Mark Tufo: Zombie Fallout

Zombie Fallout

Copyright @ 2010

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Cover Art by Sylwia Serwinska

Dedications

I want to dedicate this book to my wife without whose encouragement this would have remained a file on my computer. She is the light that shines my path and for that I will be eternally grateful.

I also need to send out an honorable mention to my brother, no matter what he may say to the contrary the sickest thing you will read in this book came from his festering mind.

I would like to take a second to also add Mo Happy into my dedications. She has taken her considerable talent and helped to soften and polish the many rough edges that this book used to possess.

To all the brave men and women, that are currently on active duty or who have ever served in the armed forces, police or fire department! I salute you all my brothers and sisters in arms!

Prologue

Late Fall – 2010

Reuters – Estimates say that nearly three thousand people nationwide and fifteen thousand people worldwide have died of the H1N1 virus (otherwise known as Swine flu). Nearly eighty thousand cases have been confirmed in hospitals and clinics across the United States and the world, the World Health Organization reported. The influenza pandemic of 2010, while not nearly as prolific as the one that raged in 1918, still has citizens around the world in a near state of panic.

New York Post (Headlines October 31 st) – Beware! Children

Carry Germs! – Halloween Canceled!

New York Times – (Headlines November 3 rd) – Swine flu claims latest victim – Vice President surrounded by family and friends at the end.

Boston Globe – (Headlines November 28 th) – Swine Flu Vaccinations Coming!

Boston Herald – (Headlines December 6 th) – Shots in Short Supply – Lines Long!

National Enquirer – (Headlines December 7 th) – The Dead Walk!

There would be no more headlines.

It started in a lab at the CDC (Center for Disease Control). Virologists were so relieved to finally have an effective vaccination against the virulent swine flu. Pressure to come up with something quickly had come from the highest office in the land. In an attempt at speed, the virologists had made two mistakes. First they used a live virus, and second, they didn’t properly test for side effects. Within days, hundreds of thousands of vaccinations shipped across the U.S. and the world. People lined up for the shots like they were waiting in line for concert tickets. Fights broke out in drugstores as fearful throngs tried their best to get one of the limited shots. Within days the CDC knew something was wrong. Between four and seven hours of receiving the shot roughly 95 percent succumbed to the active H1N1 virus in the vaccination. More unfortunate than the death of the infected was the added side effect of reanimation. It would be a decade before scientists were able to ascertain how that happened. The panic that followed couldn’t be measured. Loved ones did what loved ones always do. They tried to comfort their kids or their spouses or their siblings, but what came back was not human, not even remotely. Those people that survived their first encounter with these monstrosities usually did not come through unscathed. If bitten they had fewer than twenty-four hours of humanity left; the clock was ticking. During the first few hysteria ridden days of The Coming as it has become known, many thought the virus was airborne. Luckily that was not the case or nobody would have survived. It was a dark time in human history; we may never be able to pull ourselves out of the ashes.

CHAPTER 1 – Dec 8 th, Denver, CO – 7:02 p.m. Journal Entry - 1

This wasn’t supposed to be how it began…dammit! I had just turned the shower on and was preparing to scrub the dirt and grime away that I had amassed during the day on-the-job. I worked for the highway department fixing potholes. At one time in my life I was what you would consider a white-collar worker. I was a Human Resources Generalist for a Fortune 500 company. To put it delicately, I made bank. And then President Bush saw fit to end my salad days. Was it really his fault? I don’t know, but he was an easy scapegoat. After the unemployment benefits petered out and still with no hot prospects, I took a city job. It was dirty, backbreaking work and I made less than when I was collecting unemployment, go figure. I made more sitting on my ass playing the Wii. But at least it was honest work. Never once in the three months that I had been working there did I wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat and stress out about having not filled in a hole on Havana Avenue. There were benefits to blue-collar work, lack of stress being one of them.

But I digress. So there I was, sticking my hand into the shower to see if it was the right temperature. I had even begun to spread some body wash on myself in preparation for the invigorating feeling of being clean. (Yeah BODYWASH, you got a problem with that?) I have two pet peeves in life. Well shit, if I’m being honest I probably have about seventeen but who’s counting? In particular two come to mind, and I’ll explain. The first is being dirty. I just hate feeling dirt and grime around my neck. I hate the way my shirt collar will stick just a little bit. It irritates the living crap out of me. The second pet peeve is feeling dried soap on my body. I don’t know if any of you have ever been to New Orleans. The water is ‘soft’ or ‘hard,’ I don’t know which. I always get the two mixed up. Anyway, the water just won’t wash the soap off of you, so you walk around all day with this invisible film on you. Everything's sticky. Your clothes stick to your body, shit, your own body sticks to you. Just bend your arm, you can barely straighten it back up. So you walk around all day like a scarecrow with a stick up its ass. Yeah I know, I know!! My wife tells me all the time I have problems! Shit, where was I? Yeah, so there I am about to hop in the shower when I hear my wife scream this bloodcurdling shriek. Now you’ve got to know my wife, she wouldn’t scream if I fell down the stairs and broke my arm. Hell, she’d probably call me a klutz and get me into the car for the ride to the emergency room, all the while calling the kids to tell them Dad hurt himself again. She’s just not that into histrionics. So when I heard the scream I knew something bad was up. I stared longingly at the shower I was foregoing as I grabbed a towel and headed downstairs.

“What the fuck….” I yelled, but the rest of my expletive sentence died on my lips as I saw the terror in my 15-year-old son’s face. Nothing scares Travis, not even me, and I’m a former Marine. Hell, just last week I watched him tear a phone book in half and not of some little town in Nebraska either. The kid was starting middle linebacker on his freshman team. And he was scaring the hell out of the starter on the JV team. The boy didn’t care who was coming after him, or who he was going after. Well I guess that’s a lie, they have to be living.

He never looked up when I came down the stairs. “Mom, lock the door!” he yelled. “LOCK IT!” he screamed again.

"I can’t figure out the lock!” my wife yelled back.

I didn’t know whether I should laugh or be worried. To be honest it was a funny scene. My wife frantically trying to lock the security door with no luck while my linebacker son, who normally towers over his mother, was cowering behind her. I couldn’t see out the door from my vantage point. When the front door is open it blocks off the landing, so I rushed to push it closed, forcing my wife and son away from the security door. I had no sooner shut the heavy gauge steel front door when I heard the glass pane in the security door shatter. (We had to move to a townhome in a less than desirable neighborhood after I lost my job, and security was a big issue. We even had bars across all the lower windows, THANK GOD!