Victor tensed, and leaned forward on the edge of his couch. Beads of sweat teetered on the edge of his forehead. There were sirens outside, but he ignored them. Weren’t there always sirens in the city, these days? He hammered the buttons on his Xbox controller and swayed back and forth with each swing of the Dragonborn’s axe on his screen. Eventually the giant’s club connected and Victor’s Nord warrior floated up and up into the air, before falling back down to the plains of Skyrim. The screen went dark. He tossed the controller onto the floor and rose from the sofa to stretch.
It was just as well. Lauren was on her way over, and he’d already promised her that he’d game less when she was over. He walked to the window. It was raining hard, and surprisingly warm. February in eastern Washington State, you were lucky if it was above freezing, but here was Victor sweating bullets, and the building’s heat wasn’t even on.
There was a slam behind him, and Victor whirled around. Clint stood in his doorway, plainclothes and a shotgun, red-faced and out of breath.
“Clint?” Victor said.
“You should keep your door locked,” Clint said, and in two strides was at the TV. He shut off the Xbox and flipped the TV back to cable, and then to the news.
There was no doubt Clint was a weird guy. He was the kind of guy who worked out eight days a week. He shaved his prematurely balding head about half that often, and he looked a little like a wrestler, too. Probably Victor’s best living friend, he was a bit of a redneck and a former member of the Spokane Police Department, turned private security guard when he realized how many bad apples he was serving with. They were an unlikely pair: Victor the perpetual temporary IT guy, born and raised on the east coast, and Clint the Inland Northwest hunter/cop/gun enthusiast. Clint probably owned more guns than everyone on Victor’s childhood block had, combined.
Clint’s normal weirdness did not include barging in with a shotgun and messing with Victor’s TV. Something was clearly wrong. Clint, holding a shotgun, giving off extreme nervous energy, turning on the news. It took Victor a moment to process before he could tune into the broad.
“Authorities have no explanation for what caused the explosion, which appears to have occurred about seventy-five miles southeast of Seattle, or for the subsequent atmospheric anomaly that has given rise to a substantial increase in temperature across the Pacific Northwest.” Here, the feed cut to a map that showed an extreme temperature hotspot originating in central Washington. The temperature was up to 90 close to the center, and in the 70s as far east as Spokane and as far south as central Oregon. This was February. It should’ve been 20, not 70. “This just two hours after the explosion,” the anchor continued. “The temperature anomaly continues to grow, and is showing no signs of slowing. The NOAA has said that, though they have no answers for us, there is no reason for concern as of yet.
“At the same time, we’ve been receiving reports from across the state of Washington that seem to indicate…well,” and here the anchor chuckled. His eyes were wide, and there was real fear there, not mirth. “I can’t bring myself to say it. Just roll the video.” Nothing happened for a moment, and then the anchor looked off screen and back at the camera. “Right, sorry. This video could be extremely traumatizing and viewer discretion is advised. If any children are watching, we recommend that they be taken out of the room.”
Then they rolled the video. A caption beneath the video informed Victor that the clip had been filmed by a Seattle area med school student who was documenting an autopsy for a school report.
On screen, a physician stood over a metal slab, gently picking a scalpel off a tray of instruments. He looked into the camera, gloves on, and smiled sadly. “George here just died after losing a long-fought battle with liver cancer. I’ll be performing this autopsy today to get some information on how well his experimental treatment was working.”
With that the physician nodded and began to cut. Victor watched, mouth agape, as the scalpel carved its way down the man’s torso. On and on the video went. The bone saw came out and was put away. And then, without warning, the carved-open autopsy patient reached up and grabbed the physician by the throat.
“Oh shit,” came a young woman’s voice from off-screen, and then the screen wobbled as she presumably dropped the camera. It was hard to see what happened next from the floor, but the physician screamed, the terror-turning-to-pain kind of scream, and then there arose a cacophony of groaning and banging. At first, Victor couldn’t tell what was making the noise, but then one of the closed slabs shook, and fingers squirmed their way out. They found purchase on the metal, and slowly it began to open.
At this point, the student grabbed the camera and began to run, and the video cut off. The anchorman was pale when they cut back to him. He cleared his throat a few times. “Well, there you have it. Apparently video evidence of the, ah, presumed dead, rising and attacking the healthy. There have been other reports of similar occurrences from across the state, and though these incidents call to mind such popular television programs as the Walking Dead, we here at NBC are confident that the CDC will be forthcoming with a real-world explanation soon.”
And then they cut to commercial. The news shows clips of a zombie attack, and then cuts to commercial? It had to be a joke. A cat prowled around on screen, and a familiar kitty litter jingle began to play. Was this how the apocalypse would come? Followed by an ad for cat litter? It had to be faked, like the legendary War of the Worlds radio broadcast. Didn’t it? Could NBC get away with something like that? Would they risk lawsuits and panic attacks for a bump in ratings?
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Clint looked at him. “Where’s Lauren? We have to get out of the city.”
Victor shook his head. “What do you mean?”
“What do I mean? Are you blind? A mysterious explosion and now the dead are rising to attack the living? It’s a fucking zombie apocalypse, man. We have to get out of the city.”
“No way,” Victor said. “No way that’s real.”
“Look out the damn window,” Clint said. “And do you even hear the sirens?”
The sirens. There were an awful lot of them. Victor stepped to the window, and it was mayhem outside. Several police cruisers outside the grocery store next door, lights flashing, and people running past clutching small parcels of food. People on the street below packed into their cars. A fist-fight broke out on the street corner by the store, anyone’s guess what it was about. And then Victor saw Lauren’s car pulling up outside his building. If this was really the apocalypse, at least she was here with him. “Jesus,” he said.
“You always did have trouble losing yourself in those games, man, but a zombie apocalypse? You seriously didn’t know any of this shit was going on?”
Victor looked over at the Xbox controller on the floor. The light was still on. “What do we do?” he said.
“Pack, dumbshit,” Clint said.
“Pack what?”
“Pack what? Pack whatever the fuck you need, what do you mean pack what? Hurry up and pack!”
Victor grabbed his backpack; he’d want to travel light he figured. He went to the closet and opened it. It was a zombie apocalypse. He didn’t know what the hell to pack. What do you pack for the end of the world? He grabbed a flashlight and threw it in. That seemed like a good call. Extra batteries. He grabbed an extra set of boxers, but then thought better of it, and tossed them back into his closet. This wasn’t vacation, this was survival. He had a big knife, an old World War II bayonet he’d inherited from his grandfather. That was his only weapon. Clint was the weapons guy. The bayonet was wrapped in an old cloth, and Victor threw it in with the flashlight. What else? What else?
He felt a tapping on his back, and he turned to see Clint offering him a handgun and a few spare clips. “You’ll be wanting this. Forty-five cal., bigger than the ones we’ve shot on the range, so be ready for some kick.”
Victor took the gun, and tossed the clips in his bag. He zipped it up and tucked the gun into his waistband, like he’d seen in countless movies and TV shows. He looked at his hand. Is this a dream? It wasn’t. There was a knock on the door. Lauren. He rose and slung the backpack around his shoulders.
Lauren let herself in after knocking, as she always did. Her eyes were wide, her hands shaking a little bit. “What’s going on out there?” she asked, before seeing Clint, Clint’s shotgun, and Victor with his backpack on. “For that matter, what’s going on in here?”
Victor just looked at her for a second. She was a hell of a girl; beautiful, for one thing – brunette, athletic and curvy, with a killer smile. She was an artist: She painted and wrote poetry and attended the local university where she was an MFA candidate for the latter. She was a hell of a softball player and an avid runner. Raised by a Marine father and three older brothers, life had taught her at a young age to never take shit from anyone. She was the love of his life and though they’d only been together for six months, he was going to marry her. That is, if she didn’t figure out that she was way out of his league, and move on.
“Victor? What’s happening?” she asked, authority in her voice that he wouldn’t have resisted, even if he could have.
“You notice that it’s 70 degrees out? In February.”
She nodded. “It seemed warm, but I didn’t know it was that warm. What’s going on? Some kind of climate change thing?”
Victor shrugged.
“Jesus,” Clint said. “Children, LISTEN. Who cares about the weather? The dead are rising. It’s a zombie pandemic, and we’ve been mentally preparing for this since the ‘90s, and we’re getting out of the city. Yes?”
Lauren looked at Victor, and gave him a look like she thought this was a bad joke. He could only shrug. “It was on the news.”
She looked at the TV, which was on a commercial for some kind of giant pickup truck. A deep, manly voice was asking rhetorical questions.
She opened her mouth, but whatever she’d been about to say, she didn’t have time to say it because there were gunshots from the grocery store. Just a few at first, and the three went to the window just in time to see two police officers guns in hand, backing away from five or six civilians. No, not civilians. They were bleeding, these civilians, from the neck or the chest. One was missing an arm. They were zombies. The officers fired again, this time rapidly, unloading their clips into the approaching zombies, and though one zombie fell, red blossoming from the back of its skull as a bullet passed through, it was too late. The officers dropped their guns and turned to run, but the shambling undead were on them, and they fell in a pile to the pavement. The officers screamed, louder than the gunshots, as they were disemboweled.
Victor looked at Lauren, whose face had gone white.
“Know how to use one of these?” Clint asked, another pistol somehow appearing from somewhere on his person.
Her usual response would have been “better than you,” as she’d been taught from a young age by her father. But after seeing what they’d just seen, she only nodded once, took the gun from him, and put it in her purse.
“Let’s get out of here,” Clint said.
“You’re a cop, too,” Lauren stuttered.
Clint laughed. “Ex.”
“Shouldn’t you be out there? Helping people? Helping your fellow police officers?”
“Helping people? They didn’t pay me enough, back when I wrote the uniform, to run out there to get eaten. As for my fellow officers, well, some of ‘em are alright, but most of them are assholes.” He paused, watching out the window as the recently mauled squad of cops clambered slowly to their feet, and looked around for fresh meat. “Nah, fuck ‘em. I’m getting out of the city. You with me, or not?”
“One sec,” Victor said, running into the kitchen. He knew he should be disturbed by his friend’s callous disregard for the people of the city he’d once sworn to protect, but really, would Victor do the same? He didn’t have any plans to take to the streets and direct the fleeing pedestrian traffic. And anyway, there wasn’t time for this sort of consideration. They would need food - especially if the grocery stores were unsafe already. He looked in his cabinets, in his fridge, in the grocery bags on his floor, from his shopping trip the day before. Granola bars. That’s all he had, two boxes of granola bars. Well, that and some mustard and yogurt. He emptied the bars into his bag and emerged from the kitchen.
“Let’s go,” he said, and they stepped out of his apartment and into the beginning of the end of the world.