“Help me!”

The main door opens and Sara peers
inside. “Did you say something?”

Dawn’s face is a twisted
distortion of burnt and melted flesh. Burned hair hugs her half bald head.

“I thought you were dead,” Juliet
croaks.

Dawn’s milky white eyes bore into
Juliet and she freezes. The burned girl groans and lunges. Juliet back pedals
and kicks the stall door shut. Dawn claws at the stall.

“No fucking way!” Sara shrieks
from the doorway.

Juliet falls on the toilet seat
and yells, “Get help!”

Dawn stops scratching the stall
and redirects her attention to Sara. The screaming girl is yanked into the
restroom. A heavy thud is followed by wet suckling.

“Harry!” Juliet screams.

The restroom door bangs against
the wall.

“Juliet?” Harry yells.

Juliet steels her resolve and
opens the stall door.

“Hey!” Harry yells at Dawn. “Get
away from her!”

In a corner Dawn huddles over
Sara. Juliet rushes to Harry and the vet shoves her into the hallway. Dawn
lifts her gore covered face and groans. She leaps to her feet and lunges at
Harry. He side steps and slams her into the sink.

“Calm down!” Harry says as Dawn
thrashes in his grip. “Juliet, get Rodger.”

Juliet runs to the lobby and
screams, “Rodger!”

Inhuman groaning comes from both
the lobby and kitchen. Harry loses his grip on the crazed woman and runs out of
the restroom with Dawn on his heels. Rodger stumbles into the hallway from the
lobby. Dawn groans and grabs his arm.

“Let me go!” Rodger screams.

Dawn buries her teeth into
Rodger’s arm and he yells in pain. People scramble up from under the tables.
Harry grabs the girl’s shoulders, but she’s too strong. He releases her, grabs
onto a chair leg, and swings it at her head. The metal leg whistles through the
air and hits Dawn at the base of the neck.

Screams fill the lobby as Sara
stumbles out of the hallway with intestines hanging from a ravaged midsection.
She groans and shambles into the lobby. Without pausing she pounces on Jake.

“What the hell?” Andrew yells as
another grotesque figure emerges from the kitchen.

“They’re infected!” Seth yells.

“Infected?” Andrew asks. “They
look like fucking zombies.”

“With Killer Z, I’ll explain
later,” Seth says.

The chemist emerges from the
darkened corner with a metal pipe and bashes the zombie’s head. Jake hits the
floor with Sara tearing out chunks of his chest with gore covered teeth.

 “Killer Z? What the fuck
man?” Andrew sputters.

The remaining three college kids
hammer Sara with fists but the ravenous girl continues to eat Jake. Juliet
understands why Andrew calls them zombies. They look and act like the undead.
Rodger’s hand seizes Juliet’s calf. She jerks back and something rushes past
her. Seth brings the metal pipe down on Rodger’s head with a sickening thud.
Juliet blinks as suddenly the carnage is illuminated by streaks of sunlight.
The sound of people working to move the rubble streams in with the light. A
megaphone enhanced voice echoes through the restaurant.

“This is the National Guard.
Please remain calm while we get you out. You’re safe.”