After Z Read online

  Copyright 2019 J.S. Patrick

  All rights reserved. This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by United States of America copyright law. For permission requests:

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”~ Benjamin Franklin, in a letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy, 1789.

  “Wrong…Wrong…Wrong.”

  ~Donald J. Trump, response to Hillary Clinton. Presidential debate, 2016.

  Broke…

  Being broke isn’t the end of the world, but for my family and me, it’s where we mark the beginning of the end.

  Little Pink Houses…

  “I don’t see any way around it,” John Morgan said with a sympathetic shrug of his shoulders, “At this point, bankruptcy seems like your only option.”

  John had been handling our taxes since we opened Trucker Jim’s Trucker Gyms (see what I did there?), a small chain of fitness centers aimed at over-the-road truck drivers.

  Knowing most truckers don’t spend enough time at home to make practical use of a local gym membership, we thought we could fill a niche by opening a few exercise centers at different truck stops across the Midwest along Interstate 80.

  My wife, Victoria, was affecting a stoic front, but I could tell tears weren’t far from the surface. Her bright blue eyes were open wide and, at the moment, had a glassy sheen that threatened to release tears.

  Vicki is the strongest most self-reliant woman I have ever known. While I deployed to different parts of the world to meet and kill various enemies of America during twenty years of military service, my wife was basically a single mother of four for at least half, if not two-thirds of that time. Sure, we had our share of problems, but what couple doesn’t? In the end what mattered was that I always came home to her and she was always there for me when I did. So many soldiers I served with over the years returned to empty homes or in flag draped boxes.

  Victoria has always been the glue that holds our household together. Now, however, we were up against something that she couldn’t simply push through.

  “Bankruptcy is just…Oh god,” she whispered, dropping her eyes to the floor, “Ryan, what are we gonna do?”

  “Well, for starters I think we’ll have to put off buying that island in the Caribbean. At least until next year.” I said with a sullen grin. Trying, and missing by a mile, to lighten the mood.

  That earned me a sizzling glare, “Not now, Ryan,” She growled, “This is not the time for your wise-ass comments.” She said this with acid in her voice, but at least the tremble of fear I’d picked up on had been pushed to the wayside, even if only for the time being. Annoyance with me, temporarily trumping her fears over failing finances.

  We started out with one gym at a truck stop along I-80 in central Iowa and proceeded to open four more between Chicago and Omaha over the next two years.

  Eventually, soaring fuel prices began forcing a lot of truck drivers to cut extraneous expenses. As a result, conveniences offered at many truck stops took a real punch in the nuts.

  Six-dollar-a-gallon diesel just didn’t leave most drivers with the surplus cash needed to drop fifteen bucks a week on visits to the gym. As a result, Trucker Jim’s had turned from an overnight success into a losing venture and we ended up closing first one location, then a second six months later.

  And now, here we were, eighteen months down the road from our most profitable month, sitting in our accountant’s office talking about filing for bankruptcy and wondering what in the hell we were going to do next.

  Vicki and I had been friends with John and his wife, Angie, for nearly fifteen years and he knew how important this business venture was to us. Hell, he had invested ten grand at the beginning because he believed we had a solid business plan. We had been successful enough up to this point to pay back his initial investment with interest. Now, however, he would lose out on the five percent stake as his part of a silent partner arrangement we had agreed to. At least we could feel good about him having not actually lost any money on the deal.

  So there we sat, staring bankruptcy in the eye with four kids to support. Our eldest financial drain, Lynn, was twenty and just entering her sophomore year of college. The good folks who ran the University of Illinois so far hadn’t seen fit to offer free college education to the masses so, needless to say, a substantial portion of our yearly income went to making sure good old U of I could pay their light bill. Forty grand a year in tuition, however, seemed a small price to pay to begin emptying our nest.

  We love our kids, but their mother and I were looking forward to the day when we could chase each other around the house naked without fear of being walked in on. Not that I ever was able to convince Vicki to participate in that particular activity even before we had four kids in the house. But hey, a man can dream, right?

  We said our goodbyes to John and he promised to let us know if he could finagle a way to keep the business open. The pensive look on his face, though, told me that was probably just something he was saying in an effort to make us feel better for the moment.

  It didn’t work.

  We stepped out the front door of the office of John Morgan: Attorney At Law and hooked a left, strolling down the sidewalk toward the municipal parking lot at the end of the block. I took Vicki’s hand and we walked in silence, fingers interlaced, window shopping a bit as we passed some of the store fronts on Main Street.

  Vicki stopped and stared, transfixed, by a colossal diamond ring glimmering brightly in the window display of Smith Jewelry.

  “I was planning an aggressive campaign of not-so-subtle hints to you about this ring for our anniversary,” She said, with a sigh, “I guess I won’t waste the effort on it now.”

  Then, with tears standing in her eyes, she turned and looked up into my face and asked again, “What are we gonna do?”

  I pulled her close and wrapped my arms around her, “Don’t know.” I said, kissing her on top of her head, “We’ll figure something out. We always do. We’ve been through hard times before and we always seem to make things work.”

  This time I wasn’t quite so sure, but I felt I had to say something in my capacity as Comforter-in-Chief.

  It was true though. We had been teetering on the edge of destitution before Trucker Jim’s and had taken the chance on a small business loan. That, along with John’s investment capital, had turned into five pretty successful years. Hell, when we were first married we had no savings whatsoever and dreamed of a time when we were doing well enough to live paycheck to paycheck instead of constantly living two weeks behind.

  At that time, Vicki was in college working on her teaching degree. I was the new guy driving for a medium sized trucking company and working sixty-five hours a week.

  Between her college expenses and all the debt that I had racked up in my misguided youth, almost every penny we had went to some sort of bill. There were times that our entire paychecks were both gone before dark on payday and it was mac-n-cheese and ramen noodles three meals a day until the following payday.

  It didn’t happen overnight, but eventually we both moved into better paying jobs. Vicki graduated college with a High School Science degree and began her teaching career at the local high school.

  Prophetstown, Illinois, or P-town if you’re
a local, was your typical small, Midwestern town. Exactly the kind of town, in fact, that John Mellencamp liked to write songs about. A farming community that even had at least one little pink house that I know of.

  Vicki was popular with the kids and really enjoyed her job. At least a couple days each week she would bring home some story of a student telling her how much they enjoyed her class and, I swear to god, the occasional apple even got left on her desk. Who knew kids actually did that? Not me.

  I eventually took over the job of Operations Manager for my trucking company, putting me in charge of assigning loads to drivers and keeping track of inventory. It was a thankless middle-management job but it allowed me to be home every night instead of spending all my time on the road.

  There are guys who are happy spending their entire career as an over-the-road truck driver, but I decided I had missed enough of my children’s lives between trucking and multiple deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan during my time in the Army.

  My military career spanned nearly twenty years between service in the National Guard and a few years of active duty time with the 101st Airborne. During that time, I deployed a half a dozen times, three to Iraq and three to Afghanistan for a year each time. I don’t talk much about those experiences and for the most part my family doesn’t ask many questions about it.

  I’m sure you’re expecting me to reveal that I was some breed of elite soldier with an astronomical body count accumulated during my combat tours. I can assure you, however, that I was nothing but a run-of-the-mill grunt that was happy as hell the day he was released from the Army.

  I did make it part way through Special Forces training before age and wear and tear on my body caused me to retire early. To this day I remain absolutely convinced the last few months of training I missed was when they teach you the secret ways to kill any enemy with one finger, but alas, I shall never know.

  Vic and I finally reached our parking spot at the extreme far corner of the parking lot. We had just bought Vicki a new SUV and I was forbidden to park anywhere near other cars lest we get a ding from some psychotic maniac who just carelessly flings their door open into the car next to them. I tried, in vain, to explain that it should be safe to park her new baby next to the Lexus up front because they most likely didn’t want their expensive toy dinged up either.

  After she threatened to beat me with her belt I just decided it was safer to park and hike.

  Ok, so Vicki would never really whip me with her belt. At least I…I don’t think she would. She doesn’t wear belts anyway so I was probably safe on that score.

  She walked slowly around to the passenger side, but instead of getting in she just stared at the truck for a full ten seconds then put her hands on the hood, hung her head and started to cry. She wasn’t all wracking sobs and flying snot, just a convulsive shudder of her head and shoulders along with some sniffles.

  I’ve never been the most empathetic person. Don’t misunderstand me here, I have plenty of sympathy for people I see in pain, but I just never quite know the right way to go about comforting those I love when they’re upset. Mainly, I rely on potty humor and inappropriate timing when others might offer a hug or encouraging words.

  Yep, dick and fart jokes. That’s me in a nutshell.

  “Honey, it’s not that bad,” I said while still standing safely on the far side of the truck, “I know you really wanted the Explorer instead of the Tahoe, but it’s still a great truck.” I thought this a rather witty comment that would surely bring a degree of levity to this moment of overwhelming emotion.

  Her purse flew, seemingly, from out of nowhere and hit me full in the face in an explosion of Chap Stick, loose change, pens, pencils and what I’m pretty sure was a five-pound sledge hammer, along with various feminine hygiene products.

  All the shrapnel contained in the black leather handbag-bomb tinkled, bounced and skittered across the three adjacent parking stalls accompanied by a silence shattering wail.

  “Shut the fuck up, Ryan! For once will you stop with the wise-assed remarks and give some serious thought to what’s going on and what we’re going to do!”

  A stunned, drawn out silence inserted itself between us for a dozen heartbeats. I inhaled deeply and held it for a couple of seconds then let it out and slowly blinked my eyes.

  “I think a tampon poked me in the eye.” I said flatly as I rubbed at my watering left eye.

  That was it. That was the perfectly timed smart-assed remark I’d always dreamed of making. She grinned and gave a single humph. Then she chuckled and shook her head. Finally she was laughing and I knew we were on our way to serious problem solving mode, “Get in the Goddamn car,” she said, “Drive us home while we still have a home to drive to.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  Asshat…

  We stopped at a Kum and Go for gas on the way home and decided to run inside for something to drink before hitting the interstate for the hour-long drive home. When we walked through the door there were four or five people gathered around the cash register watching the wall-mounted TV behind the counter. They seemed completely unaware of our presence. Not a single one of them so much as glanced our way when the door chime dinged. After an apprehensive glance at Vicki I walked to the counter and spoke to a burly guy wearing a bright yellow reflective vest with Mid-West Power emblazoned across the back.

  “What’s going on?” I asked in a low voice. The tension in the place could be cut with a knife and I had the feeling if I spoke at normal conversational volume that at least one of the folks gathered here might jump out of their skin.

  “Zombie attack in some town called Hooppole,” he said without turning his head or eyes so much as a single millimeter in my direction, “Wherever the hell that is. They say it was just one and there’s nothing to worry about, but how the hell do they know where it came from or if it infected anyone else before it got sterilized?”

  Zombies weren’t exactly an apocalyptic occurrence at that time. Individual living-dead or small outbreaks would pop up out of nowhere, at most, maybe a few hundred times a year across the country, seemingly at random. The reporter explained, for the benefit of those who lived their lives under a rock, about how ten years prior, a small but determined group of medical researchers was searching for a way to fight a strain of flesh-eating bacteria known as Necrotizing Fasciitis.

  This particular microscopic ball of joy could be found in certain bodies of fresh water and would occasionally find a host, usually in the form of swimmers or water skiers.

  Anyway, what this little parasitic asshat does is to enter the body through a cut or scrape or some other break in the skin. It would then insinuate itself between the lower layers of epidermis and body fat and begin to eat the tissue.

  There were no drugs effective at killing it that wouldn’t also do serious harm to the infected individual so, more often than not, doctors would resort to amputation of any affected areas. First a finger or two, or maybe and arm below the elbow if the infection was on the forearm. Next they’d move up to the shoulder.

  There was a case of a sixteen-year-old girl in Mississippi who ended up having both legs amputated, one at the knee and one at the hip. After all that, she ended up dying anyway when some of the bacteria the doctors missed began to eat a hole in her spinal column just below the base of her skull. Obviously, there was nothing to amputate there and she died after a two-inch section of her spinal cord became completely necrotic.

  The news anchor droned on about how a confirmed zombie attack hadn’t happened in nearly six months and for one to show up in a small farming community in central Illinois certainly must mean it came into contact with others from the area. Then a rather graphic depiction of a zombie popped up in a split screen with the reporter on the left and a zombie on the right. The heading PATIENT ZERO was scrawled across the bottom of the zombie’s picture.

  As the reporter continued the story, we all watched in the silent disbelief that never seemed to go away during the recounting of
the unfortunate series of events that led to the emergence of the first zombie.

  INTERLUDE 1:

  Ten Years Before Z-Day

  Meet Rory Manning

  Here’s the story, as I remember it, of the world’s first zombie. All from news reports, newspaper articles and Discovery Channel specials on how it happened.

  Before the real thing arrived on the world’s doorstep, I was a huge fan of zombie movies and zombie fiction authors like Johnathan Maberry, Keith C. Blackmore, Max Brooks and of course George Romero. So, I, like many others, often fantasized about how I would survive the Zombie Apocalypse. The thought of scavenging through the leftovers of society in order to survive after most of the other people died off fascinated me to no end. Talk about being careful what you wish for.

  Meet Dr. Keith Lockhart, who, in January of the year 2008 was a brilliant microbiologist and bacteriologist in his twentieth year of practice.

  Dr. Lockhart and his team had developed a method whereby a genetically engineered bacteriophage was programmed to seek out and consume the Necrotizing Fasciitis bacteria. A bacteriophage is a virus that consumes bacteria and uses the bacterium itself to provide material for its own replication.

  In the laboratory this procedure worked wonderfully, first in petri dishes then later on in lab mice. The particular bacteriophage Doctor Lockhart selected for his experimental treatment was engineered to replicate a limited number of times then stop through engineered apoptosis or cellular suicide. To date, no one truly quite understands the secrets of genetic manipulation that allowed the good doctor to exert that level of control over the virus but, nevertheless, it worked. Cultures of the Necrotizing bacteria died in droves. Mickey and his friends were infected and cured. And then…