The Fractured Earth (12 page)

I scooted all the way out, stood up, and ran to the building. I looked around for another minute, then eased over to the corner and sliced it, then ran to the other one and sliced it. I didn't see anything, so I made my way to the dump truck up front, slowly this time, looking carefully around every bulldozer and grader and tractor and whatever else those things were called.

Finally, I made it to the dump truck and snuck underneath. The light was definitely fading, but there was still enough to see the store. It didn't look like there was anything moving around it, so the other creatures had moved off or were maybe inside, or I just couldn't see them from here.

I watched for at least five minutes. I've never been good as whistling, but I could blow a mean hand. I cupped my hands and made an almost perfect hoot owl sound. I waited a minute, then made it again. A shape appeared around the corner of the store and limped toward me. It bumped into the truck still parked under the canopy, then turn and followed the edge.

Zombie.

Another shape appeared in the window of the store and thumped against the window.

Another zombie.

The first one turned back toward the store and bumped into the window, then followed the front of the store until it reached the corner again. It turned and disappeared.

I imagined it was doing an endless perimeter check, like a zombie NASCAR driver, always turning left at the corners.

Maybe it would bump into another creature and have a spectacular crash.

There was more movement inside the store, but nothing came out, and nothing bumped against the glass again.

I scooted around beneath the truck until I was pointed the other way, and started to exit when I heard a gunshot. Make that two gunshots.

It was my survival rifle.

Jen.

I quickly crawled out and ran for the spruce tree in the back, drawing my dad’s Shield as I went.

—————

Interlude—Boreling Empire

Prime Schedule Guide

 1 : Headliners : Bio-creature attacks in enclosed sub-surface ocean vessels

 2 : Headliners : Slow-motion internal atmosphere craft crashes

 3 : Headliners : Pleasure cruise ocean vessel riots

 4 : Headliners : Life support failures in medical facilities

 5 : Headliners : Night-side bio-creature first time attacks

 6 : Headliners : Credit trade center bio-creature attacks

 7 : Headliners : Alien-on-Alien violence

 8 : Headliners : Hilarious military reactions

 9 : Games : Die or Not Die

10 : Games : Voter's Choice

11 : Games : Dance of Death Mashups

12 : Pay and Play : Drone Controller

13 : Pay and Play : Build your own Bio-Creature

14 : Pay and Play : Baffle an Alien

15 : Entertainment Talk : Jezeen the Irresistible

16 : Entertainment Talk : Dradge Borgwah 

17 : Alien Interest : A male travels home

18 : Alien Interest : A female in danger

19 : Alien Interest : A family tries to escape

-- scroll for more --

—————

The Professor

The screams of the people below were not muffled by the distance. Sitting in his Adirondack chair, he could hear them just fine, but he wasn't listening. He relit his pipe and puffed, savoring the cherry-sweet aroma of the tobacco. He reached for the glass of wine on the small table next to his chair and swirled it before taking a sip, then lifted the glass as he took another puff on his pipe.

What looks like a duck, sounds like a duck, and walks like a duck, but isn't a duck?
he thought. He set down the cup and the pipe and stood up. He adjusted his telescope and peered at the activity below for a minute. "Zombies," he said, answering himself as he sat back down and retrieved his pipe. He lit it again and puffed, then blew the smoke out in a ring.

"Magnetic anomalies in the brain, triggered by the EMP?" he murmured. “No, MRI patients would have been going home and munching on their beloved pets.”

The man tapped out his pipe, sipped the last of his wine and stood up. He walked across the garden on the roof, down the stairs and entered his home, setting the wineglass on the counter in the kitchen. He set the pipe in its holder and walked to the stairway, opening the door. Going down four floors, he checked the barricade on the fifth floor down, satisfied it was still keeping out the ghouls moaning below. There were fewer and fewer every day—so they did seem to either give up or perhaps forget he was there. One of them sensed him and began moaning and trying to climb over the cabinets and chairs and other debris in the stairway. That started all the others moaning and trying to get to him, and probably attracted more of them from below.

Fortunately, they didn’t seem very intelligent, and they didn’t work as a group. His experience told him they would stop moaning after about twenty minutes and just shamble around, jostling each other, occasionally knocking one of them down the flights of stairs.

He went back up to the fourth floor door from the top and entered the outer room, where there were several smocks and other medical equipment, including complete biohazard suits. The ceiling, walls and floor, including the door behind him, were crisscrossed with a pattern of wires. The man took down a smock and donned it, then added a pair of camouflage pants and boots. He sealed up the edges with duct tape and completed the outfit with an open hood and gloves.

Once fully decked out, he entered the only other door, then closed it behind him. Inside, it looked a bit like a cross between a small hospital room and a quarantine facility.

The man known simply as “the Professor” to his former-neighbors-turned-zombies was a scientist, a man curious about everything around him. He had won the lottery at the age of fifty and had immediately quit his professorship and toured the world.

He picked an unfortunate time to visit Egypt, however, and was caught up in the Arab Spring. After escaping, he began to study civil unrest and the behavior of people during disasters with the same zeal that he might have when looking into the language of insects or the basic principles of electromagnetic communication.

He became convinced that the socio-economic infrastructure of the world needed only a small catalyst to spark a freefall, so he purchased the top four floors of this building and built a bunker. He had another, much larger safe house, but this was where he preferred to live.

The top floor was his living space, open and airy, with a Southwest feel to it. It boasted a log cabin look—strikingly different from most upper class penthouse homes. He had an Olympic-sized swimming pool on the roof, as well as a tended garden. There was also an enormous storage area for food—dry goods, MRE’s, protein bars, water, freeze-dried food, garden seeds— three year’s worth for three people.

The second floor down was a Faraday cage holding various microelectronics and communications gear, scientific instruments—including a state-of-the-art 3D printer. There were replacement power controllers and solar panels, and it held his battery banks. He’d also protected it against biological attack, using filtered air that was also subjected to ultraviolet radiation and high heat. It had positive pressure as well—constantly pushing air out of any cracks and crevices in the structure.

The third floor down was the armory, likewise protected. He was an arms collector and even had a small commercial storefront where he mostly traded for rare, vintage firearms. It gave him an excuse to have the proper licenses to own any kind of weapon he wanted.

Finally, the fourth floor was the biohazard room and hospital and was protected like the others. It was here that the remains of his gardener and his housekeeper were kept. Both of them had turned two hours ago and nearly killed him. The gardener he'd bashed with his own rake, and he managed to keep the housekeeper at bay until he could get to his bedroom revolver—a Dirty Harry style .45.

He'd taken them to the lab on a stretcher after donning a full protection suit, but he never got sick himself, even though he got blood and other body fluids splattered all over his arms and face. He barricaded the stairway in case anyone managed to get into it, then cleaned up the mess. He saw a lot of similar creatures when he took his smoke break.

He looked into the isolation chambers. His housekeeper was an older woman from Brazil. He paid her well, and had helped her get a green card. Her name was Maria. His gardener was from Mexico and had started working for him just three months earlier, but he'd done a wonderful job. The Professor had planned to increase his salary this week.

The creature that used to be Jose the gardener had somehow recovered from the head trauma inflicted by the rake and was trying to get off the gurney, but he was strapped down. When he spotted the Professor looking through the portal, he moaned and gnashed his teeth, rocking on the gurney.

The Professor opened the chamber with Maria and rolled her gurney out to the examination room. He wasn't a medical examiner, but he at least knew a little bit about anatomy.

"Female specimen, approximately fifty years old. Death was by gunshot wound to the head, with massive damage to the brain. Correction, that is the presumed manner of death, as it is possible that the creature, although ambulatory and somewhat aware of her surroundings, was not technically alive. Additional injuries include gunshot wounds to the chest, heart, shoulder, thigh and left knee."

It was this that convinced him that it was probably dead. He'd fired six rounds point blank with only one miss. His former housekeeper fell when struck in the knee, and was right next to his nightstand with extra ammo. He had to run downstairs to his armory and open it to reload the pistol with .45 rounds. While there, he also loaded an AK-47 and put on a tactical vest. In all, he was gone about five minutes. When he headed back upstairs, Maria was headed down, one leg barely dangling, several holes in her. He automatically raised the AK and fired three shots, the second one striking her in the head and the other two missing.

He had to understand what was happening!

The Professor sliced off a layer of Maria’s skin and placed it on a slide, then ran it through his scanning electron microscope. It revealed that a reconstruction of the epidermis had occurred, allowing the creature to absorb oxygen directly through the skin. There were alveoli structures connected to all the pores, and capillaries extended down past the point where the skin slice was made.

"The creature appears to absorb oxygen directly into the skin. There appears to be almost a Stirling engine pressure effect as well, allowing the fluids to be pumped without a heart. This creature continued to attack after being shot in the heart—although that's not entirely remarkable, as a human can function for a minute or two before dying when the heart ceases to pump."

He thought for a second, then added, "It is likely that there is increased vitamin-K present in the body, as non-fatal wounds, any wounds not to the head, appear to clot almost instantly."

He put down the recorder and went back to the cadaver. He sliced open the sternum and used a rib spreader to open the ribcage for examination.

"It appears that the organs have also undergone some sort of mutation, with a hard, chitin-like substance covering the outside. It is possible that some of the organs are no longer needed by the creature. I might be able to conduct experiments to determine that on the second, male creature."

He took out a high-power camera and worked it near the shoulder wound. After looking at the surface and interior of the wound cavity, he set the camera snake down into the body and backed away.

"It ... it also appears that portions of the body rebuild themselves. The shoulder wound has fresh new skin at the edges, and internal muscle tissue is reconnecting." He moved back to the cadaver and picked up the camera, moving it into the damaged area of the head.

He sighed and put the camera down again. "There doesn't appear to be any brain tissue regeneration. I'll move the cadaver back to the isolation chamber and check it again tomorrow. I am hopeful that it will have stopped all tissue regeneration and will cease all cellular functions by then."

He rolled the body back into the chamber and locked it in, then cleaned up the room. He went to a special decontamination shower and sprayed down his suit with a water-bleach solution. An air dryer blew the suit dry, then he exited the inner room and removed the suit, setting it in a biohazard barrel for disposal.

He exited the room slowly and quietly. The stairwell barricade was still working, and none of the creatures appeared to hear him. He went back to the first floor and sat down in his entertainment room with a pipe and a glass of wine, and thought about the situation.

The top floor electronics were toast. Classic EMP effect. The solar panels were fine, but the controllers had to be replaced. All expected. Except ... he had an old fashioned Kindle reader next to his bed, and it still worked. His Apple Watch was okay, although his iPhone was toast. His old Super Nintendo game console turned on, but not the TV.

Strangest of all, his iPad next to his bed worked fine, albeit only on his rebuilt local network. That device was a marvel of microelectronics engineering; its compact design should have been compromised along with all the other highly-sensitive gear.

The iPhone was practically the same device, only smaller and with a SIM card and cellular telephone circuitry, and it had succumbed. It just didn't add up.

Bodily reconstruction into a zombie. Simulated effects of an EMP. He pictured the anomalies as pictures in the iPad game "Four Pics One Word.” The Professor enjoyed stretching his mind, and that game definitely did the trick, showing four seemingly disparate images, but all with some kind of underlying similarity.

Zombies. EMP.

What was the commonality? Both were devastating, but neither was a likely thing to ever happen. In fact, one of them was entirely impossible. Both were "end of the world" scenarios.

End of the world.

Could that be the One Word? Apocalypse?

The Professor puffed his pipe and took a sip of wine.

If that was the One Word, then who provided the pictures—“Zombies” and “EMP”?