It’s about 6:30am and very cold out. The older make car pulls off the crowded highway and makes its way along a less busy side road. Inside is a young man and his girlfriend. Both college juniors. They’ve been living in this car for the last 22 hours. Took forever just to get out of Kentucky Ohio
Amber picks up her cell phone. Still reception. Their friends in Ohio
Jake’s been driving for the last six hours so that Amber could get some sleep. With the roads so pack they didn’t want to stop and lose their place in line. Seems like roads kept getting closed, or blocked by accidents, right on their heels.
“I can keep going. We’ll be there in a few more minutes.” Jake wonders if he should just keep driving. Zombies haven’t been spotted this far north yet, but it’s been spreading. But they do need some food and rest and his friends said they can hook them up.
Amber and Jake spent the last of their cash buying some gas at $8.00 a gallon last night. What little food they had at their apartment they threw in the back seat with their clothing and some blankets.
With a couple more turns, and following some homemade signs, they find the encampment. It’s made up of close to one hundred tents, a few campers and trailers, and about forty cars parked to form a circle around the tents. Jake pulls the car into an empty parking spot on the asphalt. About fifty feet away is a long line of about sixteen port-o-potties.
They both get quickly out of the car. “This has definitely got to be it,” says Jake surveying the park. The park is surrounded on most sides by office and local government buildings.
“This place reeks!” says Amber as she stretches her legs. They weren’t able to get out of the car much as they evacuated from home.
“Be nice,” pleads Jake. “Paul’s going to help us, and he’s working hard here. He’s one of the organizers.”
“Hey, Jake,” calls out a friendly voice from across the way. “Amber!” Paul comes trotting down the aisle between two rows of faded tents. Paul’s rail thin and with the long hair and beard he’s got the Jesus-look going on right now.
“Dude, it’s been too long.” They give each other a quick straight guy-hug with double pound on the back.
“Welcome to O.S.O., Occupy … South … Ohio Kentucky
“Looks great!” says Jake.
“Yeah, looks great,” repeats Amber with less enthusiasm.
“Let me show you around,” offers Paul, “we’re cooking breakfast. Bet you haven’t eaten anything hot in forever.”
***
The small metal skillet sits on a portable gas camp cooker. Five strips of bacon are curling around each other as cook and shrink. Paul’s friend Ben is moving them around with a fork. He’s a tall, over sized kind of guy. Probably the comic relief of the group. His homemade shirt reads: “Occu-Pooh New York
“Place looks deserted,” notes Amber. They’re all arranged around the little camp fire.
Ben answers. “We’re not usually up this early. Everyone else is still asleep prolly ‘til eleven. Party too late every night.”
“Knew you were coming so we got up early,” explains Paul. “You deserve a breakfast after that long-ass drive thru’ hell. Ben’s dad owns a market so he’s got all the best food here.”
“You two eat these, I’ve got plenty more in the cooler so I’ll cook more.” Ben keeps shifting the bacon strips. “Better we cook these up now anyways. The PETA animal rights chicks over there get on our case when they catch a whiff of cooking meat. There’s beer in the cooler too. Out of coffee.”
“Smells good, thanks,” says Jake obviously eyeing the bacon.
“So, how bad was it down there?” asks Paul changing the subject to more serious matters. “See any of those dead eat anyone?”
Amber jumps in. She’s still on edge from the long drive and current events. “No, we got out of there before we had the chance to see any dead. Heard a lot of rumors on twitter, but most people are full of shit. Assume every shadow is a zombie. Gotta be part of something big to feel important.”
“Mostly just saw a lot of tail lights in front of me,” volunteers Jake. “A lot of car accidents. Hit three roadblock quarantine inspections. A lot of cars out of gas on the side of the road. Hitchhikers. A few fist fights. A couple stores looted.”
“I’m sure they deserved it,” adds Paul.
“Paid eight bucks a gallon for gas. Saw it as high as ten.” Jake pulls the first strip of bacon from the pan with his fingers. No sense waiting.
“See, that just proves the point we’re trying to make here with the Occupy Movement.” Paul takes it up a notch. ”These companies take advantage of you when things are supposedly going well, and most people don’t even notice it, and when the hard times come, they rape you out in the open in the name of profit. Fuck them! They deserve to have the dead chewing on their bone.”
“That’s a little rough don’t you think?” counters Amber. Her dad’s a bank manager. Neither her, nor Jake, want to mention that right now. “Most people evacuated without fighting, and the stores owners are just as scared and confused as the rest of us.”
“It’s people like them that created all this and now people are dying,” counters Paul. “They’ve destroyed the environment to the point that the earth is expelling our dead from the ground. It’s all those poisons in the ground and water. The earth is rejecting us.” To this point, there are no reports of the dead climbing up out of the ground. That’s just in the movies.
Ben ends up being the better host-type. “I’m personally betting on ‘Big Pharma’ myself. Prolly some drug trial went wrong and they created a mutant super-virus instead of curing cancer or AIDS. But for now, have some more bacon.” He pauses. “I bet you can use some sleep. You can crash in my tent once you’re done eating. I’ve got a great air mattress.”
“Thanks,” says Jake and he means it in more than one way.
“Thanks,” repeats Amber.
***
A few miles back along the highway, just past the Kentucky-Ohio border, traffic’s nearly at a standstill. About ten highway patrolman, thirty armed national guardsman, and a camera crew in a news van man a roadblock.
Each car has to stop while one of two large dogs sniffs around some. The patrolmen also look inside some and look the driver in the face for nervousness, but the dog is the main objective. Very early in events people noticed dogs go crazy when an undead is nearby. Some get violent and bark, some cower and try to get away, but somehow they know. They react different.
Dog and man have been together for some time now, and whether it’s the smell of death, or some other sixth sense, dogs know something’s wrong when man returns from the dead. So far dogs and other mammals seem immune to this new virus even when bitten my man. No undead pets yet.
The loaded down car pulls away, the driver happy to get over 5 MPH again. The patrolman motions with his hand for the next car to pull into the same spot.
All four lanes are open, but processing every single car looking to get through into Ohio
He motions for the driver, a forty something year old man, to lower his window. “We just need to check you out and then you’ll be on your way.” His voice is stern, but not threatening. “Where you coming from?”
“Ah...Lexington Dayton
The patrolman looks back as the patrolman with the German Shepherd leaves the car next to them and approaches this car. The car contains a family of five. Within seconds the dog begins to bark intently. As a trained drug sniffing dog it’s either drugs, or something dead.
When this assignment was announced yesterday afternoon the majority of the rank and file patrolmen doubted they would find anyone smuggling the dead, and may be find only a few that died while in transit.
The dog continues to bark, focused in on the trunk. Immediately two more patrolman and three armed guardsman rush to surround the car. There’s no running this roadblock without gun fire. Three feet behind them the cameraman and lady report take there spot to coverage the first real commotion of the day.
“All of you!,” yells the first patrolman as he pulls his handgun, “Out of the car NOW!”
“Please, … ,” pleads the driver not knowing what to say next. The mom and three kids are escorted away from the vehicle.
The first patrolman pushes the driver back with his presence without actually touching him. “Please step back.”
“But he’s my brother…Please.” The stress and fear is now visible on his face now that the secret is out.
“I’m sorry for your loss, Sir! Please join your family. You need eachother right now.”
A man in a hazmat suit rushes over to the car, gets into the driver’s seat, and drives the car over to the dirt median between the north and south bound lanes. It stops between to large National Guard vehicles. The other 3 lanes continue to process almost without hesitation. He pops the trunk.
Two other men in hazmat suits join the first. One opens the trunk all the way up with a long metal pike allowing him to keep distance. The other two have handguns with silencers on the ready. Ten feet away a uniformed man without a hazmat suit radios in information to someone higher up.
Inside is a human body wrapped its arms and its legs with a length of multi-colored rope. Over the head is a pillow case. The trunk is full of blankets and pillows to muffle any noise. One man reaches in and snags the corner of the pillow case. He pulls it off revealing a pale adult male. He has a bloody head wound. There’s a cloth gag around his head and mouth to keep him from biting and moaning.
One of the hazmat suited men speaks, “Must have fallen, or gotten hit in the head, and died. Or at least injured enough for the virus to kill and then re-animate him. Family must have tied him up quickly…hoping for a cure like us all. I guess the head wound could have happened after death.” He struggles.
“Check,” says the non-hazmat suited man. He repeats the info over his radio.
After 36 hours of anecdotes and quite a few online videos, it appears the virus spreads in a limited way. It most likely causes those with lowered defenses from disease or injury to die and quickly come back. Bodies of those that have been dead longer than 30 minutes have not come back. They need to be exposed to the virus before death, often by bite. How long the virus stays alive in the human body trying to kill you and take over is still unknown. Does the virus live long enough to travel airborne, or can it be transmitted by saliva and other bodily fluids? Still unknown.
The zombie looks up at the three suited men with glazed eyes and begins to struggle more. Two of them are holding long metal hooks like a farmer uses to move around bales of hay and straw. One swings the hook and catches the dead man under the knees. The other swings his and catches him behind the shoulder. They yank with all their strength pulling him up over the lip of the trunk and onto the dirt. They pull the hooks out.
The zombie reacts to their presence, but not any pain from the hooks.
The third hazmat suited soldier already has his handgun drawn. He calmly aims and fires a round into its forehead. It stops struggling. With the silencer it doesn’t attract much attention, but with the media there, it is documented. For now the authorities allow the media to be imbedded with them to show the people something is being done.
A large body bag is retrieved from one of the trucks, opened up, and the body is rolled into it. The lead soldier reaches into the back pocket, pulls out the zombie’s wallet, removes the driver’s license, closes the wallet up, and motions to a soldier without a hazmat suit walking past them. “Give this to that family over there.” He hands over the wallet, but keeps the license for identification and documentation.
The soldier delivers the wallet. It’s not until later he wonders if he should have touched a zombie’s personal affects.
Over the next 50 minutes, the car is scrubbed down with hot soapy water, and the inside is sprayed down with some industrial strength spray and passed over several times with a UV light. The pillows and blankets are collected to be incinerated. The family’s info is collected, and then allowed to leave.
If this was an isolated case, they might have been taken into custody, but with it expected to get worse, the directive is to be polite, kill anything dead, and let them continue to evacuate. Catch and release. Don’t prosecute those who’ve just lost there families, and then had the horror of seeing them come back and attack.
The roadblock continues to search each car heading north, one by one. Very few are heading south.
***
Still in most of their cloths Jake and Amber fall onto the air mattress in Ben’s private tent and pull the sleeping bag over them for warmth. They hope to at least get a few hours sleep, not in a car, before the camp become too alive to rest.
“Sorry for starting to argue with your friend,” offers Amber. “He’s very nice for taking us in.”
“Half the people here are homeless or almost homeless. He’s taken in a lot of people and convinces a lot of people to help out. A lot of these tents and the food is all donated.”
“Now I feel real bad.”
“Don’t, now he’s got a whole camp to listen to his views. Everyone’s got a different reason to be here and are mad about something. Hell, if I don’t find a job soon, I’ll be living here too.”
“Shut, you won’t be homeless.” Amber pulls Jake’s arm around her as they spoon under the sleeping bag.
“This disease makes whatever they’re mad at seems like nothing. I can’t believe they’re staying. People are dying all across the state. I wish Paul and Ben would at least relocated farther north.”
“I didn’t want to say anything earlier,” says Amber, “but right before we got here my brother Facebooked that his friend was killed last night in an attack on his college campus. He was in Indiana Cleveland
Jake reassures her, but not very convincingly, “Yeah, we’ll get some sleep, find some more gas, and keep going. Maybe take on a couple more passengers to share the cost of gas. Someone here with some money’s going to want to get out of here.”
Neither says anything more as they begin to drift. Jake rests his hand on her right breast as usual and they fall asleep.
***
Several more miles away in Cincinnati
Dad’s driving, Mom’s in the front, and the little brother, about fourteen, sits in one of the second row seats. The other seat is pushed all the way forward to make a flat surface along with the storage area. Their sixteen year old daughter, wrapped in blankets, is asleep laying across the back. She’s in a real bad condition fighting leukemia. Not sick enough for the hospital, she should be home.
Problem is a zombie was shot down just half a mile away from their home. Must have bit two others because then there was two more and they had to be shot in the head next. Within minutes the most on the city of Cincinnati
Without warning, not a sound, Wendy jumps at her brother sitting near her. She claws at him as he screams. He shoves his hand into her face but she simply bites down on three of his fingers drawing blood. Mom spins around to break up the fighting siblings behind her like she’s done many times before, but this time its more violent. She too gets a small bite to the wrist.
Dad pauses half a second, and then kicks on the parking break. He quickly gets out of the car, slams the doors, and opens the driver’s side passenger door, the one closest to his daughter. Without thinking, he wraps his arms around her chest from behind and pulls her frail but energized body out through the open doorframe.
She hisses and screeches but is pulled out of the reach of her badly injured brother. Wendy struggles, but Dad’s got her tightly locked up. She can’t quite reach his arms to bite him as she flails. But now what does he do?
“Zombie!” The cry carries from one of the cars also trapped with them on the onramp. From another car, “Zombie! Roll the window!”
A man from the pick-up truck in front of them hops out of the cab and pulls out a rifle from behind the driver’s side seat.
“Stay back, I’ve got her,” pleads Dad. “Just stay back.”
Mom’s now getting out of the SUV to better attend to her son. She looks up and see the man with the rifle through their glass. “God. No. Please!” She begins to tremble in fear for all her family.
The man with the rifle begins to walk their way. Dad drops his diseased daughter to the pavement and charges the gunman to keep the hunting rifle from pointing anywhere near his daughter. As they clash the rifle goes off and hits the hood of the car parked on the opposite of the SUV, the passenger side.
“What the Fuck!” bellows the driver of the hit car. The angry man gets out of his beloved car to see what the hell’s going on. He already reached his boiling point before the bullet to his sports car. He saw people getting out, wasn’t his concern. But now this is his concern.
While the other two struggle over the rifle, Wendy stands up and begins to walk the other way, down the off ramp. With her brother’s blood on her lips, and a paler and paler face, the trapped passengers in the vehicles around them check to make sure their doors are locked again, and then again once more. They suddenly feel trapped in little glass aquariums as they huddle away from the first Zombie they’ve seen.
Wendy feels each car in random spots as she walks down the cramped aisle between each row of vehicles. Even though she can see, she touches everything as if blind and the world’s brand new to her. Parts of her brain have died.
After a few moments a young man, maybe nineteen, tough looking, jumps out of the back of one of the vans a couple more vehicle lengths down the onramp. He’s got an old wooden baseball bat in his hand. He’s seen many movies on Zombies and now he’s finally got permission to swing away. “I’m going to fuck this bitch up.”
At a fast pace the two teens close the distance and with perfect timing the young man raises the bat above his head and brings it down upon the top of Wendy’s head before she can reach him. She stops stunned for a moment.
“Wendy!” Dad’s noticed she’s walked away and turns his attention away from the gunman and to the fight behind him. Mom’s also begun to run after her daughter leaving her son holding his wounds.
The young man winds up again and this time hits Wendy horizontally up against the left side of her head, splattering blood on the nearest car. By this point a few more people have gotten out to get a better look, or defend their little piece of the highway.
Wendy slides against the car until she hits the ground in a crumbled mess. The young man stands a little stunned. Not the same as the movies. Real blood and he finds the girl kind of cute once. And he had to almost take her head off.
Mom crashes into the young man fists flying. The bat drops to the ground bouncing and rolling.
The young man’s friend in the van are shocked at first at what he decided to do, but seeing him get attacked, the two of them get out of the van.
Dad reaches Wendy and seeing the two new young men approach grabs the baseball bat at prepares to swing to keep them away from his wife. He’s feeling a dozen emotions and he’s pumped with adrenaline.
A pastor in a nearby car seeing people in trouble gets out of his car. He’s scared, but he must join the chaos.
Another man gets out of his SUV removing a handgun from his waistband. The original gunman with the rifle is also approaching.
Another man has a length of pipe. Everyone’s suddenly defending themselves against a feeling that their world is out of control.
Dad pushes Mom aside to get a clear shot at the stunned young man who hasn’t done anything since bashing in their daughter’s head. He rams the tip of the bat into the young man’s stomach with all he can manage. He goes down. His two friends then jump the two of them.
Someone fires a gunshot into the air thinking it will stop the fight like it does in the movies. It only creates more panic as people run around and dodge behind the stalled cars. Half he people react by getting out of their cars, the other half react by cowering even lower inside their vehicles.
Some push forward as if they could actually push the next fifty cars out of the way to escape. One car lurches forward pinning a woman’s legs against another car when the driver’s foot slips from the break and he accidentally hits the gas. She lets out a blood curdling scream.
At some point during the struggle on the onramp Little Brother slid out of the SUV to see where everyone went. But then he began to shiver like he had a fever. He’s now on his hands and knees on the dirty pavement of the highway. Parts of his brain are beginning to die. His heart rate spikes erratically with the flush of adrenaline.
Mom and Dad now too lay on the pavement, injured, experiencing similar biological changes.
Within the next thirty minutes fifty more people will die and come back on this highway leading out of the Cincinnati
By nightfall the death toll in Cincinnati
In perspective it will be little more than a footnote in the history books.
***
Earlier that morning, back at the OSO encampment.
The man’s in his late twenties. He’s asleep inside a tent, on hard ground, packed in with five strangers. Whenever someone moves someone gets kicked. It’s November and its getting cold. He’s been living here weeks. His own coughing spell wakes him up again. This has happened dozens of times this morning.
“Shut the hell up.” The woman on the other side of the tent is usual well mannered and easy to get along with, but it’s been a disruptive night for everyone.
The man suffers from what the media in New York
He’s tired from the lack of sleep and feels a headache coming on. He pulls the sleeping bag tighter over his head hoping to get some warmth, and maybe another hour of sleep.
Ten tents away a man’s curled up under in his covers. This tent’s smaller so it only has two other occupants. Next to him is a little tin case with some needles and some other paraphernalia still open from last night. He’s not breathing.
One of the other campers in the tent rolls over, unzips his bag, and sits up. He’s wearing a red t-shirt, part of a lot donated by a local labor union. It’s covered with initials and slogans. Of the three he’s the one sleeping in the middle. He looks around as he tries to wake up. He glances at his cell phone. It’s after ten.
Looking at his still friend he reaches over and gives him a shake. “Zach, wake up.” He pauses and shakes him again. “You wanted up earlier”.
Zach jolts awake with an expression of pain and spins towards his friend. Before he can react his friend pounces on him, pushes him down, and bites his nose and random spots around his face. Zach also claws at his torso as if looking for the softer parts of his flesh. Zach says him pinned and overpowered.
The third camper now very awake screams, tears open her sleeping bag, and makes for the tent flap, struggling to unzip it. “Help! Zombie!” She gets the flap open and exits. “He’s killing him!”
The camp, still only half awake, reacts in panic.
Back in the other tent the Man with the Zuccotti Lung Bites into the upper arm of one of the women in his tent. The others scramble and get into each others way keeping anyone from being able to escape quickly. The woman who yelled at him earlier reaches under her pillow for a small knife, the one she has in case anyone tried to rape her.
Last week a man was exiled from OSO for a “misunderstanding” one night. Since then she’s kept a knife under her pillow.
Her eyes and the Zombie’s lock in on each others. He’s been in a frenzy trying to figure out what to bite on next. She looks good. As he lunges towards her she directs the knife and stabs him in the ribcage. It doesn’t slow him down. Pushing her down against the hard ground he bites into her neck.
The other four are able to eventually get out of the tent, but not before three of them getting bit to some degree.
“Help!”
Across the aisle a fifty-something, grizzled, homeless man climbs out of his tent. He’s been living with the group for a few weeks despite being double most of their ages. Free food and a place safer to sleep than the alleys of the surrounding city. In the past when he slept in the park the police would throw him out. Now he’s got a right to stay.
The homeless man knocks down a young woman as she runs past him. With her face down he bites the back of her head and shoulders. A friend tries to pull him off of her and he gets overpowered and bitten as well.
Back over at Ben’s tent, Jake and Amber unzip the flap and re-enter daylight to see what’s wrong. They quickly figure it out. “It caught up with us,” Amber laments.
“Run for the car.” Jake grabs Amber’s hand and they dash towards where they think they remember leaving their car.
On the other side of camp, a recent college grad, still in his college sweatshirt he sleeps in, enters and then exits his tent holding a revolver.
“A gun?” asks his scared girlfriend standing next to him. “We don’t believe in guns.”
“That was before you asked me to live in this damn park,” he snaps back. He looks all around for the safest escape. About fifteen feet away is another zombie who ambushed a man as he climbed out of his tent. She’s pinned him down and is biting at the side of his face and then on to his fingers, but she notices the man and woman standing there stunned. The female zombie stands up and starts to move in their direction.
The young man raises his revolver in both of his shaking hands. Never actually shot before.
“Fire!” yells his girlfriend who doesn’t believe in guns.
He pulls the trigger and completely misses her hitting a woman running in the background. Couldn’t have done that shot if he tried.
“You missed!”
“I know!” He steadies his hand and fires a second time into the woman’s upper chest. She’s pushed back for a moment and then continues.
“In the Head!” The news has been broadcasting that it seems headshots work the best. Single shots to the body barely register.
“I know!” He fires this time between her eyes. She falls just a foot short of his trembling feet. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” he says with a little bit more bravado in his voice than usual.
Back across the camp someone had a lit log from one of the morning campfires and was waving it for protection. Somehow it hit a tent and now it’s spread to a second one. Artificial plasticy smoke starts to breeze over the camp as Occupiers run in various direction across and from the camp.
After coming out the south side of the camp Jake and Amber figure out they must be parked on the west side. Running the perimeter, they locate Jake’s old car.
“Hey, come with me!” Standing four car spaces away it’s Ben. “You said you were low on gas. I filled up yesterday.” There are three other students standing close to the big guy including a woman holding tightly onto his arm. “Grab only what you need and meet me over here.”
Jake and Amber grab a few bags from his car, and he bids his old car farewell not knowing if he’ll see it again. They find Ben standing next to a brand new, shiny black Suburban with all the extra features. Perfect for roughing it in the city park.
“Nice,” comments Amber. His parent’s market must be doing very well.
“Where Paul?” asks Jake as the six of them get inside the truck.
“He tried to pull one of them off a kid and got attacked himself.” Ben turns the ignition. “If what they say is true he’s lost…”
The police have been driving past OSO ever since they set up in the park. When one of the regular patrols notices the smoke of the burning tents and bedding they drive in closer and call in for some back up. They’re expecting unrest.
The Suburban and three other cars drive up the driveway past the police car as it enters the park. The car stops in the middle of the parking lot, both police men get out. They’ve haven’t seen action yet, but they’re too close to Kentucky
They call in an updated request for back-up and notification of Federal Authorities, draw their weapons, and approach the perimeter of the camp.
“Aim for the head…”
“…but only if it’s dead.”
