Rendezvous: Chapter 18

Chapter 18
Dee’s eye started to twitch. She held the note in her hands, staring at it, trying to integrate this new information with the events of the last month, with what little she remembered of her childhood.
Behind her, the box of tapes and papers beckoned. The video cassettes were arranged roughly in chronological order, judging by their labels; beneath them, the stacks of paper and binders bore symbols and contact information representing mental health institutions and various courts.
“Dee?” Sam was as nervous as she was confused.
“Yeah, Rosie?”
“What exactly happened in California?”
“I’m starting to wonder the same thing.”
They hauled the box downstairs to the TV in the living room and got the generator going. Dee found the tape with the earliest date, from when she would have been three years, six months old. The video quality was not very high, but this had been done in the early eighties, when consumer video equipment was bulky, expensive, and rare. A hand briefly came into frame before disappearing again, and then the focus adjusted and the camera panned to the view of a hallway. A woman Dee had only seen in photographs was leaning on a wall, arms folded across her chest. The camera froze on her for a beat, and she spoke.
“Just what the Hell do you think you’re doing, Tom?”
“Calm down, Tracy. I just want to be able to show this to the doctors. They need to see this with their own eyes, in case Dee gets nervous and decides to clam up.”
“That’s bullshit, and you know it. You just want to document this because you believe her.”
“No, I don’t. I think it’s just as weird as you do. But I think there’s something going on here, and -“
“And what? And you want to get to the bottom of it? Bottom line, Tom: she’s crazy! I don’t know how, or why, but that’s all there is to it. Just let it go. This is freaky enough as it is, we don’t need to be preserving it for posterity.”
“Then don’t watch it. I’m gonna go talk to Dee.” The camera moved past the fuming woman into a living room strewn about with children’s toys. In the middle of the floor was three-year-old Dee, reading a book while laying on her stomach, feet kicking idly in the air. “Hey there, hon. What’cha up to?” The child looked up at the camera and beamed.
“Hi, Daddy! I’m studyin’ aggerculture!”
“Oh, really? And why are you doing that?”
“For when the zombie umpocalypse happens! We gotta be prepared, or ever’body’s gonna die.”
“Really? And how do you know that?”
“I saw it. I was there.”
“When was this? Should you have been sleeping when you saw these things?”
“No, Daddy, I didn’t dream it.” The girl on the screen rolled her big brown eyes. “I mean I was there, an’ it happened, an’ I found a way to come back an’ warn ever’body. I’m ‘onna save the world, an’ then I’ma get a physics prize when I find the time machine again!”
“That’s pretty far-fetched, you know. Some people might not believe you. What else can you tell me about all this?”
“Well, for one thing, we’re gonna need clean rooms, ‘cuz otherwise the parasite’s gonna get all up in our kids, an’ then -”
“That’s enough, Tom!” Little Dee went wide-eyed and silent at her mother’s angry shout. The frame swung around to capture Tracy’s livid countenance.
“Jesus, Tracy, what’s your problem?”
“I don’t want to hear any more of this! That’s enough, the doctors will be able to see that something’s going on, OK? This is freaking me out!”
“Well, then calm down. Why don’t you go have a smoke out back or something? We’re just talking, it’s not -“
“You’re not ‘just talking,’ Tom, you’re encouraging her! Whatever’s going on, you’re just feeding it by asking her questions.”
“Well, maybe if we ask enough questions, she’ll run into something to trip her up and then we can talk her out of this.”
“No! Not in this house! This is too weird!”
“Mommy, calm down.”
“Dee, I’m talking with your father, don’t interrupt us.”
“Mommy, he’s right, you should just calm down. Talking won’t hurt anyone.”
“See what you’re doing, Tom? Now she won’t shut up!”
“An’ why should I? I got a right to talk, don’t I? What are you afraid of?”
“Dee, honey, I’m - I’m afraid that my little baby girl’s really sick, and I don’t want her to hurt herself, or anyone else, and I don’t want to worry about what other people will think if they hear about this.” The anger had mostly faded from her voice by now, and tears were coming from her eyes. “They won’t understand you, sweetie. They’ll say really mean things that will make you feel bad, and you’ll wish you didn’t do the things you did to make them say those things.”
“What, the same way they did to you when you were in college?” Little Dee’s voice was flat, challenging. Tracy’s jaw fell open.
“What -?” Dee came back into frame, getting to her feet. “Tom, what have you been telling her?”
“What are you talking about, Tracy? I’m never around, I work all the time! I only even know about this because you told me!”
“He didn’t tell me, Mommy, you did. You told it to me when I was in high school last time, about the doctors and their drugs and their so-called ‘treatments’ on the hippie-farm. You just don’t want me to go through the same embarrassments you did in college. Well, I can handle it, OK? My daddy’s not an alcoholic, so I don’t have to sleep with other men to feel good about myself, so leave your baggage out of my life so I can do my work!”
“You - you fucking bitch!” Tracy came into frame as soon as she set into motion, raising her arm as she stomped towards little Dee.
“Jesus Christ, Tracy!” Tom set the camera down sideways on the couch, then ran around it to try to get between them. Dee was in frame again, standing her ground. As her mother approached and swung at her, the child reached for Tracy’s arm while simultaneously leaping with the force of the blow. Tom’s figure occupied the frame immediately afterward, obscuring what occurred. There was a scream and a thud, then Tom stopped abruptly and backed away. As he left the frame, Dee was standing upright with her mother face-down on the floor in an arm-bar. Her tiny hands were each gripping one of Tracy’s fingers, twisting her wrist and elbow in a way her shoulder wouldn’t turn.
“I’m not afraid of you, Mommy,” the child said. There was iron in her voice. “I’ve been killing zombies for years. I won’t let your personal hang-ups get in my way. So get over your bad self, and let me do what I need to do, OK?”
“Goddammit, Tom! Get her off of me!”
“Dee, honey, let your mommy go, OK? She didn’t really want to hurt you, but you can’t say things like that. They’ll just make people angry, OK?”
“Well, she needs to fucking believe me, Daddy! Everyone does! Or we’re all gonna die! I’m serious!” Little Dee started crying as she released her mother’s hand and embraced Tom’s leg. Tom scooped her up and set her down on the couch next to the camera, then went to help his wife up. Tracy had already gotten to her knees, and pushed him away as she rose to her feet. Her voice was low and detached as she spoke.
“That’s it, Tom. We’re through. I’m done - I am fucking done - with this. I’ll be back for my stuff later. You can expect divorce papers on Monday. You have fun with your little freak show. This is too much for me.” The door slammed, and she was gone. Tom was left alone in the frame, frozen, palms out in supplication, jaw open in shock. The only sign that the tape was still rolling were little Dee’s sobs from off-camera. Then Tom’s shoulders slumped, he moved to the camera, and the recording ended.
The tape picked up again during a birthday party. They both recognized Linda’s house from the Chicago suburbs - Dee was in junior high at the time of the recording. As the party wound on, Dee and Sam watched in silence, reeling from what they had just seen. After a few minutes, Dee ejected the cassette and popped in the next one.
Tom was alone at a table in a white room. After a few seconds, a door opened and closed, then a man in a white labcoat with a clipboard came into frame and sat across the table from Tom.
“So is that thing on, then?” Tom pointed to the camera.
“Yes, as you requested.”
“Thank you, doctor.”
“It’s no trouble. Like I said, the hard part is going to be getting your hands on it. Sometimes you can request copies, but if what you told me is true, well - look, to be honest, I think you may need to take legal action. It can be done, but we’ll probably have to see a court order before releasing the records.”
“I understand.”
“OK, then. Is there anything else?”
“Not that I can think of. Shall I go get her?”
“Sure thing.”
Tom stood and left the room. He reappeared later with Dee, who sat at a third chair around the table.
“Hi, doctor!” She grinned and stuck out her hand.
“Hello there, Dee. You can call me Dan.”
“OK, Dan. Does my daddy hafta be here?”
“Well, strictly speaking, he doesn’t. But he can stay if that makes you more comfortable.”
“No, that’s OK. I don’t want you to think he’s coaching me or anything.” Dr. Dan let out a nervous chuckle and looked at Tom.
“Hey,” Tom said, shrugging. “It’s her show, I guess.” He stood and left the room again.
“So, Dee, your father tells me you have quite a lot on your mind. Why don’t you tell me all about it?” He readied his pen above the clipboard.
“Listen, Dan,” she said, reaching up to fold her arms on the table. “I know you’re gonna think I’m crazy, OK? But you hafta believe me, and I dunno what else to do.”
“Well, don’t be too hasty, OK? I don’t think you’re crazy. I can’t right now, because I haven’t even heard what you have to say. So why don’t you tell me what’s going on, and then we’ll see how things go. Does that sound all right to you?”
“Sure, fine.” Dee took a deep breath. “I use’ta be a scientist, OK? I was a physicist, I graduated from UCLA, and when I was twenty-three and in grad school, a bunch’a stuff went down. Twenty years from now, unless I get this all sorted out, it’s all gonna happen again.”
“Really? And what - went down?”
“First, the power went out. All over the world. Every power station got bombed, all within a few minutes of each other. The satellites went down, too, which made us think that whatever did it came from space. An’ three days later, the zombies showed up.”
“Zombies, huh? And what were they like?”
“Well, they’re not like the zombies you see in Hollywood movies. They’re technically alive, but the hosts of this parasite. It looks like a lichen sometimes, like a moss other times, or like a fungus. It can grow anywhere, it just grows differ’ntly depending on where it’s growing. It can even be like a slime mold when it’s living in the human body.”
“So you’re saying that this parasite - which isn’t just one plant, but several - it can infect people and turn them into zombies, huh?”
“It is one plant. It just goes into a different life phase depending on where it’s growin’ at. We think it spreads by spores in the air, and they latch on to stuff, and that’s how it gets everywhere so quickly.”
“We - that would be you and who else?”
“The other scientists. We all stuck together. We couldn’t do too much without power, but we still found out a lot with good-ol’-fashioned science.”
“I see. Let’s go back to the parasite for a second. How is it that an infection can turn a person into a zombie?”
“We never figgered that out exactly, but it had something to do with the brain. It works on the microscopic scale like zombies work on other people in Hollywood movies - just surround your prey and overwhelm them. It’s hard for it to get through the skin, unless there's an open wound - or I guess if you had a coma or something. But it mainly goes in through the lungs or stomach. You can hold it off indefinitely with booze and cigarettes, as long as you catch it early enough. Babies din't stand a chance, though - they were infected three, four days out the womb. Five, tops.
"Anyway," she continued in an excited tone, "I remember that it had something to do with the frontal lobe and the base of the brain - y’know, all that 'lizard brain' stuff. Decision-making processes and base instincts, that's really all it needed to change, the way we figured it. The rest of the brain - balance, coordination, whatever - that could all run on its own. After the infection takes root, it gets into the bloodstream and goes up into the brain where it grows like roots. But it gets into all’a major organs, too, since it needs to keep the host alive. The parasite also slows down the host's metabolism, which we think is why the zombies moved so slow but lived so long without food or water. We found redundant circulatory and nervous systems in various stages of development as the zombies lived longer an’ longer, too."
"How long did this go on?"
"Oh, about six years or so."
"Really? And what happened then?"
"That's when I found the time machine!"
"OK, tell me about that."
"Well, even affer we hooked up our generators and got things running, nobody else had power, and all the satellites were down, so we couldn't really do much. We started lookin’ around, though, and six years after the blackout started, we found some electrical signals from the North, by the San Andreas fault line. We thought it might be another survivor outpost, but they didn't respond to our messages, so we sent some people to look. What we found looked like some kind of alien ship. It's hard to describe. It didn't appear to have any weaponry, it was just all shiny an' stuff, so we drove up to it, figuring we were dead if we ran, anyway. We had all gone a little stir-crazy at that point, and just wanted a break in the routine. Well, nobody was in it, it looked like, so we went inside an’ started pokin’ around. At the back, I found what looked like some kind of computer, but way more advanced than anything we had built at the time. I managed to find a way to send myself back -"
"Wait a second. If this was alien technology, how could you use it?"
"I dunno. It wasn't in English or anything, but it was really simple to use. After staring at the symbols for a while, I just felt like I understood ‘em, like they were written to be recognizable."
"I see. Thanks for clearing that up. Please, continue."
"OK, anyway, I started recognizing physical constants, and it looked like it could be used to go back to points in time. So I tooled around with it until I got to the year I was born, and then sent myself back."
"But it didn't send you back."
"Oh, it did."
"Well - I'm sorry, I'm confused. Why is it that you only appear to be three years old, if you were really twenty-nine when you used the time machine?"
"I'm not sure how, but it sent me back to the way my body was at the time. So, I have the mind I had when I went back, but with a renewed lease on life, I guess."
"And you didn't tell any of your scientist friends in the ship?"
"No, I thought the whole thing was gonna go back."
"Oh, it didn't?"
"No, I told you, it only sent my mind back. Otherwise somebody would’a found the ship by now."
"Of course."
The conversation wound on and on, little Dee explaining details of the situation that confirmed their findings over the past month, as well as what Dee had thought were her own delusions resurfacing. Sam was aghast, Dee was stone-faced. After about thirty minutes of talking, Doctor Dan sent little Dee to go get Tom. He came back alone.
"So what's the story, Doc?"
"I'll be straight with you, Tom: I don't envy you."
"Huh. Yeah. I can see that."
"I'll definitely want to review that tape you've got. Have you made a copy?"
"Yes, I duplicated it in case you wanted to keep one, it's out in the car."
"I do, and thank you. It will be one less thing you have to get back from us, I guess." Dan jotted a few things down on his clipboard. "We'll want to perform a few tests on her, nothing invasive, just some cognitive assessments and CT scans. The results will be shared with you, but as for getting copies of your own, well -" Dan trailed off, alluding to yet another red tape barrier in Tom's way.
"Yes, I had assumed so."
"OK, then we can discuss the tests out in the waiting room, I'd like to schedule what we can at the same time."
"Sounds good." The two men stood and left the room. There was a brief jump, and the time-stamp changed to a few weeks later. Otherwise, it was the same shot of the same room. Dee and Doctor Dan entered and sat at the table.
"So, Dee, how have you been?"
"I been well, thanks."
"Things going OK at home?"
"Yeah, they're fine. Mommy left, though. I guess I won't have a brother, after all."
"Hm. Speaking of your mother, your father showed me a tape of you from a few weeks ago. Do you remember that?"
"Yeah, the one when I was readin’ up on aggerculture?"
"Yes, that's the one. Do you remember what happened after that?"
"Well, yeah. It was just a couple weeks ago."
"Can you tell me about it?"
"Ugh. You watched it, didn't you?"
"Yes, but I want to hear how you'd describe it."
"Fine. I started talking about the future. Mommy threw a fit. Dad an' I tried to calm her down, then she started projecting fears from her own youth onto me and I called her out on it. So she came over and tried to hit me, and I put her on the floor.”
“Uh-huh. Those were some pretty fancy moves you had on that tape. Not many three-year-olds could take down a fully-grown adult.”
“Well, she doesn’t really know how to fight. I mean, she took some judo and some tae kwon do when she was in college, but that was a while ago, and she didn’t really stick with it, anyway.”
“Hm. So, where did you learn to fight like that?”
“From one of the survivors who stuck with us. He was a second-degree black belt.”
“Ahh, neat. Is that in - karate, then? Tae kwon do?”
“No, none of those.”
“Well, which martial art, then?”
“It’s called ‘bujinkan.’”
“Uh-huh - and how do you spell that?”
“Bee you jay eye enn kay ay enn. Boo-jin-con.”
“I see. And what manner of martial art is this, then? I’ve never heard of it.”
“Meh, you can look ‘em up on the web.”
“The - excuse me, what ‘web?’”
“Y’know, the inter - oh crap, that’s right. This is only 1987. Look, in a few years, everyone’s gonna have a computer in their home. Like, the progress with ‘em is just going to be amazing, leaps an’ bounds beyond the pocket cacolators we got today. An’ all the ‘puters are gonna be connected by a network that spans the whole world - well, the whole developed world, anyway. It’s called the ‘internet,’ or the ‘world wide web,’ or just the net or the web.”
“Computers, huh? You mean like that clunky beige box with the green letters on the screen, right?”
“Hmph. Comparing that ‘puter to a ‘puter from twenty years from now is like comparing a Model T to a Lamborghini Gallardo. I mean, sure, they’re both technically automobiles, but one’s a relic and the other’s an example of state-of-the-art technology.”
“Umm - there is no Lamborghini Gallardo. At least, I’ve never heard of it.”
“Of course there is, it - oh, dammit, that’s from 2003. OK, nevermind. But do you get the idea?”
“Sure, I guess. You’re saying that in twenty years, computers will make progress equivalent to almost a century in the automotive industry?”
“Yeah, it’s Moore’s Law, accelerating returns an’ all that. The better machines we build allow us to build even better ones, an’ those allow us to build even betterer better ones which are even more an improvement than last time.”
“I see.”
Once more, the conversation wound on, then little Dee left the room and Tom entered.
“Hey, Doc.”
“Hi, Tom. How are you?”
“Eh, I’ve been better. Tracy’s still living with her parents, but she’s having second thoughts about the divorce. Things are just really busy.”
“I can imagine. How’s Dee?”
“She seems to have calmed down a lot. I guess she really just wants to talk to someone about this.”
“That seems about right. I have the results from the tests here, would you like to go over them now?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“OK. Well, let’s see what we’ve got.” Dan pulled a folder from behind his notepad on the clipboard. “The tests we performed on her are helping to put this into perspective. Intellectually speaking, she’s got the cognitive abilities of a college graduate. It’s quite frankly amazing. The imaging we did on her brain also shows highly-increased brain activity in nearly all areas. Her mind - look, this is - Jesus, Tom. If I had fewer scruples, I could make a career on this girl.”
“What do you mean?” Tom raised an eyebrow.
“I mean that her brain is highly developed, and I don’t know when it would stop. There are people who would want to study her, but - look, sometimes, ethics doesn’t really keep a strong hold over actual practices, OK? I look at her, and I see a sweet little girl who’s really smart but also really confused. Others wouldn’t see her like that. They’d see her as a puzzle, something to be figured out, and they’d probably try to get you to sign all kinds of releases to do all kinds of things to her that would screw her up for the rest of her life.”
“Why are you - I mean, you’re not doing yourself any favors by telling me this.”
“I’m not trying to make myself look good here, Tom. I’m trying to do what’s right for her. That girl - if she can get her head screwed on straight, there’s no telling what she might be able to do. But not if a bunch of researchers get their hands on her. They might never let go.”
“So - OK, what are you saying I should do?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t. And truthfully, that’s up to you. You have to follow your own conscience on this and do what you think is right. Just be careful, OK? Watch out for her.”
“That’s what I’m trying to do, but - Jesus. I don’t know.” Tom held his head in his hands. “I don’t know what’s right. I don’t know what will turn out well. I don’t know how to do the best thing for her.”
“Nobody knows the future, Tom. You’ve got to make decisions you can live with.” Dan put his hand on Tom’s shoulder. “I told you last time, I don’t envy you. I’m not going to sugarcoat this - you have a lot of hard decisions to make.”
“I know.” He sniffed and rubbed his eyes. “OK. So what’s next?”
“Well, the tests show that Dee’s incredibly intelligent, but getting to the bottom of what’s causing her to say and think these things, that’s going to take some time. Do you want to schedule another appointment?”
“Yeah. Let’s do that.” They stood and left the room, and there was another jump in the time stamp to a week later. Dee and Dan entered and sat down once again.
“So, Dee, what do you want to talk about today?”
“Dunno, Doc. What do you want to know?”
“I’d like to know whatever you want to tell me.” Dee sighed and put her elbows up on the table.
“Look, Doctor. I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but I don’t think you’re taking me very seriously. Nobody does, it seems.” Dan put his elbows on the table and steepled his fingers. He took a deep breath before speaking again.
“Dee, I want you to listen very carefully to me, OK? I take you seriously. I really do, and I want you to believe that. However, the things you’re saying are very far-fetched and hard to swallow. There is a difference between you and the things you say, and for a person in my position, that is a very important difference. Do you understand?”
“Please don’t patronize me. You don’t believe me, and that’s OK. What would it take to get you to believe me, though? How can I convince you?”
“Well, let’s see.” Dan leaned back in his chair and tapped a finger on his chin. “I suppose actually seeing the time machine would be a very strong piece of evidence for your case.”
“I told you, we didn’t even see it until twenty-three years from now. And it didn’t come back with me. I don’t know how it works, so I can’t build a new one. I thought it would come back with me, so I didn’t really plan on needing anything else to convince people.”
“OK, well, if you know the future, then tell me some things that will happen.”
“Well, I already told you about the development of computers.”
“Yes, I remember you talking about that last time. I went to the library and looked some things up - I understand you go to the library a lot, too - and the things you said - well, after checking some facts -“ Dan stammered for a moment before continuing. “To be honest, what you say doesn’t sound that far-fetched, now that I’ve done the research. Actually, it looks like a very educated guess - and you are highly-educated, to say the least. And for someone with your intellectual abilities, I don’t see it as that far of a leap to hypothesize that things will go the way you say they will.”
“Well, how about elections? George Bush is gonna win in eighty-eight, and then Clinton in ninety-two - he’s the governor of Arkansas - and -“
“No, Dee, that’s even easier. Elections are a fifty-fifty shot, more or less, and I can’t see those as anything more than lucky guesses.”
“Well, dammit!” Little Dee slammed her hands down on the table. “What’s it going to take, then?”
“Dee, the claims you’re making are extraordinary, and they’re going to require -“
“Extraordinary evidence, I know. Carl Sagan said that.”
“Yes. Good job. Now, I have to look at what the most likely explanation is. You are an extremely intelligent young girl, Dee - probably more intelligent than anyone I’ve known. However, you’re also very young, and children your age typically have imaginations that run wild because they don’t have the experience required to rein in those extraordinary imaginations. So please, put yourself in my position, and ask yourself what looks most likely in this situation: a little girl has an incredibly detailed and completely unfalsifiable story of what the future’s going to be like. Is it more likely that she’s telling the truth? Or is it more likely that she’s confused, caught up in her own fantasy world?”
“Well, when you put it that way -“ Dee’s shoulders slumped, and her arms fell into her lap. “OK, then put yourself in my position. You know what the future’s going to be like, but you’re helpless to prove it. Nobody else will believe you. What do you do?”
“That’s a tough question, Dee.” Dan sat up in his chair again and folded his arms on the table. “I really don’t now. It’s hard to say, because I’m not actually in your position, and I don’t know what it’s like to be you. If I had any solid evidence, though - anything at all - then I would try to bring that forward to convince people. Otherwise, I would probably just bide my time and prepare myself. That’s what I think I would do.”
“But - I mean - dammit! Lives are at stake here! People are going to die - lots of people - and a whole lot more will, too, if nobody listens to me!”
“That may be so. And lots of people have been in that position in the past. How many military advisors do you think have had their pleas fall on deaf ears, only to see their worst fears come true on the battlefield? They were right, too - but nobody would listen to them. And if nobody will listen to you, railing about it won’t help you get your point across. It will just make you look like -“
“Like I’m crazy.”
“That’s not what I was going to say.”
“That’s what you meant, though.”
“Other people would probably say that, sure. And, well, other people will hold a lot of influence over your life. Even if they’re wrong, you have to take them into account. What it comes down to is: do you want to be right? Or do you want to be effective?”
“I want to be both. I know I’m right, so how do I be effective with that?”
“Well, what do you think would be the most effective course of action, if nobody listens to you?”
“I guess - I guess - I would just have to wait it out.” Dee’s head bowed in thought as she said this. She looked defeated. From there, little Dee talked about her feelings about the situation, how helpless she felt to change things, and Dan returned to his usual clinical self. This was his territory, this was progress to his mind - getting past the facts of the situation and discussing what they meant to people, and the effects they had on feelings and relationships and how those affected interactions between people. The conversation wound on, and eventually, Dan and Tom were in the room again.
“How are things at home, Tom?”
“Tracy’s thinking about coming back, now that Dee’s in therapy. I told her how Dee had started calming down, now that she had someone else to talk to, and that seems to have improved Tracy’s opinion on the subject.”
“I see. Hopefully, she can come back for good. Dee would probably show much more improvement in a stable household.”
“Yeah. So what’s next?”
“Well, Tom - I think we made some good progress this session. She’s starting to understand how other people think of her fantasies, and the effects they have on those around her. However, I think that we may want to try some other things as well.”
“Such as?”
“Well, did you have a chance to look over the side effects on the medication information sheets I gave you?”
“Yeah, I read them all. They look pretty intense. I’m not so sure about them.”
“Well, we have two options. And they’re not mutually exclusive, we can try them in combinations. The first is therapy, the second is medication.”
“OK.”
“I would highly recommend therapy. Dee seems to get a lot out of talking to people, and I think interaction is really what she needs at this point. However, she has some really solid beliefs in her fantasies. She’s a child, after all. These fantasies, while extraordinary to you or me, are really just blown-up versions of the fantasies that any child has - the difference is that Dee has the intellectual capacity to flesh them out with convincing details that other children can’t. When adults do this, we call these fantasies ‘delusions.’ Dee shows all the classic signs - she’s thoroughly convinced, her story is unfalsifiable, and she lacks the slightest bit of evidence.”
“I just - it seems that putting a child on these drugs, while she’s still developing - I think that could do more harm than good.”
“That’s true. There have been studies to show that if a person isn’t psychotic, then antipsychotic medications can actually induce the conditions they’re meant to treat. There is a small possibility that if this is merely an overgrown fantasy and not a full-blown delusion, the medication may exacerbate her condition.”
“Yeah. That’s what I’m worried about. I mean - maybe this is just wishful thinking, but if she talked herself into believing these things, can she maybe - do you think she can talk herself out of it?”
“That brings us back to the therapy option. I’m glad you came to that conclusion, Tom - I’m at the same point, myself. The human mind is a very powerful thing, as I’m sure you’ve seen. If Dee is - if she’s under the impression that she’s on these medications, and undergoes therapy in tandem, I think we could get her to do exactly that. She would probably look up the side effects at the library or something, and maybe imagine that the sedative and amnesic properties were taking hold, in effect talking herself out of it without actually subjecting herself to the potentially harmful side effects.”
“Are you - I mean - lemme get this straight, Doc. Are you trying to get me to hypnotize my daughter?”
“No, not hypnosis. Well, not in the Hollywood sense, anyway. No dangling pocket-watches or ‘you’re getting sleepy’ nonsense. However, we would in a sense be trying to use the power of suggestion on her. The way I conceive of it is this: we’re giving her another, better fantasy to counteract the one she’s got, and it will eventually be indistinguishable from reality.”
“And when she’s old enough, well, then we can spill the beans. Right?”
“Ideally, yes. That’s the hope. We just want to get her, as you said, to talk herself out of this fantasy until she’s old enough to grow out of it on her own.”
“And when would that be?”
“I can’t say for sure. This isn’t a hard science, exactly. I don’t even know if it will work, to be honest, but I think it’s worth a shot, and I think it would be the safest option to try at first. What do you think?”
“I think - I need to sleep on this.”
“I understand. Take as much time as you need. If, as you say, just talking to me is calming her down at home, then maybe we won’t even need to go that far.”
“Yeah, hopefully.”
“Same time next week, then?”
“Sure, sounds good.”
“OK, let’s go tell Carrie up front.” The two men stood and left the room.
“Jesus Christ,” Dee said, staring at the TV. “What the fuck?”
“My God,” said Sam, equally in shock. “I mean, I’ve - everyone knows about the placebo effect, but this - this is just - how on Earth could they -?”
The women stared, numb, as the next session played on tape. The story, as best they were able to reconstruct it from the other tapes and various documents, was that Tracy had moved back in and things went back to normal for a bit. Then Dee started to backslide, culminating in the pipe-bomb-at-the-library incident, and Tracy walked out again, this time for good. So Tom started going along with Doctor Dan’s recommendation for suggestive therapy, and it worked. Little Dee fell for it, hook, line, and sinker. She talked herself into forgetting everything she had known from her previous life. When Tom moved, he had to take legal action to get the records released, but he got copies of all the hospital records and court transcripts so he could hold on to them. Dan, for his part, downplayed the extent of Dee’s condition to another doctor in Illinois, and her therapy continued uninterrupted. Eventually, when Tom felt she had a handle on things, the talk therapy went away altogether - but this was after numerous backslides during gradeschool due to a not-entirely-smooth transition between therapists.
Tom saw how well Dee was doing scholastically and socially, and didn’t want to rock the boat with the news until after Dee had graduated college. He didn’t even tell Linda. While Dee lived under his roof, he handled all the prescription pick-ups, then handled the legal forms regarding the placebo medication when she left for college.
Dee was floored. It was too much at once for her to feel anger, sadness, frustration, anything but utter shock. Sam, too, was bewildered beyond words. They watched and read in silence, eyes wide, mouths shut.
As darkness fell, Dee rubbed her eyes and finally spoke.
“Well, I think we’ve seen enough.”
“Um. Yeah. I think so.”
“Then I guess we go to California?”
“I guess so.”

Rendezvous: Chapter 17

Numbness hung thick in the air, a cloud above the crowd of people. For long minutes, they stood together, silent in contemplation. Some of them, individually, had broken down over the course of their stay, but the majority of them had held strong. Now, they were all starting to lose it. It was just too much. Too much to comprehend. Too much to handle. Too much to sort out. Just too much.
Dee was lost in her own reflections. Even if they managed to die of cancer or old age, they were still probably doomed as a species. If her guess was right, the parasite worked microscopically in the same way that the zombies worked macroscopically: surround and overwhelm. It was the only way she could make sense of the fact that the parasite could grow on stone, yet seemed able to infect only from the lungs or the stomach, apparently unable to penetrate unbroken skin (though, to be fair, she had never actually seen a person turn due to an infected wound). The way Dee figured it, more air and fluid passed through the human body than went around it, so that was probably the only way the parasite could get a foothold against the onslaught from the human immune system - but she was with adults right now, whose immune systems had been tempered by years of struggle against viruses, bacteria, and fungi of varying strains and strengths.
Newborns were not nearly so well-armed.
"Well," Seamus said, after minutes of silence, "As fun as this is, I'm gonna get back to work." The crowd dispersed into smaller groups at that point, going about their daily tasks as with weights upon their shoulders.
Days later, Shep had showed no variation in his speech or behavior. The vegetables who had had the parasite removed showed no change in their condition. The survivors experienced no improvement in their mood.
Dee was on watch detail one night when Jack came up to the roof.
"What's up," she asked as he approached and sat down on the rooftop next to her.
"Hey. Can I bum a clove?"
"Sure. Free to all. Didn't cost me a dime."
"Yeah, that's right. Thanks." He took a cigarette and her Zippo and lit up. She did the same a moment later.
"That it, then?"
"No. I've been thinking lately, and, well, I'm back to my plan to kill myself."
"You've thought it over?"
"Yeah."
"And you're sure?"
"As I'll ever be."
"Well, then. I don't tell you how to live, I won't tell you how to die. Heh. I hope it's everything you expect."
"Ha. Yeah, so do I."
They smoked in silence for a while. Dee eventually spoke up again.
"I think I'm gonna head out soon."
"You plan on hitting the hospital?"
"No, I mean for good. This is - well, shit, no sense in sugar-coating it to you. It's pointless. I just want to go somewhere else, do something else."
"Just travel until you die?"
"I don't know. Maybe. I want to stop by my parents' place in Wisconsin, see if I can find out what happened to them. After that, well - I guess I'll see where things go from there."
"Yeah. Well, have a good trip."
"Heh, I'll try, thanks."
Another long moment passed before Dee asked Jack when he planned to do himself in.
"Oh, I dunno. Maybe I'll watch the next sunrise. I was hoping to read more books, but really, every day that goes by just gets me more depressed. There's just - well, no point, like you said. I thought about traveling, too, but I didn't want to have to worry about zombies everywhere I try to sleep. I'd rather kill myself than be one of them, but on the road, I might not get the chance."
"Yeah. Good call, I guess. Do you know how you're gonna do it yet?"
"Well, I wanted to jump from the top of a really tall building. I've always wanted to know what that would feel like. But I can't think of any that I could safely get to, and I don't want to risk surviving the fall from here and becoming zombie food. I'm probably gonna shoot myself in the head."
"Y'know, if you want, I could drive you to a radio tower in town or something."
"Nah, I'd be too worried about you not making it back."
"No, I'll do it when I'm leaving town. No worries."
"Really? When are you leaving?"
"Dunno. I've been thinking about it all day, but I haven't talked to Rosie yet. I guess it all depends on her."
"Well, yeah, if you're gonna leave in a couple days or so, let me know." After a moment, he added, "You know, you're really fuckin' bad at suicide prevention." Dee shrugged her shoulders and took a drag.
"I figure that part of being human is being able to determine the course of your own life. If you can't do that, you may as well determine your death, right? I think a lot of suicides are stupid people who can't see past their invented problems, but this is a different story. I actually see you as trying to claim some of your humanity with this."
"Yeah, that's kind of what I was thinking, too. I mean, not exactly like that, I was mainly thinking that this was really the only statement I could make. I'm not gonna wait for something to kill me, I'm taking matters into my own hands, you know?"
"Yeah. Yeah, I know. I've given it some thought, myself."
"Huh. Never would've pegged you for it. Well, then." Jack stubbed out his cigarette, stood, and dusted off his pants. "I'm gonna walk around for a while. Let me know after you talk to Sam."
"Sure thing. Actually, can you grab watch for a sec? I'll go ask her now."
"Of course. See you in a bit."
Dee descended the rope ladder and found Sam cleaning the zombie pens. She was the most interested in what the currently- and formerly-infected could tell them, and so took it upon herself to do the most maintenance work. She found it relaxing, despite the constant nearby moaning. It inured her to the far-off moaning of the zombies outside as she tried to sleep, and so she took it in stride. She raised her head as she heard Dee approach.
"Hey, Rosie."
"Hey, sweetie. What's shakin'?"
Dee looked around before answering. "I'm thinking of clearing out. But only if you come with. What do you say?"
"Just - taking off? For good?"
"Yeah."
"Shit, I thought you'd never ask."
"Huh. Really?"
"Yeah. I mean, you got your whole zombie-survivor-fortress thing going here, I didn't think you'd want to walk away from it. And I sure as Hell didn't want to leave you, but - well, shit. This sucks. Here. I mean, it probably sucks everywhere, but I need a change of scenery, y'know?"
"Well, you wanna take off tonight, then?"
"Shit yeah! Let's fuckin' blow this joint!" Sam jumped to her feet and put away the tools she was using. "Night-time escape into the great unknown! I'm all for it!"
"All right, then. Let's say our goodbyes."
They went to find Seamus first. He was reading in the hammock he'd set up as a bed.
"You two look like you're up to something," he said, looking up from his book.
"Yeah," Dee said. "We're gonna leave."
"Hm. I've been thinking about that, myself. So you're just going to run around until you die or something?"
"Yeah. That, or until we decide we'd rather do something else. We figure, this really can't go on forever. I mean, we've made our stand, but even if we tried to restart civilization, I don't think any babies we have would really have immune systems strong enough to fight off the parasite. And besides, what the Hell kind of world is this to raise kids in, anyway?"
"I was kind of thinking the same thing. Didn't wanna say anything, though. I didn't think it would help."
"Yeah," Sam agreed.
"Anyway, we're taking off after we say goodbye to everyone. You might wanna go up to the roof and say goodbye to Jack, too. He's planning on killing himself at sunrise."
"Huh. Poetic. Hella timing, too."
"Why'zat," Dee asked.
"Well," Seamus said, looking at his watch, "In about twenty minutes, it's gonna be the Fourth of July."
"Oh. That's neat." Dee nodded her head in solemn contemplation. A statment, indeed. "I hadn't been keeping track."
Seamus headed up to the roof, and the girls made their rounds. The others were fairly unsurprised to hear of their departure; most expressed the desire to leave themselves, but simply hadn't worked up the gumption, while others reflected that others would probably start following suit. Bill said he was going to try to stick it out to the bitter end, but he wished them well on their journey. Then they returned to the roof to find Seamus having a last cigarette with Jack.
"He tell you when we're heading out," Dee asked.
"Yeah," Jack replied. "He said you were going tonight. He also told me that it just now turned July Fourth. I actually think that's kind of cheesy, but just a coincidence. Not like I planned it or anything."
"Heh, right. Well, it's basically up to you, now. You wanna wait for sunrise, or you wanna watch it from the tower?"
"Yeah, a radio tower sounds good. Let's wait a few hours. I'd like to watch it from the top, but I don't want to have to wait too long."
"Sure thing. It'll take you a while to climb it, though."
"Yeah, I figured that."
About four AM, the three of them headed out in the black truck, loaded with some tools, water and a few days' food. Jack rode in the bed, the wind running through his hair. They arrived at a radio tower in the center of town, and broke through the fence surrounding it. Jack was dropped off at its base, and when he started going up the ladder, he turned to say goodbye.
"Have a good life, you two."
"Have a good death, Jack," Dee responded. "We'll miss you."
"Yeah. I miss living. I have for a while now."
"I know what you mean," Sam called from the cab. The zombies were getting nearer the truck.
"Love to stay and watch," Dee said, "But I don't think Zed's gonna tolerate our presence too much longer. I don't wanna get caught in the mob. I hope your climb goes well!"
"Thanks. So do I." He started climbing as Dee pulled the truck around to leave the fenced enclosure surrounding the tower. "Hey," he shouted after them. The truck stopped. "If there just so happens to be an afterlife, I'm giving God a piece of my mind, and then I'm gonna track you two down. So, uhh, don't do anything stupid and wind up in the wrong monotheistic afterlife region, OK?"
"Sure thing," Dee shouted back with a laugh. "We'll look for you, too. Don't be a stranger!"
"Right!" With that, Jack resumed his climb up the ladder, and the truck drove off into the distance.
Jack August realized during his climb that radio towers are a lot taller than they seem when you look at them from a ways off. He had to stop a couple times, despite the fact that he was in the best shape of his life due to the fitness regimen of the past few weeks. Once at the top, he stepped off onto the grate and braced himself against the railing surrounding the walkway. Jesus, but it was windy up here. He could see for a long damn way, too.
After a few minutes, the sky began to grow pale in the East. Jack took in every minute of it, savoring the colors as they developed, relishing the feel of the wind against his body, the sensation of freedom this high up, even enjoying the dizziness he knew he was feeling for the last time. The Sun burst over the horizon, bathing the land beneath him in light and warmth. Jack closed his eyes and concentrated on the feeling on his skin. He waited a few moments to mentally prepare himself one last time.
Finally, the Sun fully over the horizon, Jack figured it was time. He maneuvered himself carefully around the railing, not wanting to hit the tower all the way down, and was almost overcome by vertigo as the empty space beneath him threatened to swallow him up before he was ready. He smiled, shook out his shoulders as best he could while holding onto the railing, then jumped away from the tower with all his strength.
His eyes were open the whole way down.
The drive North was quiet, serene. The women took a route that went almost straight up into Wisconsin, bypassing Chicago and the suburbs, where there were likely to be tangled knots of traffic. Dee and Sam didn't see a single moving vehicle the whole way up. The two towns they passed through on the way showed no signs of life, only the dispersed zombies. With no reason to travel slowly, Dee kept the truck at a steady eighty-five. As they got further from each town, they noticed that the zombies thinned out in the rural areas.
At some point, Sam noticed a blackened crater off to their left, in the middle of an open field. She pointed it out to Dee, who had been keeping her eyes on the road the whole time.
"Huh. What do you suppose that is?"
"Dunno," Sam answered. "You wanna go check it out?"
"Hmm." Dee considered this for a moment as she took her foot off the gas. "Sure, why not? Zed's pretty thin out here." She slowed the truck to twenty and took it off the road, looping back around to the crater. Pulling up to the mess, they saw a piled wreckage of something in the middle, with scraps of whatever it was scattered about. The closest zombies were a hundred yards off, so they got out of the truck.
"Shit. What do you make of it," Sam asked.
"Dunno," Dee said, poking at bits with her crowbar. She looked around, then up at the sky. Sam wandered about the crater, examining the shrapnel. Dee resumed prodding at the mess in the center. "Holy shit."
"What is it?" Sam turned to what Dee was looking at, a chunk of something embedded in the ground. It looked vaguely grid-like, but whatever impact there had been had severely warped it. Dee's crowbar was pushing chunks of blackened stuff around which made a tinkling noise, like glass.
"These bits - they're ceramic. I think - I think this might be part of a solar panel. There's not much of it left, but - son of a bitch, I think this might be a satellite."
"Get outta town. Wouldn't a satellite vaporize before it hit the ground?"
"Mostly, maybe. Eh, probably. But not if it was big enough. Especially the ceramics and whatnot. I don't know how they're constructed, really, whether it's to burn off during reentry or to survive it, but - yeah, I can't think of what else this might be."
"Aren't most satellites around the equator, though? How would it get this far North, do you think?"
"Well," Dee mused, "If something else bumped it, then it could have fallen out of orbit. If it was just winged, it could have wound up pretty much anywhere. But - I don't know. Maybe I'm just making this up. But I think that whatever bombed all the power stations, whatever delivered the parasite, I think it did this, too." Sam paused to think for a few moments before responding.
"So, if aliens are attacking, then where are they?"
"Probably waiting for us all to die off."
"I dunno. I mean, I can't think of anything else, but - Jesus, it just seems so far-fetched. You really think whatever did this - you think it came from space?"
"I can't think of anything else, at the moment. And - well, I mean - dammit, I don't know if I'm losing it or what. But it seems right. I can't get my head around it."
The zombies were getting within a few dozen feet of them now, so they got back in the truck and headed off. The rest of the drive passed fairly uneventfully.
Tom Morrigan lived with his second wife, Linda, in a fairly rural town close to the Illinois-Wisconsin border. They had moved there after Tom's entire department at the University of Chicago had been axed due to budget cuts. Until the blackout, he had worked in instructional design for a motor company who happened to need almost exactly the skills he had used years before at Yamaha, and his experience with the university's media department was beyond reproach. The only other applicant was a quarter-century Tom's junior, and had a fancy degree or two that Tom lacked, but was a bit "modern" for the company's traditional tastes. On his new salary, he and Linda were able to make a down payment on a house that was nearly twice the size of their old residence in the Chicago suburbs. As Dee pulled up into the driveway, she realized that she could probably count the number of times she had been there on one hand - just holidays, which she alternated between here and Sam's parents, who still lived near Chicago. The two of them had agreed that the city meant certain death, and if they decided to go in there, it would be their last stop.
Zed had only a token presence in town, with most of the zombies spread out among the fungus-ridden fields. Dee saw that all the windows of the house were boarded and assumed that the doors would be barricaded, too. She tried to stop herself from hoping that her parents were alive. She went around to the West side of the house to climb the antenna tower to the second-story window - those on the front had not been boarded up, and she guessed that they wouldn't be in back, either. Keeping her center of gravity close to her, she advised Sam to do the same.
"Y'know, Rosie," Dee said, reaching her leg out to the roof below the window she planned to enter, "I told my dad when I helped him move in that this house wasn't ninja-proof. All it takes is one asshole to climb this antenna tower - or, as I call it, a 'ladder' - and bam, all your samurai are dead."
"Whatever," Sam said, laughing. "It doesn't matter whether your house is ninja-proof or not. What you need to worry about are the pirates, and there's no proofing against them."
"What about cowboys?"
"No, dammit! The Pirate-Ninja-Cowboy pantheon is a hierarchy, not a triangle like Rock-Paper-Scissors. We've been over this before."
"Sure, sure." Dee tried a window; locked. She forced it up with her crowbar, not wanting to deal with broken glass.
Inside, things smelled awful. The air was still and stagnant, and Dee abandoned both worries about squatters, and hope for her parents. This was the smell of death. She went immediately across the landing at the top of the stairs to their bedroom and stared in shock at the scene before her.
Sam joined her shortly, and immediately reached for Dee's hand at the sight of Tom and Linda, dead in each other's arms in bed. At Sam's touch, Dee began to tremble, and then broke into sobs as she fell to her knees.
"They were - fucking - shit! They were safe! They could have held out! What the fuck?!" Tears streamed from her eyes, and her shoulders heaved as Sam began to weep with her, arms around her lover. "God-fucking-dammit! Why couldn't they - wait, or go somewhere, do fucking something - anything! Why this? Why like this?!"
"I don't know, honey. I don't know. But - they were good people, OK? Just - just let it all out. It's - it's not OK, I know, but - but that's OK. They lived their lives, they saw you grow up, and they made their decision."
"But I - son of a bitch! I never - I wanted to say goodbye! Why didn't they say goodbye?!"
"I don't know, baby."
"What the fuck?! This - this isn't - fucking - it's not -" Dee just shouted into the air, unable to finish the thought.
"I don't know, baby. But I know Tom, and I know Linda. They were good people, and you know that. They knew what they were doing. Whatever they did, there was a reason, OK? And - I mean, maybe - maybe if we look around, we can find something, OK?"
Dee moved from her knees to a sitting position, leaned against the door. She and Sam cried together for a few minutes, and then Dee started trying to compose herself. After a couple false starts, they held each other for a while, and then got to their feet together.
"You're - you're probably right. They probably did something, left something behind. You're right. We should look around." Wiping at her eyes, she made for the stairway. She used her Zippo to look around downstairs - there wasn't much light that got in around the boarded windows, but she found a flashlight in the basement and started looking around. The generator was hooked up, but other than that, the house looked normal, and Dee couldn't find anything out of place or looking even vaguely clue-like.
Back upstairs, she found the empty tequila and beer bottles that she presumed Tom and Linda drank before heading to bed for the last time. She hoped that the liquor wasn't what brought them to do it - then crushed the thought, for the scene showed far too many signs of premeditation. They were in each other's arms, in bed, the bottle of sleeping pills on the nightstand, and - shit, she hadn't noticed it at the time, but the remote had been on the nightstand. They usually kept it next to the TV itself. She went back into their bedroom, Sam right behind her, and crossed the room to get to the other side of the bed.
Dee nearly tripped over the box of videotapes. Most of them were dated from when she had lived in California, and beneath them were stacks of paper and various black binders.
On the nightstand, on top of the alarm clock, was a note written in Tom's inimitable scrawl. It took some concentration, but Dee was eventually able to decipher it. It was short and to the point:
Dee -
We're so sorry, honey.
You were right.
Love, Dad and Linda

Rendezvous: Chapter 16

Chapter 16
A group meeting quickly assembled to discuss this new development. Those who hadn’t heard the zombie speaking in his cage were given the chance to listen with their own ears. After the facts of the matter were laid out, a heated discussion ensued regarding the ethics of the situation.
“If the infected people are still aware enough to speak,” Hank began, “I think it’s not too far of a stretch to imagine that they’re still aware of the world, if only dimly.”
“That’s always been the case,” Seamus said matter-of-factly. “In order to find and capture their prey, the zombies have to be somewhat aware. I don’t see how this changes anything.”
“Well, typically,” Cameron began, “Hollywood zombies have always been the walking dead. These, as we have seen, are more like the ‘nzumbe’ from the voudoun traditions. They’re still alive, not reanimated corpses.”
“Precisely,” Hank said. “And because of that, I think it’s safe to say that whatever the parasite does, it changes the person, and doesn’t replace or remove them. What I mean is that it’s still the person in there, and not a zombie in the philosophical sense.”
“So you’re saying souls exist,” Dee scoffed.
“No,” Hank replied, “I’m saying that, if Shep here - I’m gonna start calling him Shep - if Shep got infected, Shep is still in there. Changed radically, yes, but still a person and not just a meat puppet.”
“I still don’t see why this puts them on a par with us, morally speaking.” Seamus’ arms were folded across his chest.
“I’m saying that we don’t know enough,” Hank said, running his hands through his hair.
“We’ll never know enough, Hank,” Dee said. “We can’t. This is just the reverse of the philosophical zombie problem. Instead of wondering whether those who act like us also have first-person experiences the way we do, we’re just trying to work out whether those who look like they might not be like us still have the first-person experiences they probably used to have.”
“Exactly,” Seamus continued. “And since this is a matter of life and - well, whatever you want to call it, in thrall to the parasite - since that’s what’s at stake and they’re the aggressors, I say this puts us in the clear for putting them out of their misery.”
“How do you know they’re miserable,” Hank asked.
“Fucking whatever,” Seamus replied. “Bad word choice. I don’t care. If these guys are going to try to make me like them, I don’t want them to, and if they can’t be reasoned with, then I’m going to use force.”
“Why not just coexist?” Hank was getting animated now. “We can keep them at bay indefinitely, it seems. Why not just live and let live?”
“For one thing,” Dee responded, “I think letting the winter cold get to them is much less humane than shooting them in the head.”
“We don’t shoot them in the head most of the time,” Mary spoke up. “We bleach them. We burn them. Sometimes we beat them. Hypothermia and frostbite don’t sound so bad next to those, given their unusually high tolerance for pain.”
“Look, this is all beside the point,” Seamus said. “The way I see it, this parasite is a threat, and we’re dealing with it the only way we can.”
“No, we’re not,” Hank countered. “We rarely deal with the parasite directly, and even then only to stop it encroaching on our territory. Most of our efforts are concentrated on the human hosts. You don’t cure a cold by killing everybody who’s got one.”
Seamus sighed in frustration. “Look, even if you want to argue that these people are merely sick, but still fundamentally persons with moral worth, that doesn’t excuse the fact that they’re attacking us. Either they don’t have moral worth and it’s OK to kill them, or they do have moral worth and thus moral responsibility, and we’re justified in defending ourselves.”
“I think that’s a false dilemma,” Hank said after a moment’s consideration. “They could simply be mad - not in control of their actions, unable to take responsibility, but still possessing moral worth. I mean, come on, ‘Find them, get them, make them like me?’ Does that sound like something a person would say?”
“No,” Cameron chimed in. “It sounds like what a zombie would say if you gave it a voice.”
“Just what I was thinking,” Seamus said. “And since there’s no way to reverse the infection, at least not at this point, then I don’t really see the point in altering our current course of action.”
“I think this is a reason to look harder for a cure, actually,” Hank replied. “If we stop killing the zombies whenever they’re not an immediate threat, that’s more people we can potentially save.”
“I disagree,” Dee said. “The damage done to the brain is, as far as we can tell, irreparable. We’ve been able to stave off infection so far, and might be able to do it indefinitely, but I think it’s overwhelmingly probable that there’s no way to cure it.”
“I’m with Dee and Seamus on this one,” Sam said. “I mean, maybe with fifty more years of neurological research and state-of-the-art equipment, we might be able to develop some kind of therapy program. But the way things are now, even if some kind of cure is logically possible, it’s definitely beyond our reach. We have neither the knowledge nor the means to work on these brain problems.”
“I don’t think we should give up so easily,” Mary said. “I mean, the human mind is a pretty malleable thing, right? What if it just takes time for the damage to heal?”
Others started voicing agreement that if the hosts of the parasite were indeed still “human” in any way, then every reasonable effort should be taken to save them.
“Hold up a second,” Sam said, quieting the crowd. “Look, the human brain is not some sacrosanct magical thing, like some of you seem to believe. It’s actually very like a machine - an extraordinarily sophisticated machine, but a machine nonetheless. Has anyone ever heard of Phineas Gage?” Dee, Seamus, and Cameron had all heard the story from Sam, but half-heartedly raised their hands anyway. Nobody else did. “He’s the subject of one of the first and also most fascinating case studies in mind-related fields of study.
“Phineas Gage was a railroad worker. He was described by his coworkers and superiors as conscientious, responsible, even-tempered, an all-around stand-up guy. But one day, there was an accident, and a metal rod was driven into his head by an explosion. He recovered, but was never quite the same. After the accident, he became irritable, irresponsible, and lazy. He had to be fired. His friends said that he had changed, that he was hardly recognizable as the person he once was. His skull was kept in a museum or something, and years later, doctors examined it and found that the areas of the brain that the metal rod had passed through were those that had been found in other studies to be responsible for decision-making processes and mood regulation. The change to his brain had changed him.
“There are other cases where it’s been shown that the brain functions very mechanically. There’s a condition known as ‘pain asymbolia,’ which can be brought about deliberately and is sometimes used to treat patients in chronic pain that can’t be easily medicated or otherwise alleviated. Those who undergo this process just about universally describe the sensation in the same way: they say that the pain is the same, but they feel much better after their operation.
“Then there’s Capgras’ syndrome,” she continued, the crowd remaining attentive to her lecture. “This is where victims of head trauma have suffered a disconnection between the visual and emotional centers of the brain. What happens is that they will be able to recognize the face of a close friend or loved one, but since the connection to the limbic system has been lost, they don’t get the emotional reaction to the sight of the face, and they end up believing that the friend or loved one has been replaced by a doppelganger. People who have this condition can have the syndrome described and explained to them, and can listen to and understand all kinds of compelling arguments meant to convince them otherwise, but they are consistently unable to change their minds about the matter. The feeling that the other person is an impostor is so overwhelmingly compelling that they simply cannot be talked out of it.
“The point of all this,” Sam concluded with a sigh, “Is that the brain, while incredibly complex, is still a kind of machine that is ultimately beyond our control or understanding - at least at this point in time. If this parasite warps the minds of its hosts so that they’re driven by this single-minded urge to turn others, and reduces them to vegetables when it’s removed, then it’s more than likely the case that the changes it causes are not chemically induced - in which case the removal of the chemicals from the host’s system would probably cure the condition - but physical in nature, and cannot be fixed.”
The crowd was silent for a while, trying to comprehend what had just been laid before them. It was a lot to swallow. Many of them believed in the soul or something like it, and if asked, would have probably said that they thought a person’s personality - or however you want to describe what makes a person who they are - was a mysterious something-or-other that could only be described in quasi-mystical terms and oversaw the operation of the brain as a human oversees the operation of a computer. While not entirely familiar with the ins and outs of every causal event going on within the mysterious box, the “user” was, so they assumed, somehow able in principle to overcome any difficulties arising from “the machinery.” Except for Dee, Sam, Seamus, and Cameron, most of them were entirely unfamiliar with the myriad arguments and studies from the fields of philosophy, psychology, and neurology which seemed to lead to the inevitable conclusion that “the mind” is simply what the brain does. The idea that changes to people’s brains would result in fundamental changes to those people themselves was a foreign idea to which many of them were highly resistant.
“Look,” Dee said at last, “I know this is some heavy shit, OK? The fact that the hosts are able to articulate their state of mind, such as it is, is scientifically fascinating but emotionally disturbing. It puts a face on them that makes it harder to regard them as enemies, I know. But they’re still zombies, in a conventional, ‘close enough to count’ sense. They’re not exactly like Hollywood zombies, but few things are depicted in Hollywood with the same degree of complexity they have in real life. Just like Seamus said at the start of this conversation, this doesn’t change anything. The people out there in the parking lot are simply not the people they were before infection, and as far as we can tell, they live to turn us. From what we’ve seen of them, they don’t show any signs of what we would call a human way of life. For all intents and purposes, they are not human.”
“Dee, listen to me,” Hank said. “What you’re saying right now - and I’m not just saying this to play Devil’s advocate - but it sounds a lot like the ‘othering’ that goes on in any armed conflict. My concern is that we’re dehumanizing the infected unnecessarily.”
“And what if that worry is groundless,” Seamus asked.
“Well - look, I’m not going to lie. Staking our ethics on one course of action and then being wrong is going to be awful, either way. We could turn out to be mass-murdering innocent people, or we could wind up like them and be left to a truly miserable and inhuman fate. I don’t know.”
“How much information do you need to answer that question?” Seamus was pressing the attack now. “How much do you need to know to settle the issue in your mind?”
“I don’t know.”
“And what’s getting in the way of that? What can you find out to help you figure out what questions need to be answered, so we have an idea of the problem we’re solving?”
“I - I don’t know.”
“Then why should we change our course of action? This is surely cause to pause for thought, but we’ve all done that, and then some. And it will surely come up in the future. But can you really recommend any other course of action to us, with so much unknown?”
“Now, hold on - that’s all very pragmatic, but what I’m concerned with here is what’s right, morally speaking.”
“I’m concerned with staying alive,” Seamus said, eyes narrowed.
“But at what cost?” Hank’s arms were spread wide. “Is it really worth it to survive like this? Is this really how we want to live?”
“No,” Dee interjected. “I don’t think any of us prefer living like this. But we can’t go back to how things were, and like Seamus, I plan to cling to this mortal coil for as long as I can. If some morally hairy issues crop up, that’s a pity, but I don’t plan on letting them get in my way.” Sam stepped close to Dee and took her arm. Despite the resolute stoicism that Dee and Seamus were unapologetically displaying, the crowd was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the concerns that Hank was raising - concerns which they all shared.
At Sam’s touch, Dee became aware of her own agitated state. Her heart rate had elevated considerably, and she felt a cold sensation in the pit of her stomach. This, she thought, was the immensity that had been approaching in her dreams these past weeks: the horrifying, implacable, inevitable futility of it all. Hank’s words stuck in her head - Is it really worth it to survive like this? Some things, she had reasoned before the blackout, were not worth surviving - even if you made it through physically intact, the emotional toll could, in principle, be too great to justify a continued existence. Was this one of those situations? Were they really “surviving” the zombie apocalypse, or were they simply succumbing to a slower death from the inside out? She knew how to stay alive - that was the easy question - but what was the right way to go about things in a world gone wrong?
All this passed through her head in a flash, an intuitive realization that washed over her like a wave. Her words had silenced the crowd temporarily, and before anyone could think of anything to say in response, she said under her breath, “This is the way the world ends.”
Jack finished the line, his voice solemn: “Not with a bang, but a whimper.”

Rendezvous: Chapter 15

Weeks passed.
Working together, the group was able to jury-rig crude electrical and plumbing systems for the building. It wasn’t ideal, but it worked, and that was the point. The zombies returned, but the fortifications held strong. It appeared that the zombies would revert from “attack” to “shamble” in six to eight hours, provided that nothing came up to renew their interest.
Fitness and learning programs were quickly instituted to keep the group occupied and in shape. There was a dojo, a track, a weight program, an armory, and a library - sections of the store arbitrarily labeled to give a sense of order. Those who chose to take initiative were able to impart their knowledge and skills to others, and the group’s mood and survivability began improving in tandem.
Morale dropped as it was discovered that antibiotics only had temporary effects upon the parasite. Within days, the experimental groups showed growth as rapid as the controls. All the other over-the-counter medications found in the store were similarly ineffective. Alcohol did nothing, except in concentrations that would also be lethal inside the human body. Aside from the bleach bomb (a water balloon filled with a 10% bleach solution), nothing worked against the zombies that wouldn't also kill humans.
There seemed to be no way to reverse the infection once it had taken root, either. After constructing a cage, several zombies were captured in succession to try to undo whatever it was the parasite did. Every subject showed the same results: if the method of removing the parasite was not itself lethal, the host was left brain-dead, exactly as Cameron had guessed. They wouldn't eat on their own, they wouldn't swallow on their own, they would soil themselves periodically, and they had no response to any stimulus except for intense pain. The subjects who survived the removal of the parasite were kept alive for long-term observation, in the hope that they might show some kind of improvement.
The rooftop garden began to grow black fungus within days. They tried burning it off, which worked, but once the first sprouts came up, there seemed to be no way to get rid of the parasite without also destroying their food. Still, they waited for the plants to grow - with any luck, the parasite was around but not inside the plants, and maybe they could cook it off or neutralize it chemically before eating it. Canning and jarring would be a different matter entirely, though.
In mid-June, the tomatoes were ready. There seemed to be no interference from the fungus - it was everywhere, but it didn't choke out the other plants. Dee had been keeping a close eye on their growth, and the tomatoes were first to come up. She didn't know what to make of it; to all appearances, the tomatoes were ripe and healthy. Dee pulled one from the vine, and cursed as the outer part of the fruit came away, revealing a thick black root ball where the core of the tomato should have been.
“What’s the matter,” Kevin asked, walking over from his post on the rooftop.
“Fucking look!” Kevin observed the tangled, hair-like roots growing where he was fairly certain a tomato ought to be. Seeing the lump of tomato in Dee’s hand, he took it from her and inspected it.
“Well, it looks like this part’s fine.”
“Still probably contaminated, though.”
“Yeah, well, if you fry or boil it, it should be OK.” Dee grumbled and took a couple deep breaths.
“You’re probably right. Still - this shit is everywhere. I mean, even if that works, we’ll only be able to eat tomatoes, peppers, and other things where the core’s separate. Pumpkins, apples and oranges, carrots, potatoes - it’s gonna be all the way through those things.” She stooped down to take a closer look at the black roots. “What the fuck,” she spat more than asked.
“I guess we’ll just have to do what we can. Maybe we can grow some vegetables hydroponically during the winter.”
“Maybe. Maybe. I doubt it, though. If this thing can survive as a lichen, and the spores are in the air, it could stick around.”
“At least the zombies won’t be able to survive the snow.”
“That’s true.” No matter how much discomfort Zed was able to ignore, water in the host cells would crystallize and burst the cell walls, causing frostbite and thus tissue death. Since the parasite needed a host that was alive, if only barely, there was no way the zombies could hold out during the winter without migrating, and they probably couldn’t do that fast enough, anyway.
Dee gathered everyone up on the roof to share the news.
“So what now,” Seamus asked after she was done.
“Well, we ought to do the universal edibility test,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“You gradually introduce the substance to your body a little bit at a time to see if anything bad happens. If not, then it’s OK to eat. I think it goes, ‘rub some on the forearm, wait eight hours; rub some on the neck, wait eight hours; touch your tongue to it, wait eight hours; eat a nibble, wait twenty-four hours; eat a handful, wait twenty-four hours.’ If you feel fine, aside from the hunger, then it’s probably OK to eat. I might be wrong on the time intervals, though; I haven’t read up lately.”
“Why are we even bothering with that,” Cameron asked. “If we can’t grow food, then we’re doomed anyway. What’s the point in seeing if the only thing we can do is safe, if it’s the only thing we can do?”
“Well,” Kevin said, “I think if we can’t grow food in the open, we should build clean rooms and grow it hydroponically.”
“Oh.” Cameron shrugged. “Pain in the ass, but I guess that would work.”
“Exactly,” Dee said. “So - any volunteers?”
Dee, Jill, Sam, Kevin, and three of the Wal-Mart employees all volunteered. After deciding that they could only spare three people, they drew straws to see who would participate - Jill, Kevin, and Jim got the short straws. They would spend most of the time in their own individual cages, and would only be let out under supervision in order to cook their food or use the bathroom. For the first test, they would boil the tomatoes. Three days later, none of them had turned, so Dee, Sam, and Cameron decided to try them fried; again, it looked safe. Next, the first group cooked them in brandy, and once again, there were no adverse effects. The group began to dine on stews and soups, saving their canned and jarred goods for the winter.
The main problem with surviving a zombie apocalypse, it turned out, is that it takes a long time and is very boring. It's dangerous to go anywhere or do anything, and living strictly for survival loses its rustic charm rather rapidly. The activities that had been set up to keep everyone occupied, as well as all the chores that needed to be done, ensured that cabin fever would not set in; however, the situation took its toll just the same.
The parasite eventually covered the walls. They decided that it was a waste of bleach to keep pouring it down the walls when the lichen would just grow back up anyway, so they restricted themselves to keeping the roof and the store's interior clean. All wounds that broke the skin were doused in alcohol, bandaged with alcohol-soaked dressings, and checked daily for signs of infection. Everyone smoked at least one cigarette a day, and drank at least one shot of hard liquor a night. Plans were not made to raid the surrounding grocery stores for their canned and jarred goods - that could wait until winter, and was an unnecessary risk. However, the hospitals were a different story. Every couple of days, items were added to or subtracted from the "shopping list," and the plan was refined. Coming up with it was no small problem, but they decided to take their time and plan for as many contingencies as they could, and also give themselves time to prepare their bodies and minds for the trip.
For her part, Dee was able to keep her act together - but her thoughts were a different story. Every day, it seemed, she was creating new false memories for herself, inventing subtle details or filling in explanations that she could not possibly know, and it was becoming increasingly difficult for her to separate what she had actually experienced from her flights of fancy. Her dreams were becoming more specific, more focused, and increasingly disturbing. With effort, though, she was able to hide her problems from everyone else. Tending the garden kept her grounded in reality, distracted her from her delusions, and was relaxing to boot.
One rainy day, Dee was smoking on the roof, watching Zed through binoculars from under an umbrella. Cameron's voice squawked over the walkie-talkie from downstairs.
"Dee, you there?"
"Uh, yeah. What's up?"
"You, umm - you really ought to come take a look at this."
"Why? What happened?"
"One of the zombies we captured is talking."
"I'll be down in a few minutes."
"OK. Umm - hurry."
"What, has he got a train to catch or something? I'm on my way." She stood up and headed down the rope ladder to the shipping area where they kept the zombie pens, still smoking. "So what have we got here?"
"Just listen for a sec," Cameron said. Almost everyone was crowded around the cage, the solitary zombie inside struggling in vain to get at them. His moaning was inarticulate at first, but the more Dee listened to him, the more it sounded like speech. He was repeating the same set of monosyllabic grunts:
"Fuhh - umm - guhh - umm -"
"What are we supposed to be hearing here," Dee asked.
"Just listen a sec," Cameron said.
"Muhh - umm - luhh - muhh."
Dee kept listening. There was definitely a pattern to his grunts.
"Fuhh umm - guhh umm - muhh umm - luhh muhh."
And then again:
"Fuhh umm - guhh umm - muhh umm - luhh muhh."
The zombie kept repeating his mantra, and the more she listened, the more sense she could make of it. She was picking up on subtle accents in the utterings, little hints that made it seem more like language than random ravings.
"Fuhn ehm - geh ehm - meh ehm - luhh meh."
"That's - Christ, is he talking about us?"
"I think so."
"Fuhn em. Geh em. Meh em. Luhh meh."
Dee's jaw hung limp, and her cigarette fell from her mouth.
Find them. Get them. Make them like me.

Rendezvous: Chapter 14

The caravan arrived at The Home Depot without incident. Some isolated zombies had begun approaching from the South, out of town, but it seemed that the main push had been to the West, through the residential areas of town. Sam and Cameron stayed out front to keep an eye out and warn the group if Zed got too near.
The rest of the group quickly hashed out what supplies they would need: more lumber and hardware, rolls of insulation, tubes of sealant, spools of rope, and so forth. Dee went straight to the electrical department and started loading a flatbed cart with spools of wire, electrical tools, and how-to books. One of the trucks was loaded with empty five-gallon jugs which would be filled later with gasoline.
The group was loaded and ready to go in thirty minutes. By this time, the zombies had reached the parking lot. Sam and Cameron were taking them out in the ones and twos that got close enough to warrant attack, but they weren't too thick yet. As the caravan left, they could see that the zombies following them along the highway were getting within range of the store. Good - they had kept up their pursuit.
The group drove to a gas station on the East side of town, different than the one Seamus and Dee had hit on their last pass through, and filled up the trucks and jugs. The filling went a lot faster this time, as more people were available to pump. Seamus and Cameron fired their shotguns at the zombies that approached, wanting to bring as much attention as possible to this side of town in order to spare their headquarters on the other side. Dee broke into the shop to grab motor oil and snack cakes - not the most nutritious of foods, but they had a long shelf life, and that was what counted. The caravan then went on a tour of the grocery stores and hospitals in town.
Menard's, the Eastern Wal-Mart, and every grocery store were crowded with zombies. Cameron could see through his binoculars that they were both inside the buildings, and milling about outside. The areas around the hospitals and the mall were surrounded by dispersed zombies, just like the residential areas, but the group couldn't tell what things were like on the inside. These places would be easy enough to assault, but the problem was that once inside, there might be no coming out. No matter; they would just have to focus on getting a garden growing sooner. If they rationed their food, they could hold out long enough for the first harvest, such as it might be. Hopefully, they would then be able to occupy and fortify some of the farmland surrounding the town to grow crops in earnest.
With nothing left to do in town, the caravan departed for the country roads to the East, in order to loop around town and approach Wal-Mart from the South, as they had planned. Once they got South of town, there were no zombies in sight. They picked up the pace - with no zombie tail, every minute spent getting back to base was a minute Zed had to spread back out to them. When the store came in sight, Seamus tried to raise Jack on the raidio. By this time, the rain had stopped and the skies were clear.
"Hey, Jack, you there?"
"Yeah, I'm here. How did things go?"
"So-so. We didn't have any difficulties getting gear and gas, but food's a different story. How are things looking over there?"
"All clear. We can't see any zombies at all from up here."
"Excellent. Send someone down with the keys to the garden gate, we'll be ready to start our attack as soon as we get back."
"All right. See you soon."
"Yep."
As Dee drove into the parking lot, she could see a few isolated zombies shuffling about in the entranceways.
"Seamus, you see that?"
"Yeah. No way they could see that from the roof."
"They probably got pushed out when we took off, then didn't have anyone to follow once they got out."
"Shit, if they're thick enough inside to push out, this could be bad."
"My thoughts exactly. Radio back for some flashlights, will you?"
Seamus did as instructed. Without much to keep them occupied while the trucks were out around town, the group on the roof had set up a plan for ferrying supplies back and forth from the roof to ground level quickly and efficiently, so they could move gear even if access to the shipping bay doors was delayed. Jim met them at the garden gate with the keys and opened up. The eight from the trucks clambered over the barricade they had set there the night before, and approached the entrance to the store interior.
"Jack, we're just outside the entrance from the garden center. It looks pretty hairy in there."
"How bad?"
"Ehh, nothing we can't handle, but it'll be pretty tough." One of the closest zombies had heard their conversation, and had begun approaching the door.
"You think you need more people?"
"I dunno, I kind of like the supply chain thing you guys have going. Why don't you start moving tools and lumber up from the trucks? We'll need that stuff up there anyway to build the garden. We'll stick together in here, and I'll keep in touch with you."
"All right, sounds good."
Jim stayed at the garden gate. He didn't want to lock them in, but had to be on hand to lock up behind them if things got too rough and they had to evacuate. The roof crew began moving gear from the trucks up to the roof as Dee pried apart the sliding doors that led into the store.
Once inside, Dee rounded up the troops for a quick pep talk after the nearest zombies had been dealt with.
"OK, listen up. I want to try to conserve ammo here, especially because there's a lot of stuff we can use. However, there are a lot of places for zombies to hide in here. So this is the plan: we stick together as a group and clear out the store one department at a time. Then we'll split up into pairs to mop up the stragglers. We'll get one person with a shotgun on point, to look down each aisle - this will rotate every time, since it's fuckin' stressful to risk popping your head around a corner only to get a faceful of zombie. Then we'll work our way down the aisle with crowbars, then back out and do the next one. That sound good to everyone?" There were nods and murmurs of assent. "OK, let's do this."
The group soon fell into a steady grind, and the work went rather quickly. Sam almost got bitten by a zombie who had fallen down into a clothing rack in the men's clothing department, but other than that, the store was cleared without incident. Once they had made their second round of the store, Seamus radioed to Jack that they could come down from the roof and use the lifts to look around for isolated zombies that they'd missed the first time. They split into pairs, one shotgun and one crowbar, as they'd been in the trucks. Dee, Seamus, Sam, and Cameron stayed inside to work with a lookout from each lift; the other four went out front to clear the entrances.
Dee and Seamus stalked down the aisles with care; the lookout shouted down to them, which was fine because it would draw the zombies out of hiding, but they themselves stayed quiet so as not to advertise their presence, giving hand signals to the lookout to indicate their comprehension. Turning down the cleaning aisle, Seamus spotted a lone zombie at the other end, facing away from them, almost completely covered in moss. Large mushrooms were growing out of his torso.
"How did we miss that asshole," Seamus asked under his breath.
"Shh," Dee whispered. "Look. He's breathing." Sure enough, the zombie's torso was rising and falling in a slow, steady rhythm.
"Well, they need their lungs to moan, it's probably just some muscle memory thing."
"But - look, later. This -" She was cut off as the zombie noticed them and grunted. Spinning around, he moved his arm out to the shelf for support, but his hand plunged into the merchandise and he fell against the shelf, knocking jugs to the floor. He tried to regain his balance as he went down, moving almost in slow motion, but his hand caught a clip strip that had been hanging from the shelf, and tore his hand open. Some of the caps had popped off the jugs as they landed, and the smell of bleach filled the air. The zombie was on hands and knees in the middle of the mess, trying to regain his balance but repeatedly slipping. Dee and Seamus watched in silent awe as the zombie began to convulse, the black moss turning a dull gray and then a chalky white in under two minutes. Finally, the zombie stopped moving and fell face down into the puddle, issuing forth a few last grunts as the moss and fungus soaked up the bleach. "What - the fuck?" Dee cautiously approached the fallen zombie and tentatively poked at the shriveled white fungus on his back with her crowbar. It crumbled apart. Seamus failed to suppress a giggle. "What's so funny? I don't get it."
"Hey, Jack," he said into the walkie-talkie.
"Yeah?"
"Cleanup, aisle twelve."
"Huh?"
Dee joined Seamus in his laughter. Soon, they were both doubled over, laughing out loud, holding onto the shelf supports to keep their balance. It was just too much.
With the store cleared, the group set about re-fortifying their position. The barricades at the entrances had held surprisingly well; they had been breached by going up and over, rather than through. Fiberglass insulation was stuffed in the gap above the shopping carts, and then the whole thing was filled in with an expanding foam sealant. Bodies were hauled out to the shipping doors in carts and unceremoniously tossed onto the grass beyond the curb of the back lot. Dee had the man who had fallen in the bleach hauled up to the roof for examination, as well as a couple other bodies for comparison. She didn't know how much she'd be able to learn from them, but she hoped it would be something.
With the store re-taken and secure, the supplies were brought into the store and the trucks re-positioned once again. Still no sign of Zed. Dee got a few people started on building frames for the garden they'd have on the roof. Without a robust ecosystem to support the soil, they would have to irrigate their mini-farm and rely on chemical plant foods. They would eventually have to raid the other stores in town for canned food to get them through the winter, but next summer they ought to be able to start farming at ground-level. If not, they were doomed for sure.
Dee then went to examine the corpses she'd had brought to the roof. A few people wanted to watch, some out of morbid curiosity, others out of a more detached interest. Most didn't think they could stomach it.
"OK, so - before we get started, here's what we've got so far," she said to the group, as she donned her gear: rubber dish-washing gloves, a particulate respirator face mask, and a pair of chemical goggles. "This black plant matter is what's responsible for the zombies. It starts out as a lichen, which you may have seen growing on the walls of the building already. After that, it develops into a moss, and finally, a fungus. Somehow, it's able to parasitize human hosts, turning them into zombies. Apparently, if the host is engulfed in flames, the parasite dies - of course, this is also lethal to the host. Bleach seems to have a similar effect, as you can see on whitey over here."
"How'd you figure all this out," one of the Wal-Mart employees asked. Dee thought his name was Greg - or was it George?
"Guesswork, mainly. And repeated observations. Just so everybody knows, none of this is 'Gospel Truth' or anything - we're just as much in the dark as you. If anybody finds the owner's manual for this stuff, please, speak up. And if you see anything of interest, tell everyone. The more we know, the better we're prepared. Knowledge is power, and all that." She took a moment to look at the group, but there were no other questions. "OK, well, let's get started, shall we?" Lifting a hacksaw, she removed the heads of the five non-bleached corpses, saving that one for last so any differences would stand out more. Then she started cutting the heads into left and right halves.
"Interesting," she muttered to herself, comparing the open heads after she had wiped away the viscous black ooze that seemed to have replaced their blood. "Here, at the base of the skull," she said, scooping tissue out to show the group. "There's a tangle of black stuff. Now, uh, I'm not a doctor or anything, but I'm pretty sure this shouldn't be here." She pulled what looked like black roots out of the pulpy mess. "Hey, looks like it goes all the way around the brain. There's also another knot up here by the frontal lobe. Huh."
Dee spent another couple of minutes poking around in the brains of the corpses, then used a steak knife to open up their thoracic cavities. "Oh, hey, that reminds me," she said, working the ribs free from the sternum on one of her cadavers. "You've all seen those things of like, 'healthy lung, smoker's lung,' right? OK, well, now compare that to - zombie lung!" She hefted a lung into the air before the group. It was recognizable as such, but there were thick tangles of black roots coming out of it in all directions. "We've figured out that infection can take root in the lungs. Err, we think so, anyway. Look, after a couple days of exposure, if you smoke a cigarette, you'll start coughing up black shit. We're pretty damn sure that means that spores get in your lungs and start fucking you up, so I would highly recommend that you all pick up smoking. Pray you live long enough to worry about lung cancer, huh?" Nervous laughter came from the group. Sam, working on a wooden frame nearby, exchanged winks with Dee upon hearing her previous sentiment restated. "Seriously, though. This is some pretty insidious stuff, so we want to try to take it out whenever we can."
Dee turned back to the corpse and rooted around in the organs for a while. Finding the stomach, she cut it open. "Son of a bitch," she said. "Check this out. I kinda thought earlier that stomach acids would kill it off, but if you look, it's like a slime mold in here. You can tell it's the parasite because the roots extend out again. Shit, this is bad news." Dee spent a few more moments contemplating the stomach before moving on to other organs. "We're going to have to start watching what we eat. Jesus." Rooting around for the heart, Dee found it similarly infested with the wiry black roots, as were the intestines. The kidneys, liver, and other organs were relatively untouched, though.
"What do you think that means," Cameron asked.
"Dunno. Could mean a lot of things. Might not mean anything."
"The liver stores toxins that the body filters out," Seamus volunteered. "If the parasite's so sensitive as to be dislodged from one deep drag off a cigarette, it might not be able to get at the liver."
"Ooh, good call," Dee said, struggling not to absentmindedly tap her forehead or chin in thought.
"Or, it might be that it's not needed. If that black slime is the equivalent of blood, then the parasite might need to keep the heart, lungs, and digestive tract working. The liver and kidneys would be fairly obsolete."
"Hmm - how would the goo function as blood? I mean, what would be the point," Dee asked.
"Err - I guess, maybe if the fungus photosynthesizes, it could hijack the host's circulatory system and use that to get nutrients to the roots on the inside. I mean, lichens, mosses, and fungi don't really have centralized - fuckin' - whatever you call the equivalent of a circulatory system in a plant."
"Yeah, but then how would it start growing in the lungs? No light, no exterior photosynthesis going on, no hijacked circulatory system."
"Well, we've already seen that it develops differently depending on the growth medium, maybe it metabolizes differently as well. Like aerobic and anaerobic respiration, it does what it can with what's available."
"Maybe, sure. Actually, that could also explain why we're seeing growth on the walls so soon, but it takes a couple days to get going in the lungs. Damn." Dee pondered this while she examined the organs in the other corpses, finding the same results. Then she started cutting open limbs to look at the muscles. What she saw made her curse, wishing she'd been taking notes.
"Now what," someone asked.
"Well, I kinda wish I'd made some notes on what the different organs had looked like, before I started poking and prodding and taking them apart, but I guess it's a moot point now. If you look at the areas where there are patches of moss on the skin, you can see that the roots are boring down from there into the muscle tissue." She peeled back a flap of skin that she had cut from a zombie's forearm. "My guess was that the parasite had a favored vector of entry - in this case, lungs or stomach - and then grew throughout the body and came out somewhere to spread to other hosts. But this - damn. This changes things. This guy over here, he's got this mossy patch on his shoulder blade. I didn't really think anything of it at first, but now that I look, it's at a spot he can't reach. And if you pull back the moss, you can see that he's got like an abscess or something here. What I don't know is whether this is an outgrowth or whether the parasite came in through here, by wound or otherwise. If that's the case, then the zombies might just have to bite us, like in the movies. And I don't know how we'd be able to clean out an infection in the blood."
"My vote goes to alcohol," Seamus said, grinning. "Alcohol kills everything."
"Look, sure, maybe that would work. But if it can get through the skin, too - I mean, what if it just looks like a rash at first? Then we might be well and truly fucked."
"I'm with Seamus on this one," Cameron said. "That's two votes for booze. Who else is with us?" There were nervous chuckles from the crowd, but for the most part, people were worrying about how to identify warning signs, without the knowledge of just what those warning signs were.
"Anyway," Dee continued, unfazed. "If I'd taken notes, I might have been able to guess, but - nah. Maybe if I weighed it, I could tell - no, shit, if it gets in through the blood, it could start anywhere. Son of a bitch. Where the fuck did this thing come from?"
"The moon." Seamus was losing interest. "Didn't they like send salmonella out to space, and it came back stronger or some noise? I want to get superpowers from space rays, instead of, y'know, die."
"Yeah, I think I saw that in the news a couple weeks ago," Cameron said. "I was all like, 'Hell yes, spacepowers!' Soon, we'll be able to harness this power for evil!"
"Dammit, guys, will you shut up for a second?" Dee was losing patience.
"Look, this Alien Autopsy reenactment is fun and all, but what are we really learning here?"
"Well, Seamus, aside from confirming that it takes root in the lungs, we've also figured out that it's got something to do with the brain and the heart, and it can live in the stomach."
"Well, I don't really like mushrooms, anyway, so I don't see as how this is really useful."
"It's - dammit, the whole point of this was to have a baseline of comparison so we could get a better idea of what happened to Bleach Boy over there."
"Well, crack him open, let's see what's up."
"Fine." Dee went over to the corpse with the whitened growths and started pointing out the external differences. "OK, as you can see, the plant matter on the outside of this guy has turned white. This happened within minutes of exposure to the bleach, so whatever it does, it does it quickly." Dee grabbed at a chunk of white moss, which crumbled at her touch. "Also, the stuff gets all dry and crumbly, as you can see. Now, let's pick this guy's brain." She removed and halved the head of the cadaver, as with the others. The smell of bleach filled the air. "Huh. Take a look at this. The clumps of the roots are all dried up and crumbled, and it looks like - yeah. Instead of that black viscous fluid, this stuff is much thinner. And, well, it smells like bleach." Dee took apart the corpse as she had done with the rest, and the results were the same all over: the parasite had become dry and brittle even in its root systems, making them impossible to pull out as she had done with her other specimens.
"OK," she said, standing up and removing her gear after the inspection was complete. "First, the obvious. Bleach fucks up the parasite, but it's fatal to the host, too. Aside from that, any ideas?"
"I don't know," Kevin spoke up. "Maybe we should hold off until we can do some proper science on this thing."
"Look, this basically is the scientific method," Seamus countered. "You come up with a bunch of ideas and try to test them one at a time until you get something that works. It's crude, but we don't exactly have a lab available. Or time."
"I'm just saying that I don't think we want to get sold on an idea that turns out to be wrong."
"I'd rather have any plan than no plan."
"Unless that's the plan that kills you."
"Well, hopefully it won't come to that, but still, better shitty preparation than none at all."
"Fair enough." Kevin shrugged his shoulders.
"Well," Cameron mused, "I think it's pretty obvious that if bleach kills this thing that quickly, it's really porous. Maybe we can weaponize the stuff. Even water balloons filled with a diluted solution should be able to do the trick. This guy just fell in some bleach and bought it, right?"
"Yeah," Dee said, running her hands through her hair. "Goddamn zombie killer death fungus from Hell. Can't stand up to household cleaners, though."
"Well, really, what can?" Cameron was scratching his head. "Also, if this thing is taking root in the brain, there's probably no way to cure the infection. Even if we managed to kill the parasite safely, the host would probably be brain-dead."
"Well, without healthy blood, there's no way you could survive, anyway," Seamus said.
"That's true," Dee said. "Oh, the thing I was going to say earlier, in the cleaning aisle. If you look at the zombies, I mean, I hadn't really noticed them breathing. Maybe they do, but really slowly."
"Gotcha. You think maybe the metabolism might be slowed?"
"I dunno. I don't know what starving people look like on the inside."
"Just an idea. That seems like it could help the host keep running with no food."
"Oh. Yeah, that's a good call."
"Hey," Cameron interjected. "This thing absorbs fluid quickly, but the host bodies aren't all dessiccated and shit. Maybe it's like a one-way thing, you think?"
"Could be," Seamus said. "Actually, I can't think of anything else to explain that."
"Shit, we're gonna have to disinfect everything." Cameron sighed. "We probably ought to raid the antibiotics, too. What do we have, penicillin, streptomycin, amoxicillin -"
"Anything ending in -cillin or -mycin is an antibiotic," Dee said. "That may or may not do anything. I mean, antibiotics work against bacteria mostly, and some fungi, sure - but there are side effects that could cause problems. If someone gets diarrhea and has to start drinking more water, this thing might be in the water and they could be doing more harm than good. I'm not saying it won't work, I'm just saying we ought to be cautious."
"Why don't we test it," Kevin asked. "We have antibiotics. We have the fungus. I'm sure we could jury rig something to test whether it's effective or not."
"Yeah, good call. OK, let's do that, then."
The conversation started winding down at that point, and the frames for the gardening project had been completed. They related their findings and conjectures to the rest of the group, as well as their plan to test the antibiotics. The corpses were dumped over the side of the building, and while they still had daylight, everyone pitched in to clean the floors so as to stop any zombie gunk from taking root inside the building. As the sun went down, there was still no sign of the zombies from town. A lookout was posted to the roof, with plans for relief every three hours. Tomorrow they would fill in their frames with dirt and start planting seeds, as well as work on purifying their water and testing the antibiotics. Everyone bedded down for the evening with a sense of confidence, tempered only mildly by anxiety. Sure, shit was hitting the fan, but they had a plan, and they were still all alive. That was more than they could say for the rest of the town.

Rendezvous: Chapter 13

The plan kicked off without a hitch. The rain had picked up a little, so the group was able to hide the noise of the ladders and get to ground level without alerting the zombies. Once safely down, Dee and Sam used their crowbars for hook-and-stomp maneuvers to dispatch the zombies on the way to the trucks. They noticed that black lichen was already growing on the outside walls, and the zombies were sporting mossy coats in places. Some had even developed mushroom caps.
The ride out of the parking lot was bumpy, both due to driving over last night's kills and running over the walking zombies who got in the way. Word of their departure quickly spread through Zed's ranks, and with Jack's help, Seamus was able to confirm that every zombie within eyesight was headed for the trucks. The group on the roof just had to stay quiet and hope that the zombies didn't lose interest in the caravan too soon.
"This is the most intense low-speed chase I have ever been on," Dee said to Seamus as they got on the street.
"I know, right?" Seamus radioed Jack once again as they neared the highway interchange. "Hey, are they still following us, or should we make another pass?"
"Nah, they seem to be concentrating on you pretty exclusively. Just stay slow, keep them in sight, and you should be fine."
"Ten-four. You guys stay safe."
"Thanks, you too."
Seamus placed the walkie-talkie on the dashboard, but kept it turned on until they got out of range of the store, in case of emergency. Sam was keeping pace with Dee, the other trucks staying about ten yards back. Once on the highway, Seamus yelled across for Cameron to keep an eye on the road ahead, and he'd make sure they kept within sight of Zed. Then he spoke to Dee.
"So what's going on?"
"Hm? What do you mean?"
"With you. Friday. When I came across you in the middle of the zombie mob, you looked like you were in some kind of trance."
"I was busy fighting zombies, Seamus." Dee's tone went flat. "I was probably just concentrating on the fight."
"Don't try to bullshit me. You were singing some song, it was like The Battle Hymn of the Republic, but it had different words. And it was in a minor key. Where the Hell did that come from?" Dee looked over at Sam's truck. Sam and Cam both had eyes straight ahead. She looked at Seamus for a long moment before speaking.
"Who else did you tell about that?"
"Nobody. I just want to know what the fuck's going on."
"All right," Dee said, lighting a clove. "Fine. But only if this stays between you and me."
"I can't promise that," Seamus said, lighting up as well. "If they don't need to know, I won't say anything. But if it endangers the group, then they have to know. The only reason I haven't talked to anyone else about this is that I didn't want to panic everyone. But unless you explain yourself -" Seamus stammered, not wanting to threaten her, but unsure of how else to communicate that there was no compromise on this issue. Dee, for her part, understood perfectly.
"Well, I don't know what to tell you, because I'm not sure of what's going on, myself."
"You're not doing yourself any favors. Start with what you know."
"All right, fine. Just - just give me a minute to organize my thoughts, OK?" Seamus answered by taking a long drag on his cigarette. "OK, I - Jesus. Look, when I was a kid - I was crazy, OK? My dad took me to a bunch of doctors, and they put me through a battery of tests, and what they saw was that I had vastly increased brain activity for a child my age."
"How old were you?"
"Like, three or four, I don't remember exactly. This went on over a couple years. Anyway, the conclusion they came to was that I learned extremely fast, but I made up things even faster, and like any kid, I got really wrapped up in the fantasies I was telling myself. I started believing them. Bullshit about past lives and whatnot. My mom eventually walked out, it was too much for her to handle. We took a trip to the library one day, I was in like kindergarten or something, and she found me looking up how to make pipe bombs."
"Look, what does this have to do with anything?"
"Well, the doctors didn't know what to do, so they put me on antipsychotics. I've been taking them ever since. They fuck you up, though, so they put me on a really low dosage and coupled it with some intensive therapy. Not like ECT or anything - just talking. But a lot of talking, with a lot of people. Eventually, I calmed down. But now I'm out of pills."
"So raid a Walgreen's and get more."
"Rosie and I tried, but that was the day the football team got us. We had already bagged the pills, and they assumed we were taking them for recreational use. We couldn't find them after we got out. I've been out since then. And there's been so much stress, I'm already starting to feel it. Like, everything is starting to seem really familiar, like it's happened before. That song - I know I never heard it before, but it doesn't seem like that to me. It feels like - it also seems familiar. But I know I just made it up."
"Yeah, you nearly fainted after fighting the zombies the other day. You said something like, 'Once you've seen one zombie apocalypse, you've seen 'em all,' or some noise. Is that all it is?"
"Mostly, yeah. Basically, I just don't know if I'm going crazy or not. Like, when the church started singing, I thought that was in my head, and when the zombies started screaming like people, I thought for a couple moments that I had just been making up the past week and projecting some delusion." Seamus took another long drag and reflected on the situation.
"Well, if that's all it is, then - I don't know. I mean, you seem to have a pretty good handle on things. I'm not gonna tell anyone. Not unless you start acting nuts. It wouldn't help anything."
"Thanks. And, actually, I'm kind of glad you know, now. Rosie was the only one who knew before, but - Christ, I mean, I love her, but I don't know if she'd be able to call me out if I snapped. Now that someone else knows, you'll be able to keep an eye on me."
"Yeah." Seamus watched the zombies slowly pursuing them. "Hey, there was one other thing that freaked me out. When you were fighting the zombies, you were - I mean - it looked like you knew where they were coming from, but without seeing them. I'm pretty sure I saw you nail a guy behind you without even looking."
"Maybe. I don't know. Why?"
"What do you fucking mean, maybe? Were you doing that, or weren't you?"
"I mean that I don't know. Sometimes, when I get in a fight, I just - it's like, I don't exactly lose control, I just lose track, you know?"
"No. No, I don't."
"Well, when I fight - I mean, I practically grew up fighting. I got in a lot of trouble at school for it. I was always tall for my age, and boys would make fun of me for it, and I wouldn't take their shit and I'd fight them. I'm better now, but when I get in the thick of things, it's like this red mist just creeps in from the edge of my vision. And then - it's hard to describe. It's not a danger to anyone else, as long as you don't attack me. But if I was really hitting people without seeing them -" Dee trailed off and took a long drag.
"Then what?"
"I know, I was just collecting my thoughts. Look, the Japanese have this term, 'sakki' - not to be confused with 'sake,' that's rice wine - what it means is 'the palpable desire to kill.' There's this school of martial arts, the one that Cam and Kev and I studied, they focus on that."
"Bullshit. You're telling me you can read minds now?"
"It's not mind-reading, and it's not bullshit. I mean, back in the day, they didn't really have any better terms for it, and the term just survived as a matter of convention. Like how electric current is shown going from positive to negative, when in reality it's the reverse. Anyway, as you develop in your training, you learn to get an awareness of what's going on around you, and at a certain point, you're supposed to be able to pick up on cues from your enemy that they don't even know they're sending. It's like mind-reading, in the sense that eventually it's supposed to become second nature, and your opponent isn't supposed to be able to tell the difference."
"You're serious? What if someone is able to - I don't know, do whatever so you can't pick up on it?"
"Yes, being able to mask it is also part of the training. It's basically so you can blend in with a crowd, or go unnoticed. The idea is that you slip under the instinctive radar. It's actually one of the tests they've got - the grandmaster of the order stands behind you with a sword and masks his sakki, and then just focuses it all at once right as he swings. You're on your knees, facing away, eyes closed, and you have to get out of the way. Too early, and you panicked - too late, you get chopped in half."
"That sounds like a myth."
"I did it."
"Really?" Seamus didn't even try to hide the contemptuous suspicion in his voice.
"Really. Cam and Kevin did it, too. I was freaking out when I first kneeled down, it seemed like I was sitting there for a year, panicking, thinking my teacher was going to swing at any moment. But I eventually calmed down, and quieted my mind, and then I felt - it's strange, it's like right then, I knew exactly what people mean when they say 'butterflies in your stomach,' you know? That was the only time I'd felt that. But I just knew it was time to get out of the way right then, so I did."
"As he swung the sword?"
"Yes. I mean, it was a dulled sword, so he would have whacked me pretty hard on the noggin, but it wouldn't have killed me."
"So that's what you were doing, in the middle of the crowd?"
"Maybe. I think so. I mean, zombies send a lot more cues than a trained martial artist. If you look closely, they do a little shuffle-step right before a lunge, they also inhale sharply and then grunt as they go into motion, there are a lot of little things like that. If you pay attention, you can pick up on them even when you're not looking at them."
"Huh." Seamis stared out the window, flicking the butt of his cigarette after one last hit. It was a lot to swallow - but, like the zombies and the bombed power station, he had seen it happen with his own eyes. He had no better explanation at the time. He'd have to keep a close eye on Dee, though. If she was on medication and had run out - fucking antipsychotics, of all things - she could be a big problem. But while she kept a grip on reality, she was a very valuable asset. Talk about a rock and a hard place.
The zombies were approaching the highway from every direction, tangling themselves in barbed wire fences and stumbling in ditches, hearing the sound of the truck engines from several hundred yards off but unable to catch up. Hopefully, their pursuit stayed this close all the way to their exit, then they could gun it to The Home Depot and lose them. If that worked, Zed would be on the Northeast side of town and would have to spread out all the way back to the Southwest side before he was a threat again. Seamus just hoped their luck held out that long.

Rendezvous: Chapter 12

Chapter 12
Sunday morning brought light rainfall. Those who had not awoken at dawn were roused at about half past eight by a warm sunshower. The group gathered in the middle to discuss the situation, and how to deal with it.
While the rain lasted, its noise would serve to mask their conversation to the ears of the zombies down below, so the group could afford to speak in normal tones. Once the group had exchanged greetings, Dee spoke up.
"Jack, you're usually up early. What have you seen?"
"Zombies. Zombies everywhere."
"And nary a drop to drink," Kevin said with a grin.
"Right," Jack continued. "They don't seem so intent on getting to us any more, though. They're kind of just spread out around the surrounding area, like they were around the apartment."
"OK," Dee said. "Cameron, have you spotted anything through your binoculars?"
"Yeah, a couple things. The wave that overtook us last night? That type of formation isn't anywhere in sight, but there are zombies spread around as far as the eye can see. The other thing is that the highway interchange looks pretty clear. From what I could see, people seem to have mostly pulled over before abandoning their vehicles."
"Good catch," Seamus said. "What about traffic? Anyone come through?"
"No, not that I saw."
"Damn. There could be clogs elsewhere around town."
"Not necessarily," Dee responded. "In dense urban areas like Chicago, yeah, that's probably the case. But we're practically out in the sticks, and as it appears from Zed's numbers, most people have just been staying in their homes like good, docile cattle, trying to wait it out. Besides, this junction here is the busiest one in town; it's where all three highways come together, and if it's pretty clear as Cameron says, then the others are probably even moreso."
"Fair enough," Seamus said. "But what kind of traffic did you see down there, Cam?"
"Uhh - mostly eighteen-wheelers. Only a few cars."
"Yeah, that's because this is where the business traffic mostly flows," Seamus continued. "The exit on the North side of town could be clogged with college kids wanting to go up to Chicago or the suburbs to see their parents. Or parents coming down to check on their kids. There's no telling."
"Good point," Dee said, after considering this for a moment. "I still think we should check it out, though. If we can use the highways to get around town, we can lure the zombies on there, where they won't be able to catch us as we pass. We could also use the terrain to our advantage: the ditches, overpasses, and fences are all good obstacles to put in Zed's way."
"OK," Kevin interjected, "But what then? If we re-supply and make camp somewhere else, the zombies will be able to find us there. I mean, it's almost a sure shot that they'll be around wherever we end up, and those that pick up our trail while we're driving around would just join in when they arrived wherever we stop. If we come back here, we don't know how many are inside, and might not be able to re-take the interior before we just get a repeat of last night."
"That's true," Dee responded. "We actually have a couple options."
"What do you think we ought to do," Bill asked. This lady had been responsible for a lot of the planning that helped them survive the night. He didn't know what her story was, but she and her crew were definitely making the difference between life and death for him and his.
"I don't know, actually. Each option has the potential to work, but there's also a significant amount of risk associated with each course of action, as well. Without the knowledge of just what the risk factors are, it's hard to judge which will put us in the best position. I think we should lay out our choices, and decide as a group which one we want to pursue."
"Makes sense," Seamus agreed. "So what are our options? Is it pretty much 'stay' or 'leave' again?"
"More or less. I mean, we can try to re-take the store here, or we can try to go somewhere else in town, or we can leave town altogether. There are good and bad ways of going about each of those, though. Let's call them Plans A, B, and C.
"Now, Plan A is going to be to take back the store. What we'd want to do here is get a crew of people down to ground level - I think we can lower the ladders to the roof of the auto garage, and from there down to the parking lot - and hop in the trucks out back. We can try to draw the zombies off from the immediate area the same way we did at the Dojo. We'd hop on the highway and take it up to the North end of town, and get off at The Home Depot. I want to pick up some electrical supplies there, wire and such, to get the generators running. We can also grab some insulation and what-not to seal off the entrances to the store, rather than clearing out the bodies. We should probably also pick up what food we can from grocery stores, if we get the opportunity. Then we'd come back and go in through the garden gate with Bill's keys, enter the store, and kill the zombies inside. We'd throw the bodies out the shipping bay doors, and basically be invisible from the outside. Now that we know to stay away from the edge of the roof, I don't think we'll have any repeats of last night.
"There are risks, though. For one thing, if the zombies to the West have linked up with another town, there could be more around than we'd be able to draw off. We have no idea how far their range is for whatever communication they've got - they may well just keep coming. We also don't know how many are in the store, as Kevin pointed out. It's possible that we will be unable to dispatch them all before the zombies spread out again, and they may catch us in the middle of things. That puts us back at square one."
The crowd was clearly divided. There were weeks of supplies in the store below, and it seemed a waste to just leave them behind. On the other hand, they didn't want to deal with an event similar to last night any time soon. Dee let them contemplate this option in the rain before continuing.
"Plan B is that we all leave and try to occupy another spot in town. There are some spots which are just out of the question - the mall is too much ground for our numbers to secure, and seems to have been the site of a recent battle, anyway. Menards is also out - lots of useful stuff in there, but the enormous picture windows by the front entranceways would be impossible to secure. The same goes for every grocery store I can think of. The Home Depot has smaller entranceways, no gigantic windows, and the supplies to secure it are right inside - but there's no food, save for what we bring. There's a more robust garden center there, though, which could prove more useful in the long-term. The Wal-Mart on the East side of town seems to have been the site of another attack, but it might be easier to take that one than to re-take this one.
"The most obvious downside to this plan, as Kevin pointed out, is that there very well could be zombies already surrounding wherever we end up. If that's the case, we won't have time to fortify our position before the onslaught becomes too much to handle. I think the risks are slightly higher, but so is the potential reward - we could get more space between us and Zed, which means better fortifications."
This did indeed sound better to the group, but the risk of the unknown was a rather frightening one - was it really so wise to abandon their position on a gamble? Staying where they were was also a gamble of a kind, but the dangers they risked here would do them in anywhere.
"Plan C has the highest risk, but also the highest potential reward. If the zombies from here have linked up with zombies from another town, and their chain of communication is able to reach that far, then they're going to keep coming until they kill us or drive us back to the roof of wherever we are. We may be able to re-take the ground level a couple times, but really, it's only a matter of time from there until people start dying. If that's the case - but only if that's the case - then our best option is to leave town and try to find another outpost of survivors or a deserted area where we can start over.
"The risk here actually isn't Zed, but our fellow humans. I mean, we're a fairly unlikely bunch, here. We're nerds - we made games of collecting knowledge, we even joked about how extensively we'd hashed out our zombie apocalypse survival plans, and most of our parents have imparted knowledge to us that's bound to help us survive. Rosie's parents grew up on a farm, Seamus' father is an auto mechanic, my dad worked as an independent contractor, and my step-mom's a nurse. Cameron, your dad's a career soldier; Kevin, your dad's an electrician; Jack, wasn't your dad a foundry worker or something? A good number of us have some martial arts experience, too, and from the looks of things, we'll all be able to get along in the long-term. My point is, how many other groups are there likely to be who are as well-suited to living this out as we are? Or, the other side of that, how many groups are there who would be able to survive, but who we would also want to hang out with?" At this, there were murmurs of agreement.
After some brief discussion, the group came to a consensus. In terms of zombies reaching other towns, they figured that even though the more urban towns around them could have experienced the zombie outbreaks quicker, there was a very small chance that the distances between had already been crossed. Plan C was the last resort. Plan B also took a backseat, as the other Wal-Mart was in the middle of a residential area with less visibility of the surrounding terrain, and The Home Depot lacked a gas station. Plan A seemed to have the lowest risk and to put them in the most secure position that they'd be able to maintain.
Dee laid out the details of her plan. The four rental trucks, each with a driver and passenger, would head out to the highway interchange, where they would drive North around town until they got to the exit by The Home Depot. If there were any knots of traffic along the way, the trucks would be able to go off-road at some point to get around the congestion. They wouldn't need to drive at high speeds, and actually wanted to give as much time as possible for the zombies to give chase, so that they could all be drawn off of Wal-Mart before losing interest. After getting more supplies from The Home Depot, the caravan would drive down the East side of town for gasoline and groceries. They would also check out the hospitals, and finally head out to the country roads that circled around town to lose their zombie tail and approach Wal-Mart from the South. With any luck, Zed would have vacated the area by that time, until he spread out again - they estimated that this could take anywhere from four to eight hours, depending on how long the zombies persisted in their pursuit.
"OK," Dee said, once the planning had finished. "Four trucks means eight people. Each driver should have a crowbar, and everyone riding shotgun should have - umm, a shotgun. I definitely want Rosie, Cam, and Seamus with me. I'll take volunteers for the other four spots." Eight other people volunteered, so they partnered up and played rock-paper-scissors to determine who would go. "All right. Seamus, you're with me. Cam, you're shotgunning for Rosie. Make sure to bring your binoculars, too. Seamus, grab a walkie - Jack, since you're staying behind, can you handle the other one? Good. Sam and I will drive the two trucks in front, you four just follow us. If we pull over, it's to talk, so make sure you pull over with us. Everybody clear? Great. Let's fuckin' roll."