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Mark Tompkins
Published by Undead Literature
Copyright © 2014 Mark Tompkins
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any semblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Edited by Josh “Shotgun” Parsons
Cover Art: “Sars Virus” by Dream Designs. Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net.
This story is dedicated to ELana Tompkins
Purge
A splitting headache forced Alicia from her restless dreams. Her throat was dry and she swallowed, painfully. I’m still sick…she swallowed again, testing the pain; it was still there…and still alive. But, I think today is the day.
Three months ago, she received a shipment of African fruit bats from Uganda for research purposes. Commissioned from the university, she was delighted to work with the little mammals and dove vigorously into her work. Not long after, her husband became ill, and three days later he was dead; his guts turned to mush. The loss was still painful, frighteningly so, and the current situation made it even worse. She’d heard time heals all wounds and knew that was a luxury she would not have. She turned her head to look out the window and pain lanced behind her eyes. She squinted against the daylight, her eyes adjusting, and gazed through the wooden slats at the street beyond.
Her husband worked at the Department of Motor Vehicles and shared the same air with approximately 1500 people that day. They were all dead now too, at least 94 percent of them. With the highest mortality rate of any contagion in history, this mutant strain of the Marburg virus had decimated the population of Bossier City in only a few short months. Not all of the infected were dead. With a five day incubation period, it was possible, though not likely, to stay sick for weeks afterwards while the filo virus slowly devoured your internal organs. Death usually resulted from massive hemorrhaging. Of course, some people died within hours, it seemed the virus affected people differently.
A man stumbled by on the sidewalk just outside the window. He was close enough for her to see the snot and blood dripping from his nostrils. The consistency of tapioca pudding, each belabored breath misted it into the air. She wondered how it could have come to this in such a short amount of time. He passed from view, staring at the cement and she heard the sudden squeal of tires on the road. A loud “thump” reverberated through the wall as the man was hit by the car…or truck…she couldn’t see outside to tell, but she knew what had happened all the same.
She tried to care, tried to conjure up a tear for the fallen man, but she didn’t have it in her. She’d witnesses so much death she’d become numb to it. Muffled voices floated to her as someone asked the man if he was okay. Not from close up, she would have bet a million dollars on that one, people didn’t get close to other people any more.
She could see the scene unfolding in her mind’s eye. The man getting out of his car, unable to see from the gore covering his windshield, running towards the fallen man. Not too close, just enough to make himself feel better, as if he was really trying to help this diseased scourge. He may have done it out of pity, or to make sure the man was sick. If the man was truly sick, then the driver would reason it was okay, the man was going to die anyway and he probably did him a favor by making it quicker. If he wasn’t sick, it really didn’t matter much more anyway. But it wasn’t okay, nothing was anymore. Millions of people were dying and the immune didn’t know how to handle it. They were the blessed, yet felt the most lost in this new emerging world; a chrysalis birthing death, disease and sorrow.
She squeezed her eyes tighter, trying to dispel the mental pictures playing in her head. It didn’t work…she imagined the driver discovering the remnants of the man in the ditch, dismembered and as his bloated body sloughed apart from the impact. She knew he would feel a sense of relief that he’d not killed one of the few uninfected, they were the only people worth saving, they were the only ones that mattered anymore. The rest were doomed to die, percentages be damned, it was how the infected were seen. In this case, it was obvious the man was not going to make it.
“I’m sorry, so sorry,” the man outside said before slamming his car door and tearing off down the street, windshield wipers trying to erase the evidence of the chance encounter.
It was a scene that was common nowadays. People didn’t really walk anymore, they stumbled, like the zombies in those George Romero films. That’s what the world looked like now, a zombie apocalypse, but these zombies were very much alive, waiting for a cure that would never come; there was no one left with the skill set to make it. These zombies would not walk the streets for ages, trying to satiate some unexplainable hunger for human flesh, most would not last the week. They were the real walking dead and they knew it.
Alicia opened her eyes and coughed up a wad of phlegm, thick and bloody, and her throat painfully objected. She was severely dehydrated and needed water. She eased to the side of the bed, trying not to make any sudden movements, and put her feet on the floor…so far, so good. She braced herself and stood up, slowly, like in a slow motion replay, and a wave of dizziness threatened to topple her from her newfound heights. She closed her eyes, fighting the feeling, trying to regain composure and sighed in relief when it came. She opened her eyes and began the slow walk to the kitchen. It was just around the corner, but it seemed like miles as she concentrated on putting one foot in front of another, marching to the beat of the drum in her head. For some reason, having something to focus on helped, even if it was the pain her heartbeat caused.
She opened the cabinet and pulled a glass from the shelf. It slipped from her weak grasp and shattered on the tile floor; a homemade claymore mine sending tiny shards of glass flying through the air, embedding in the white pasty flesh of her legs. There were only a few, but they hurt and she cursed herself for her clumsiness. Too weak to care, she pulled another glass from the shelf, this one safely tucked inside both clenched hands. She placed it in the sink and turned the faucet handles on, nothing happened. She twisted them further and still no water.
“Damn,” she croaked, her vocal chords rusty from disuse. “I’m so thirsty.”
Realizing there would be no water from any of the faucets, she reached up to the shelf above the glasses. That was where the magic potions rested and she perused the labels, Ibuprofen, Acetaminophen, Nyquil…yeah, Nyquil, that helped everything. She pulled the bottle from the shelf and twisted the lid off, anxious for some sort of relief. She grabbed the Ibuprofen and spilled a few tablets on the counter. She picked up four of them, popped them in her mouth and tipped the Nyquil bottle back. It was half full and she drank all of it down, knowing it would only be a little while before it took effect, and she hoped it would be enough to make her feel a little better.
She knew what she had done was dangerous, at least it would be normally. She was infected now and it didn’t really matter if she abused her kidneys anymore, they would be a bloody mass of useless tissue before long anyway. She didn’t know how she had contracted the disease, for the last two months, she’d been immune, but she knew nature had a way of getting around immunization by the process of mutation. The virus had mutated, she didn’t need a medical specialist to tell her that, she knew it because she was now coughing up blood from her lungs. It had come around for revenge…for bringing it here, killing off everyone she knew before killing her too. It had made her watch first.
She knew she was dying and in a way, she was relieved. People always think they want to be the ones to live through Armageddon. To have the world to themselves and reset the laws of the land. She’d once been a staunch believer of that herself. But now that it was a reality, she was tired of seeing eve
ryone around her die. Tired of stepping over dead bodies while people in white suits, coughing under their plastic bubble helmets, drug them into piles and pretended not to be sick. They would be next, white suits couldn’t protect you from The Bossier Strain, nothing could.
That’s what the news had come to calling it, The Bossier Strain, like some demented tribute to a bestselling novel. She shortened it and called it BS, but it wasn’t an acronym for Bossier Strain. The media always had a flair for the dramatic, but in the end, they faded into black like the rest of humanity. People were too sick to go to work, there was no more news. What information there was came from the radio, from people hiding from society, claiming victory over The Bossier Strain, some claiming a government conspiracy had this coming a long time ago and it was a plan to wipe out 6