The Living Dead 2 (The Living Dead, #2)(110)
Monday, some aspiring comedian did a mock news report on the school radio station. “This just in: Romero was right! The dead walk! Signs of life even spotted in the Math Department!”
Tuesday, half my mailing lists were going off-topic to talk about strange events, disappearances, attacks. Some people suggested that it was zombies. Everybody laughed.
Wednesday, the laughter stopped.
Thursday, the zombies came.
Some people fought, some people ran, and some people hid. On Saturday, there were twenty-six of us here in the Life Science building, half of us grad students who’d been checking on our projects when chaos broke out on the campus. By Monday, that number had been more than cut in half. We were down to nine, and if Eva was worse, we might be looking at eight before much longer. That’s bad. That’s very bad. Because out of all of us, Eva is the one who has a clue.
Andrei leads me down the hall, through the atrium where the reconstructed Tyrannosaurus Rex stands skeletal judgment over us all, and into the lecture hall that we’ve converted, temporarily, into a sickroom. Eva is inside, reclining on the couch we brought down from the indefensible teacher’s lounge. She has her laptop open on her knees, typing with a ferocious intensity that frightens me. How long does it take to transcribe a lifetime? Is it longer than she has?
In the lecture hall, the smell of the Everglades hangs over everything, hot and ancient and green. The smell of sickness, burning its way through human flesh, eating as it goes. Eva hears our footsteps and lifts her head, eyes chips of burning ice against the sickroom pallor of her complexion. Acne stands out at her temples and on her chin, reminders that she’s barely out of her teens, the youngest of us left here in the hall. Her hair is the color of dried corn husks, and that’s what she looks like—a girl somehow woven out of corn husks that have been drenched with that hot swampy smell. She barely looks like Eva at all.
“It’s viral.” That’s the first thing she says in her reedy little voice, the words delivered with matter-of-fact calm. “Danny’s team over at the med school managed to isolate a sample and get some pictures. It looks sort of like Ebola, and sort of like the end of the f*cking world. They’re online now.” She smiles, the heartbreaking smile of a corn husk angel. “They’ve been trying all the common antivirals. Nothing’s making any difference in the progression of the infection.”
“Hello to you, too, Eva,” I say. A duct tape circle on the floor around the couch marks the edge of the “safe” area; any closer puts us at risk of infection. I walk to the circle’s edge and stop, uncertain what else to say. I settle for, “Professor Mason just gave an update. We’ve lost contact with the library.”
“That isn’t a surprise,” says Eva. “They had Jorge over there.”
“So?” asks Andrei.
“He updated his Facebook status about three hours ago to say that he’d been bitten, but they washed the wound out with bleach. Bleach won’t save you from Ebola, so it’s definitely not going to save you from Ebola’s bitchy big sister.” She coughs into her hand before saying, almost cheerfully, “Good news for you: the structure of the virus means it’s not droplet-based. So you don’t need to worry about sharing my air. Bad news for me: if Jorge took three hours to turn after being bitten, I’d say I have another hour—maybe two—before I go.”
“Don’t say that.” There’s no strength in Andrei’s command. He lost that when Eva got the blood in her eyes, when it became clear that she was going to get sick. She was the one who told him we needed to run. Losing her is proof that all of this is really happening.
Eva continues like she doesn’t hear him: “I’ve been collecting everyone’s data and reposting it. The campus network is still holding. That’s the advantage to everything happening as fast as it has. Professor Mason has a pretty decent file sharing hub in place. If you can keep trading data, keep track of where the biters are, you can probably maintain control of the campus until help arrives.” Matter-of-factly, she adds, “You’ll have to shoot me soon.”
Andrei is still arguing with her when I turn and leave the room. The smell of the swamp travels with me, hot decay and predators in hiding.
Minutes trickle by. Susan from the Drama Department gives way to Andy from Computer Science; Death Cab is replaced by Billy Ray Cyrus. There are no gunshots from inside. Professor Mason gives the afternoon update. Contact with the library has been reestablished. Six survivors, none of them bitten. There are no gunshots from inside. The hot smell of the swamp is everywhere, clinging to every inch of the campus, of the city, of the world. I wonder if the alligators have noticed that the world is ending, or if they have continued on as they always have…if they observe our extinction as they observed the extinction of the dinosaurs: with silence, and with infinite patience.
The risen dead have more in common with the alligators than they do with us, the living. That’s why the smell of the Everglades has followed them here, hanging sweet and shroud-like over everything. The swamp is coming home, draped across the shoulders of things that once were men. Was that how it began for the dinosaurs? With the bodies of their own rising up and coming home? Did they bring it on themselves, or did the dead simply rise and wash them from the world? The alligators might remember, if there was any way to ask them. But the alligators have no place here. Here there is only the rising of the dead.