Curran Array - Zombie Pulp

“How’s that fog?”

“Like soup.”

“Anything to report?”

Cabot peered out into the soup. “Not much. We got a wrecked bus that’s a hazard. Seen a couple stragglers, no numbers, though. Sweet and clean.”

There was silence for a moment. “How’s your guest doing? How’s Blaine?”

Blaine sighed and shook his head.

“He’s not liking it much, Chum,” Cabot said, winking at the kid in the dim cab. “Sitting over there with a sour look on his puss like he’s got about seven inches of cruel loving up his ass and he can’t shake it loose.”

Chum giggled over that. “Okay, don’t be a stranger, Cab. Out.”

“Why’d you have to say that?” Blaine asked Cabot. “It sounds gay.”

But Cabot never answered him because in the back of the truck there was a sudden thudding sound, a thumping. Then something which might have been a hand slapping against the rear door, a low moaning like someone was in pain.

Blaine had balled his hands into fists now. He was shaking.

“Just our cargo, kid,” Cabot told him, grinning. “They must be waking up back there. Dope must’ve worn off. It does that. We better push it, get our piggies to market.”

*

It began with a microbe in Clovis, New Mexico.

A robotic satellite called BIOCOM-13 was sampling the upper atmosphere for microorganisms of possible extraterrestrial origin. Somewhere during the process, it found the microbe, analyzed it, sealed it in a vacuum jar, then proceeded to get cored by a rogue meteorite. Long before a maintenance crew could get up there, BIOCOM-13 fell into a rapidly decaying orbit and plunged to Earth.

It crashed outside Clovis, its sample jars bursting upon impact. Several were bacterium of terrestrial origin, a few exotic mold spores, and a virus. The virus would come to be known as Biocom after the satellite. The virus, it was later learned, was not from Earth. It had drifted here, scientists theorized, perhaps stuck to a rock or a speck of cosmic dust, on a trip through deepest space that might have lasted ten-thousand years or ten million.

It probably would never have made it down if the satellite hadn’t grabbed it.

NASA exobiologists had long said that the possibility of pathogenesis resulting from contact with an alien microbe was minimal. That extraterrestrial agents such as bacteria, fungi, protozoa, and multicellular parasites evolved differently and would share no common biochemical or cellular traits with terrestrial types. Ergo, it was more conceivable for a human being to get infected with Dutch Elm Disease or wheat rust than an alien microbial agent. But Biocom was a virus. And NASA had left viral agents out of the loop. Viruses have no cellular machinery of their own; they convert that of the host organism to reproduce themselves. So a virus is a virus is a virus, regardless of where it comes from. It adapts to any chemistry.

And nobody knew where Biocom came from.

First contact was in Clovis and from there it spread in every conceivable direction, mimicking pneumonic plague and putting two thirds of the world’s population into the grave within six months. But they didn’t stay there.

They started rising.

They got out of their graves, feeding on the dead and the living and spreading the virus like the common cold. If you got bit, you died. And if you died, you came back with a whole fresh slate of culinary impulses.

Of course, nobody believed it at first.

Zombies? The dead rising? Utter bullshit. File it away with those aliens on ice at Roswell and Bigfoot shitting in the Oregon woods. But the stories did not go away: they proliferated. From Florida to Maine, Michigan to Texas, the dead were rising. And it wasn’t long before videos of the same showed up all over the internet. One in particular was posted to YouTube. It got so many hits it crashed the server.

What it showed was Clovis, New Mexico.

At first glance, the grainy video taken with a night-vision device looked almost comical, like something from a Gary Larson cartoon about the living dead: men in bathrobes and fuzzy slippers, women in fluffy nightgowns with curlers in their hair, all wandering the streets in the dead of night. Then some daylight footage was added and things got spooky. Men, women, children. Some stark naked and some dressed in burial clothes, pallid, decaying, infested with vermin. They were rising from cemeteries and crawling free of mortuary slabs and morgue drawers. Their faces were gray and seamed, their eyes flat dead white or lit a lurid red and filled with a cunning, evil intelligence, narrow teeth jutting from shriveled black gums, chattering and gnashing, looking for something to bite.

This is when people started to worry.

And when they saw the video of the naked little boy with the glaring black autopsy stitching running from throat to crotch feeding on the dead cat or the bloated woman breastfeeding her swollen, blackened infant while grave maggots wriggled in her dirt-clogged hair…well, panic ensued. The authorities denied it all, but still the stories spread and nobody believed what they were told because by then, they had all seen the walking dead. Biocom overflowed the graveyards and deceased loved ones came washing out, knocking at doors and windows in the dead of night with grim appetites.

Six months later…the world was gone.

Biocom was the great eraser that washed the blackboard clean. A world that had been a struggling, unruly child lost its innocence almost over night and became a deranged adult that shit and pissed itself hourly, its mind lost in a sucking black whirlpool vortex of dementia, madness, and resurrection.

The plague filled the cemeteries and emptied them again and that’s the way it was. Many contracted the plague, but survived it. But even survival left a little parting gift: sterility. No man or woman over the age of thirty came away able to reproduce. The young and virile became something to protect and covet. Without them, there was no children and with no children, no future.

And that had been five years ago. Five long, hard, cruel years.

This was the reality that Cabot and the others in Hullville lived with day in and day out. It was a bitter pill to swallow. Some people just couldn’t keep it down. They lost their minds, they raged, they pulled into themselves, they became sightless breathing shells. And more than a few slit their wrists or ate the gun.

But for all those, many more did not roll up like frightened pillbugs. They survived. They accepted. They adapted and overcame. Not just in Hullville, but in towns like Moxton and Pick’s Valley, Slow Creek and Nipiwana Falls. They accepted the reality that the new world was not the world they or their parents had known. The new world offered the survivors nothing; everything from food to shelter to a bucket to piss in had to be fought for, had to be wrenched free from the hard earth or taken from those that held it.

Survival.

A simple concept and one the human race was very adept at.

Graveyards and ghost towns.

A few struggling pockets of humanity trapped in-between. In Hullville, things were run by the Council. They made all the decisions. Guys like Cabot didn’t like the idea of driving the sick, the weak, the old and diseased out to the Deadlands and ghost towns, but there was no other choice. If the Wormboys weren’t given meat, they’d come for it.

So Cabot, like so many others, did what he was told.

For in the end, it was always better to be in the front of the truck than in the back.

*

The ghost town came up out of the fog like a clustering of tombs blown with fingers of white vapor. The headlights speared through the mist, but neither man looked too closely at what they might reveal in the deserted lots and leaf-blown streets. A pall of age and shivering malevolence hung over the town, just as thick and palpable as the fog itself.