The Z Club (11 page)

When Fred had gotten home, he had immediately locked the door, turned out all the lights, and headed into the basement.  He rummaged around in the basement bedroom closet until he found his dad’s old hunting rifle and a partial box of shells.  It was only a .22, which his father had used to shoot squirrels and for target practice.  It was the first gun that Fred’s father had let him shoot.  It wasn’t powerful by a long shot, but, as his father had explained a long time ago, the ammo was cheap.

Fred loaded the twenty round magazine, shoved it into the rifle’s underbelly, and chambered a round.  He plopped down on the basement couch and switched on the TV.  Every channel was broadcasting the same thing: an EAS alert.

He rooted through the DVDs on the shelf next to the TV.  They were mostly horror flicks, all the classics he had grown up on; all the
Living Dead
movies (including remakes),
C.H.U.D.
was there, along with
Night of the Comet
,
The Evil Dead,
Night of the Creeps
, and several dozen others.  He slid
Night of the Living Dead
(the original black-and-white version) into the DVD player.  He had always thought it was a little cheesy.  He had first seen it when he was six, which would have been back in ’88 or ’89, and at that point it had been out for nearly twenty years already.  Even the movies that had come out in the 80’s and 90’s, the ones that had shaped his young mind, seemed cheesy now.

Back when he was in high school, before he had resigned himself to the fact that he would be taking over the family business, he had toyed with the idea of making movies; about making the same cheesy schlock flicks he and his friends had loved growing up.

The problem was, he wasn’t all that creative.  A shining example of this was a concept he’d had about a psychopathic delivery guy that went around murdering his customers.  Instead of getting their pizza, the would-be victim would be killed in some creative, over-the-top way.  Fred had come up with the highly original title of
Pizza Delivery Man
.  The movie’s catchphrase was:
Delivering murder – with extra cheese!

The villain of the movie, Guido Rossi, was a man who had been picked on and bullied relentlessly when he was in school. Ten years later, he still worked at his father’s pizza joint, but after all that bullying, something had snapped inside of Guido, and he was now a homicidal maniac.  His entire purpose in life revolved around seeking revenge on all the jocks, cheerleaders, and cool kids that had picked on him in high school.  The twist was that these innocent (or not so innocent if you looked at it from Guido’s point of view) customers would order a pizza, but instead of getting their pizza, they would find Guido on their doorstep, and end up getting killed in any number of gruesomely clever ways (the best of which was Guido using a pizza cutter to cut the former head cheerleader’s body into equal slices).  Afterward, to really rub it in, he would camp out near the victim’s body and eat their pizza.

Needless to say,
Pizza Delivery Man
had never seen the light of day.  Fred had written a detailed treatment, shoved it in a drawer, and had mostly forgotten about it.  Every once in a while, he would pull it out and read it, absently wondering if there was any way to salvage it.  Fred had always blamed it on lack of funding, but it really came down to something his mother always told him:
you never follow through, Freddie.  You’re perfectly content to half-ass your way through life.  When I first met your father, he was the same way.  Always starting, never finishing.  But he eventually came to his senses, so maybe there’s hope for you yet.

Hours passed.  He polished off a six pack of Keystone Light without ever letting go of the rifle.  He tried not to think about what had happened earlier that day.  If he closed his eyes for too long, he would see the cable digging down into the crazy man’s throat.  Part of him was convinced that he had hallucinated the entire thing, or at least the part about the guy attacking him, but if that had been the case, Fred thought the cops would have already paid him a visit.  Hauled him away for murder.  And there wouldn’t have been any questions either because Sheriff Branagan had had a hard on for him for years.

Forget it,
he thought,
you know what you saw.  The guy was a zombie.  As impossible as that sounds, it’s the God’s honest truth, and you damn well know it.  Dug a new canal from his mouth to his asshole and the guy kept comin’.

Even with a buzz going, he couldn’t fool himself into believing anything else.  And if there was one zombie, there were two zombies, and so on and so forth, until Fred was certain that the town would be crawling with them by now.

He heard pounding at the front door.  He dropped his beer as his heart froze, his hands wrapping around the rifle like constricting snakes. 
They found me!

Then something strange happened.  Despite his better judgment, despite his considerable knowledge of horror movies, Fred stood up from the couch and slowly made his way up the stairs.  In the movies, this was exactly how people wound up dead: they always had to check shit out.  A knock at the door, a noise from the other room, a breeze through a window you didn’t recall leaving open.  Investigating such things inevitably led to an excruciating death, and when they did, Fred was unsympathetic. 
Served ‘em right,
was what he always said. 
If they were smart, they’d run the other way.

Yet here he was, reaching the upstairs landing and quietly making his way to the front door, armed only with the .22 rifle, which did the trick for shooting squirrels, but was probably inadequate, Fred guessed, for dealing with zombies.

Fred went to the window next to the door and parted the slats of the Venetian blind.  He squinted, trying to see through the darkness –

A hand slapped the glass, and a second later, Ryan’s face appeared, mouthing the words, “Open up.”

Fred unlocked the door and threw it open.  Ryan and Becky rushed in.

“You’ve seen ‘em, too?” Fred asked.

Ryan nodded.  Fred whistled through his teeth.  “How bad is it?”

“Bad,” Ryan said.

“Where’s everybody else?”

“I just got off the phone with Kevin.  They should be here any minute.”  Ryan could smell the beer on Fred’s breath.  “Have you been drinking?”

“Fuck yes,” Fred said.  “Want one?”

“Under the circumstances…I think we better.”

Kevin, Rhonda, and Derek had shown up ten minutes later.  Fred had taken another six-pack of Keystone Light from the fridge and carried it down to the basement.  Each of them had taken a bottle, except Kevin, who had taken two.  He handed one to Derek and said, “I think you’ve earned it.”  Derek accepted it gratefully, but almost gagged after a tentative swallow.

“We all know what’s going on,” Ryan said, “as impossible as it is to believe.  So let’s go over what we know.”

“They’re after brains,” Kevin said.

“And they can talk,” Derek said.

Rhonda said, “More or less.”

“That’s
ROTLD
for sure.”

“But they’re slow.  Like Romero zombies.”

“I shot the Sheriff,” Ryan said.

“Huh?”

“Branagan.  He was one of them.  He wasn’t slow.  And he could carry on a pretty even conversation.  But come to think of it, he had a bad habit of waxing on about wanting to eat my brain.”

“Do we know if this is happening everywhere?” Kevin asked.

“Not for sure,” Ryan said, “but I think it’s local.”

“How do you know?”

Ryan told them about the Chinese shuttle crash, and about the firefighter.  He finished by saying, “There was a canister in the wreckage.  I think the guy was exposed to whatever was in it.  I’m betting that crash was ground zero.  The firefighter was contaminated.  The hospital is a high traffic place.  Would have been easy to spread from there.”

“Real life Trioxin?”  This from Derek.  He took another sip of his beer, cringing, but was determined to finish it.  “Trixie?”

“Doubtful,” Kevin said.

“You’re the expert on that shit,” Fred said.  “What do you think it is?”

“I’m hardly an expert,” Kevin said.

Ryan said, “You studied biology.  I’d say that makes you the closest thing we’ve got.”

“All right.  If I had to guess?  They were probably experimenting with viruses.  Or bacteria, maybe.  They’ve done it here in the States before.  Take shit into space and see how it reacts in a vacuum.  Turns out that bugs act oddly in a microgravity environment.  Some of it comes back meaner and nastier than before the trip.  Bacteria grows faster, viruses are more virulent.”

“Like ebola on steroids?” Rhonda asked.

“Kind’ve.  It could be something as simple as the virus that causes the common cold.  You take it up there and maybe it mutates, comes back stronger, or maybe it spreads easier.  There hasn’t been a lot of research, so it’s inconclusive.”

“You’re not making that up?”

“I wish I was,” Kevin said.  “I’m just speculating.  I could be way off.  But I don’t think I am.”

“We’re not on good terms with the Chinese,” Fred said.  “It could be a biological weapon.  What if they meant their ship to crash?  Infect the town.”

Ryan shook his head.  “I don’t think so.  If they wanted to do that, why not just launch a missile?  Those shuttles cost millions of dollars, maybe billions.  They wouldn’t send a bunch of astronauts on a suicide mission to destroy their own ship.  Especially when there was no guarantee it would work.  There was a good chance that whatever was on board would have burnt up in the crash the same way the crew did.  Even if they were desperate enough to do that, why Trudy?  Why not a big city?”

“Ryan’s right,” Kevin said.  “They would have picked somewhere like New York or L.A.  Somewhere densely populated.”

Becky felt lost.  It was the same way she had felt the night before at the cemetery, only this time there was nothing entertaining about the conversation.  She didn’t think they could be right about any of it.  This was just years of zombie talk going to their heads.  Granted, it was mysterious, and she didn’t have a theory of her own, but brain-hungry zombies wouldn’t have been her first guess. 
Mass rabies?
  At least that was based on a disease that actually existed.

Does it really even matter?
she thought.  All the theories in the world wouldn’t change what was happening.  She had seen it with her own eyes, could remember with perfect clarity the image of the old man beating the woman’s head against the pavement.  How he had sucked her brains out.  It had been like watching a bunch of kids ruthlessly gut a piñata.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said quietly, not really meaning to say it out loud.

Ryan turned to her.  “What?”

“I said it doesn’t matter.  It’s happening…that’s enough, isn’t it?”

“It could help us figure out how to stop it,” Rhonda said.

“I’ll tell you how we stop it,” Fred said.  “We shoot all the bastards in the head.  Case closed.”  He headed up the stairs.

“Where are you going?”

“I need more beer.”

“Why brains?” Rhonda asked.

“In
ROTLD
,” Derek said, “they wanted brains because it was like a painkiller to the undead.”

“
Pica
,” Kevin said.

“Huh?”

“It’s this weird disorder that makes people want to eat shit like dirt or paint chips.  Say whatever caused the infection did something to their brains.  Causes something similar to pica, but it makes them all want to eat one specific thing – brains.”

Ryan glanced at Becky, saw the fear written on her face and gave her hand a reassuring squeeze.  She looked up and gave him a weak smile.  “Don’t fall apart on me,” he whispered.  “We’ll get through this.”

Fred came down the stairs carrying another six-pack of Keystone.  “So, you’re saying they’re zombies with mental disorders?” Fred said.  He finished off his beer and tossed the bottle onto the floor.  “In that case, maybe we don’t need guns.  Maybe just a really good psychiatrist who’s liberal with his prescription pad.”

“I’m serious.  Pica would only be one symptom.  Something else would have turned them into zombies.  Stopped their hearts and brought them back.  It could be anything.  Bacteria, a virus, parasites, prions – the list goes on and on.  Whatever it is, it has the capability to stop the brain and then reactivate it to some degree.  Destroy the brain and you kill them.”

Derek said, “Just like in the movies.”

“Just like in the movies,” Kevin agreed.  “I’m guessing that direct exposure to whatever was on that ship caused it, but that a bite or an exchange of bodily fluids can spread the infection.”

“What if it’s airborne?”  Rhonda asked.

“If it was airborne,” Kevin said, “we’d know it.  We’d probably all be infected by now.”

Ryan sat down on the couch next to Becky and slid his hand over his face.  “Let’s assume this outbreak or whatever it is has stayed local.  It hasn’t gotten out of Trudy yet.  The question is, what are we going to do about it?”

Fred said, “We get out’ve Dodge.  Leave town, call the military and let them handle it.  They can nuke the place for all I care.”

“We’ve got friends here,” Rhonda said.

“And family,” Becky added.

“Speak for yourselves.  I don’t have any family left.  You guys are my only friends.  Let’s just get in our cars and go.  Piss on everybody else.  Let the pros handle it.”

“My mom’s out there somewhere,” Derek said.

Kevin shook his head slowly.  “I hate to say it, but maybe he’s right.  I mean, what can we really do?  It’s only the six of us.  We have three guns total.  I don’t have any family here.  Fred, your folks are gone.  Ryan?”

“My brother, his wife, and a niece and nephew.  I guess you could say we’re not on what you’d call speaking terms.  They live out in the boonies.  Doubt it’s spread that far yet.” 

“Becky?”

“They’re in Florida.”

Kevin turned his attention to Rhonda.  She said, “Mine moved to Wisconsin last year.”

“Derek, do you think your mom would want you to stick around?  I don’t think so.  She’d want you to go someplace safe.  I think we need to ask ourselves if we can do any good staying.”

“Peggy said everybody is heading to the convention center,” Ryan said.  “Using it as a shelter.”

“See,” Fred said.  “They’re safe.  The ones with good sense anyway.  The rest are zombies…or will be.”

Ryan felt the attention fall on him.  For better or worse, they looked upon him as their leader.  Kevin and Fred had been following his lead since junior high, and, more recently, Becky, Rhonda, and Derek had naturally followed suit.  He didn’t care for being in that position, and he cared even less for the direction his mind was headed.

Ryan rubbed his knees, finalized the decision in his head, and stood up.  “I shot the Sheriff,” he said again.  He hadn’t meant it to sound humorous, but now that he had said it out loud, he had the sudden urge to laugh.  “I’m pretty sure I’m the only law left that isn’t dead or one of those things.  Leaving town sounds damn good.  In fact, it’s probably the smartest thing we could do now.”

Fred rolled his eyes and said, “Why do I feel a ‘but’ coming on?”

“None of us like to admit it,” Ryan said, “but this is
our
town.  Trudy is
our
home.  Maybe it isn’t the center of the universe, but it was a good place to grow up.  Most of our memories happened right here.  We’ve all spent years dreaming up ways to leave, and despite that we either stayed or came back.  I can’t watch it all go down the toilet.  I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m going to stay and
fight
.”

Ryan looked each of them in the eye and waited.  His hands were shaking.  He balled them up into fists and held them against his sides.

“Jesus Christ, you had to go and make the hero speech,” Fred said.  “I suppose every bad movie has to have one, but goddamn.”  He began to impersonate Ryan.  “’Trudy is
our
town…I’m going to stay and
fight
.’  Hoo-fuckin’-rah!”

It was serious business, but Ryan laughed anyway.  “Best I could do on short notice,” he said.  “I’ll totally understand if you guys don’t –”

“Save it,” Kevin said.  “You know we’re in.”

Ryan nodded, a little relieved.

“So how are we gonna do this exactly?”

“We need better weapons,” Ryan said.  “Darnell’s is out of the way, but it has everything we need.”

Becky stood and walked over to him.  “Are you sure you want to do this?” Ryan asked.

“No, but my social standing obligates me to do whatever the cool kids are doing,” she said.

“That’s good,” Ryan said.  “Cuz it’s going to be one hell of a party.”  He bent down and kissed her and then turned to the others.  “Let’s get going.”

They had already started up the stairs when Fred said, “Hold on a sec.”  He went back over to the shelves and began rummaging around, pushing CDs and DVDs onto the floor.  “Here it is.”  He held up a cassette tape that was labeled
Mix tape – for the apocalypse.
  The others stared at him, nonplussed.  “What?” Fred said.  “I figure the end of the world at least deserves a decent soundtrack.”