“And then what?” Gene said. “They become normal, human, again? Slowly, but eventually, they get better.”
“I haven’t seen any evidence of anyone getting better,” I said. “Have you? Has anyone?”
No one nodded. Kind of killed the theory; made it useless without something to support the idea, other than mere wishful thinking.
“What about the people they bit, would they become human again, assuming it was a virus?” Allison said.
“I was thinking about why some are fast and some are slow,” Megan said.
“Did you know Megan worked at The Living Dead Museum? It was created not long after George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead was filmed here. Right here in Butler County,” Andy said.
Go figure. “Didn’t know that.”
“I do. I mean, I did. But what I was saying, what I was thinking was, the problem with a zombie is that it’s dead, right? Reanimated flesh. Like what Frankenstein did with his monster. Brought a corpse to life, right?”
I thought it was rhetorical. When Megan didn’t keep talking, I verbally agreed.
“Okay, so what happens to a body the longer it is dead?” she said.
“It decays,” Charlene said, and dropped a tot back onto the paper plate on her tray.
“They do. That’s right. But until they’ve been embalmed, there is all of that blood in them. And if blood isn’t circulating, it’s pooling. So if a dead zombie is chasing people, sure, at first it’s fast. Eventually, that non-circulating blood is going to catch up with it. It’s going to all sit in the thing’s legs, right?”
“Right,” I said.
“So, rigor mortis sets in. It’s what makes them slower,” she said. “But not just slower. It also means they are decaying. Ever wonder why you can stab them in the skull so easily? The bones are far more brittle. If they were healthy, there’s no way I’d of been able to push a pocket knife, or even a hunting knife into the brain as easy as I have.”
“That makes sense,” Allison said. “I mean, that really makes a lot sense.”
I nodded. “It does.”
“But will they turn normal again?”
“I don’t see how they can. They’ve died. They’re dead. A better question might be, will they just eventually stay dead? Maybe the rigor mortis will stop them, and hunger and time will kill them, again, but for good,” Andy said.
“I still don’t understand why there aren’t more survivors, or government action, or military involvement,” Robert said. “I can’t believe that you guys are the last of New York, and we’re the last of Pennsylvania. That’s just, I don’t know, it seems impossible. Improbable. It all happened too fast to wipe out billions of people. Right? Or am I wrong? Am I missing something?”
“I agree,” Michelle said. “So none of us got the flu shot. There’s got to be more like us, people who are against it. Hell, the Appalachian area alone has got to be filled with people who didn’t get the shot.”
“There are probably a good percentage of people who didn’t get the vaccination, but have they survived not getting bitten, too? How many planes have crashed, or trains derailed, or cruise ships sunk, or are floating aimlessly about on the oceans?” Gene said. “Forget the military, they get vaccinated for everything. Those shots probably killed our armed forces in days. Days.”
And the military had a heads up, too. Just not a timely warning, unfortunately. I still suspected there were more military and political groups around, alive. It was a guess, of course, but seemed likely. “We have to assume pockets of people are all that is really left. Maybe pockets per county or town. Maybe only thousands of people per state, but not much more. I don’t know,” I said. “It is pretty mind blowing.”
“So, I want to get this right,” Gene said. “Your plan--what you guys want to do--is go to…Mexico? That’s what you were saying, what you want? To cross the border because you think it will be safer there?”
I nodded. “It was my initial thought. Poorer countries didn’t vaccinate their people. It’s really all I was going with. I mean, this all came out of nowhere, I heard something on the radio…”
“Radio?” Gene said.
I shook my head. “That was days ago.”
“But they’d still have zombies. Travelers, and people that were vaccinated, and then people who were bitten, too,” Andy said. ”That country isn’t infection free. Or do you think it is?”
“They would have zombies, too. No doubt about it. But less than what’s happened here in our country. And the wall we built to stop illegals from sneaking into the U.S., could now be used to keep infected Americans out. You’ve got the wall and the Rio Grande as a natural border. The things hate water,” I said, but remembered the zombies aimlessly fell from the bridge over the Genesee River when we’d climbed onto the Coast Guard vessel. They didn’t know enough to stay away from the river, despite not appreciating water. If they learned, however, it might not happen again.
“But why leave? Why risk crossing the country to get there, when we have everything we need here?” Andy said. He spread his arms wide and looked around the cafeteria.
“He’s right,” Gene said. “This place is great, but it isn’t going to last. And hiding here, it’s not going to rid the country of the millions of zombies. We’d just be biding time until we eventually ran out of supplies. And we would run out of supplies.”
“We’ve got months’ worth of food,” Robert said.
“Exactly. Months. Then what? Then what do we do? Raids? Visit Costco and Sam’s Club?” Gene shook his head. He reached for his wife’s hand. “Chase has a point.”
“But Mexico?” Megan said. She sounded doubtful. I shared that doubt, but wouldn’t admit as much.
“Look,” I said. “I wasn’t telling you this to convince you to come with us. I was just telling you what we were thinking, explain what we’d been trying to do. That’s all. Nothing else.”
“You don’t want us to go with you?” Gene furrowed his brow, narrowed his eyes.
“That’s not what I mean. You want to come with us, that’s fine. There’s safety in numbers, and the work can be more evenly divided.” Thought about clearing a building, or making that run through a Costco or Sam’s. Everyone takes a turn, makes it better than just Dave and I always doing it.
“I know you weren’t,” Gene said. He looked at his wife, and she nodded. And he nodded back. “I’ve got a bus.”
I closed my eyes. We didn’t need a bus. We needed to travel a few thousand miles. We needed another plane. A bus was shit, a shit method of transportation.
“No,” Melissa said. “It’s not like you’re thinking. It’s a school bus.”
I was glad my eyes were closed, because when I rolled them, no one saw. The fact that guy had a school bus really didn’t make that bus any better, any more attractive an offer.
“Their right,” Megan said. “I’ve seen it. It’s a converted school bus perfectly designed for the apocalypse. If Romero had seen this thing, he’d of used it in one of his movies. It’s even got one of those cattle scoopers on the front, you know -- like the ones you see on trains? They clear the tracks of animals and well, shit, anything, so the train can chug right along.”
“Thing will destroy any cars blocking the road. Destroy them.” Gene smiled, grinned really.
I looked at Allison, Charlene, and then at Dave.
Dave cocked his head to one side. “Let’s see what this thing looks like.”
“Good.” Gene clapped his hands together. “Great.”
“All right,” I said. “So where is this monster masher of yours?” I asked.
“Well, see, that’s where there’s something of a problem,” Gene said, his smile gone, his shoulders deflated. “It’s not here.”