After the Pandemic: Genocide (3): Times Square (780 hits)
Category: Quotes & StoriesLabels: After_the_Pandemic
Rating: 2 on 15 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by Axolotl (View user info) at 2005-12-05 09:01:21 EST
Jack McCallum's Introduction - http://www.ubersite.com/m/61238
After the Pandemic: Genocide (1): The Variants - http://www.ubersite.com/m/79933
After the Pandemic: Genocide (2): The Armory - http://www.ubersite.com/m/80119
-----------------------------------------------------------------
PART THREE- Times Square
-----------------------------------------------------------------
With an almighty roar, the engineers detonated the high explosives, sending a quiver through the very earth itself. As the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels imploded, the Hudson River burbled in a steaming caldron above where the tunnels lay. Debris and flame shot from the Weehawken entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel; on the Manhattan side, the army could only hope that some of the zombies were killed.
"General Riley, do you copy?" crackled the voice over the general's radio.
Riley lifted it to his lips and replied, "Loud and clear, over."
"Confirmation that the Lincoln Tunnel and the Holland Tunnel has been obliterated, over."
"Thank you, over and out."
* * *
Tobias stepped out onto the quiet 124th Street, where bands of roaming people huddled around bonfires and staggered helplessly in their stupor. Tobias could easily tell the three variants apart just by looking at them; the Variant As lay prone and dying on the asphalt or stood staring blankly into space. The Variant Bs wandered and mumbled to themselves like madmen, eyes blurry and pink, looking for uninfected blood.
Tobias quickly spotted a group of about thirty Variant Cs standing about in a circle, talking quietly in the street. He recognized a few faces from his apartment and neighborhood, including Angel, the woman who had infected him with the virus. Upon further study, they were speaking to and listening to a man in a doctor's uniform in the center of the circle. Tobias moved in to hear them.
"...from what we have studied and learned, the Variant C disease is particularly troublesome to live with," the doctor was saying. "In our subjects, they crave human blood, fresh and uninfected, and when they feed upon a human, they have an equal chance of killing or transmitting a Variant to him or her." the doctor was saying.
Upon seeing Tobias, he said, "Newcomer? Are you Variant C?"
"Yes, I am," Tobias said with a smile, looking around at his bloody and bemused companions. "I was infected last night." Angel gave him a coy smile at this.
"I'm Doctor Madison Grey," the middle-aged doctor said. "And like the rest of you, I have the virus. My brother died of AIDS, and now I have this..."
Recomposing himself, Grey continued, saying, "I have studied Mauer's Syndrome and looked into the nature and symptoms of the disease." He bared his neck and showed a long, fresh wound near his jaw, patched up with gauze. "We are all together in this, and might as well join together."
Tobias looked around him at his fellow "zombies." Most were men, although a few tough-looking women were scattered throughout. There were no children. The people in the Variant-infected group were hardened and cruel-looking, almost like they were backed into a corner and would fight their way to the death.
"Yes..." said Grey, noticing Tobias' circumspection. "There is no one under twenty-four in this group, nor over fifty-seven. It seems that the disease strikes each age group with different levels of mortality. Children and the old have no defense against the syndrome."
"What's wrong with us?" asked an Asian woman in her early thirties, a gaping wound in her stomach. A lanky man, evidently her boyfriend, supported her.
"How do I know?" Grey said gruffly. "I know the symptoms, not the cause or the cure. We can still feel pain and human emotions, which is far better than Variant B or Variant A. We bear the scars of our wounds, and the trauma of our affliction, and the loss of our children and revered elderly, but we have survived."
Out on the street corner about forty meters down a man emerged from behind a 7-11 with a long gun. He whistled loudly, and the thirty zombies, including Tobias, looked from Grey to the man.
From behind the 7-11 a mob of a dozen armed civilians ran across the parking lot, some with shotguns or pistols, others with common knives. One person in the group, a tall swarthy man, carried a short blade like a Roman sword. The Variants tensed up, preparing to scatter.
"Zombies!" they cried. "Killers! Kill them! We're taking back this neighborhood!"
"Oh, hell," Grey said, immediately turning to flee. The uninfected mob began to open fire.
The man who had first appeared drew within thirty yards, supporting his massive elephant gun. "Surrender here to us, you fucking killers! Fucking baby killers!" His comrades stood by his side in a phalanx, one of the hooded members holding a Glock in a sideways gangsta grip. A zombie strode out from Tobias' group, holding his hands in the air.
"Yo," a zombie said, nudging Tobias. He was pulling a pistol from his waistband; the blue bullets he discreetly forced into Tobias' palms indicated he was a Crip. "Take this, yo. We'll fight these guys." He had three pistols; he gave one to Tobias, another to one of his mates, and kept the first for himself.
"Come on," said the zombie envoy, hands raised before him and stepping warily out into the space between the two groups. "We don't want to kill you. We're just infected. We have the virus. There's no need to—"
The civilian pulled the trigger, releasing both barrels of the elephant gun onto the envoy's stomach. He stumbled back, a massive hole in his stomach from the shotgun intended to bring down large game.
Unthinking, Tobias rushed forward into the fallen envoy's place, firing his pistol. Astonished at the audacity, the enemy didn't react until the elephant gun-man and the gangsta had been downed by Tobias' steady hand. The two zombie gang members jumped into action, firing their pistols as well.
The fight was short and furious, with the three zombies charging forward into the poorly-armed mob. With their leaders writhing on the ground, the uninfected civilians fell backwards, dropping their weapons. The zombies who were not fighting, including Grey, inched forward as the opposition drew back.
The dark-skinned man with the long blade made a final brave attack, charging at Tobias and cutting his thigh with the sword. As dark blood ran from his jeans, Tobias pistol-whipped the man's forehead, almost breaking his skull apart with his newfound strength. Picking up the discarded sword, Tobias drove it into his prone victim's throat.
And that was all. The fight was over.
What should have been the most gruesome thing of the killings—the blood seeping onto the ground from the bullet wounds and shotgun blasts—was the most frightfully enticing for the zombies. "Sarcophilia," Grey muttered, staring with longing at the dead civilians' gaping wounds. "The love of flesh. The last symptom..."
"Should we...?" said the Asian woman, newly infected and nervous about her urges.
"Save the elephant-gun-man for me," Tobias said, letting his two-foot blade list his body. He strode over to the convulsing and gibbering leader of the mob, and administered the coup de grace with his sword.
"Young man, your leg," Grey said as the zombies closed in on the dozen civilians that had been slaughtered like sheep. Tobias looked down reflexively at the slash on his upper thigh, marveling that he didn't feel it.
"I didn't know, I didn't actually...feel..." Tobias remarked.
"Was anything else in your bloodstream when you were...infected?" Grey asked slyly. "It might prove a point I was trying to make when I was a doctor, before I was..."
"Just..." Tobias began embarrassedly. "Doctor, I don't need it anymore. I don't need any smack to help me live, I feel fine."
"I believe the opiates in the heroin mixed with the virus have dulled your nerve cells," Grey said, faintly triumphantly. "You cannot feel pain. Or sexual pleasure, for that matter either."
Tobias stared at Grey for one long, unblinking second, gave a curt smile, and leaned down to devour his prey. Without any reservation, Tobias sunk his teeth into the soft belly of the elephant gun-man.
It felt so natural, Tobias thought, as he consumed the man's flesh, carefully laying bare his stomach with a surgical dental precision, removing his swollen and plump liver and feasting upon it. It was as though all humanity and revulsion had departed him; the blood had awakened a deep primal urge.
Now the rest of the zombies were kneeling down to tentatively eat the fallen defenders of New York. Grey and Angel included, the zombies gorged themselves on the dead, feeling their fatigue evaporate as the salty iron taste of human blood ran down their throats like butter. They ate their fill, stripping the bones of flesh, and taking all the weapons the militia had dropped.
"We need to defend ourselves against people like these," Tobias said. "Everyone grab a weapon,"
"We're going to run out of humans though...of people we can eat..." said Angel.
"No..." Tobias said, almost as though he were posing a question to himself. "There are humans left. Not in New York, but elsewhere...in New Jersey. We all need to stick together, though. People hate us, and we need blood and flesh. We have to stay together."
"124th Street militia!" a zombie said in triumph, raising the heart of a dead human and squeezing a torrent of blood from it.
* * *
"Keep firing!" Gordon said over the din of the echoing gunshots.
"They're so human, though," Preston replied, hesitating with his finger on the trigger of his M-16.
"Help us!"
A massive wave of zombies was about to overcome a fireteam of GIs fortified by the MTV headquarters. They had expended their ammunition and were fighting with the butts of their rifles and combat knives. Preston and Gordon aimed down the sights of their guns and sprayed bullets into the zombies, cutting them down in droves and adding to the piles of suicidal creatures littering Times Square. The zombies bled dark brown fluid when shot, the soldiers had discovered, except for Variant A, which barely bled at all.
An eerie silence settled over the Square. The hundred and twenty-member Company B was deployed all over the square, from the Army Recruiting center under the high wall of corporate advertising to the southern end where Broadway went west and 7th Avenue went east. Squads and fireteams were barricaded and fortified under the eaves of the largest Toys 'R' Us in the world,
"Everyone okay?" Captain Farrell called out. "Platoon leaders report in!"
From the exterior of a studio where David Letterman taped his shows, Lieutenant Vasquez reported, "Two of my guys are dying, and four wounded."
Corporal Gordon looked down at the bloodied corpse of his CO, Lieutenant Davis, shot by a well-armed Variant C zombie while defending the southern half of Times Square. Two more from Gordon's platoon were prostrate on the ground, paralyzed by the bites of the zombies.
"Lieutenant Davis is killed," Gordon reported. "And two of our men have been bitten...they're infected."
From the MTV headquarters, where once adoring TRL fans had competed for the attention of the cameramen outside the studios, five American soldiers lay dead, torn apart by a sheer human (zombie?) wave. "Five dead, eight—no, nine—nine hurt," said the final lieutenant.
"All right..." Captain Farrell said, nervousness in his voice. "We're going to pull back out of here. Just to Broadway and West 106th. Take the wounded and dead, but if they're infected, leave them where they lie."
"Thank God," Preston muttered.
Gordon knelt down next to the twitching infected soldiers, Stevens and Daniels, sitting up and staring blankly. They were infected, and had not died, but they were no longer whole.
"Stevens? Daniels?" Gordon called. The two soldiers did not look up, but just stared with half-closed eyelids into nowhere. They were infected with the Variant A virus; they would never again awaken.
The remaining living soldiers retreated from their positions to Captain Farrell by the recruiting center in the north part of Times Square. The streets of New York were like the bottoms of wide manmade canyons, the buildings of midtown rising up spectacularly in the gleam of the setting sun.
All the buildings, however, were empty. Manhattan, with a former population of a million and a half, was decimated terribly. A half-million of the lucky had evacuated the city before the lockdown. Four hundred thousand were infected in Manhattan, and an equal amount in Brooklyn and Queens. Worst of all, well over two hundred thousand were dead alone in Manhattan.
Those who survived on Manhattan island, around four hundred thousand, were huddled in the few uninfected bastions of uptown, the upper west side, and Greenwich Village, where militias of civilians with shotguns and pikes held off the zombies. In midtown, formerly the capital of the world, with its Broadway plays, Times Square, Empire State Building and Grand Central Terminal, was deserted and covered in the bodies of the dead and soulless husks of the infected.
The actors and actresses had fled the city, Times Square was a bloodbath, the Empire State Building lay stark and dusty in the quiet silence of the city's death, and Variant B zombies lurched around Grand Central. A more deadly manifestation of the evils of the disease were the growing independent militias of Variant C zombies, well-armed and dangerous, searching for human flesh as the made their way around the city.
Up on the edge of Central Park, Tobias Collins gathered zombies under his influence, arming them by breaking into abandoned arms stores and armories, and preparing to launch an offensive into uptown. At the Columbus Circle, Company B, Teaneck Battalion of the 50th New Jersey Infantry Brigade, passed by the roundabout, burnt-out cars and bodies lining the streets.
Twelve hundred Americans had died in Katrina. This was far worse. In Iraq, the emerging disease from Africa had struck the troops hard, spreading rapidly amongst the American occupation. President John Derringer, a Democrat representative from Maryland, had immediately sent more troops to the dismay of his party, but the new brigades had fell to the virus. There was no more violence in Iraq; neither side had the ability to fight.
In the Teaneck Armory, Jennifer Grant and the rest of the civilians gathered around a large military-owned wide screen plasma television to listen to CNN. Vice President Russell Effinger, a hardline partly-conservative Ohio senator who had previously been a Brigadier General, was addressing the American people.
"President Derringer and I have discussed these matters in a great amount," he was saying, his jowls trembling as he read off of a paper. "Yesterday, the 17th of September, the governors of New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut have ordered the evacuation or quarantining of their populations closest to New York City. I'll be honest—things are not going well in the city. Drastic measures have to be taken to—"
"What does he expect?" a man sitting next to Jennifer Grant said angrily, gesturing with a finger at the television. "We don't have any more soldiers ever since that jackass Derringer sent two divisions into Iraq after the disease—"
"Yo, shut up, I can't hear," a man said. The former quieted down, and the Vice President continued.
"—history cannot be preserved at the cost of the blood of Americans. The Lincoln Tunnel and the Holland Tunnel have both been destroyed, and air strikes are planned against the Brooklyn Bridge and the Spuyten Duyvel. If we have to blow the George Washington Bridge up, if we have to nuke Times Square or ram a plane into the Empire State building, so be it. September 11th was nothing compared to what I—the president and I—will do to this city if necessary."
"Ah," grunted Effinger's detractor, getting up from his folding chair and moving away.
Effinger continued. "This infection, this monstrous disease, will end here in New York City. We are moving in more troops and sealing off all routes in and out of the city. Chemical weapons have been considered, as has been the utter destruction of New York. President Derringer has the option to firebomb the city, but this is very serious. We must protect America, but be judicious in our application of force. If we dropped an atomic bomb on New York, the problem would be solved, but at what cost? More lives will be lost, but rest assured, this challenge will be met and America will be victorious."
User Reviews
Submitted by awesome_face (user info) at 2006-03-28 16:04:10 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
This series makes me hard.
Submitted by thecaes (user info) at 2005-12-12 23:03:22 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
I like how this is shaping up. I like your take on the Variants...I see no problem with C-Variants using firearms. They're pretty much regular people, but with enhanced physicality and bloodlust...so why wouldnt' they use guns?
The only thing I didn't like is the way Effinger was speaking. I don't think any catastrophe could make a politician use the phrase 'nuke the whole city' or 'ram a plane into it' or whatever he said. Totally not official enough. Also, I wouldn't expect a politician to be so forthright in his delivery.
Good description on the zombie feasting, too.
Submitted by mbstateside (user info) at 2005-12-06 12:24:01 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Good stuff!
And now onto part 4
Submitted by Axolotl (user info) at 2005-12-05 22:46:23 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
Submitted by hcp28 (user info) at 2005-12-05 18:21:56 (#)
Ranking: 2
I don't know how I feel about Variant C's actually picking up rifles and handguns to fight. I would think they might arm themselves with body armor or some knives but aren't they killing machines in and of themselves? It would be interesting to read how they will solve their food problems and quell the ranks of the Variant A and B. However, I always thought Variant B's were aware of their surroundings and who they were as well, but they were more affected by sunlight and did not suffer from the neverending cycle of life and death that Variant C's did.
=------------------------------
They will be using hand-to-hand weapons most predominantly, starting with Tobias' seizing of the gladius sword that one of his attackers dropped. The zombies only fought with the firearms due to the extreme duress of the situation, but soon they will be relying on massive human waves and melee weapons and armor to fight.
I was thinking of developing a tactic that the more aware and intelligent Variant Cs would use the Variant Bs and As as cannon fodder, just throwing them forward in massed assaults against weaker American Army positions.
Submitted by hcp28 (user info) at 2005-12-05 18:21:56 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
I don't know how I feel about Variant C's actually picking up rifles and handguns to fight. I would think they might arm themselves with body armor or some knives but aren't they killing machines in and of themselves? It would be interesting to read how they will solve their food problems and quell the ranks of the Variant A and B. However, I always thought Variant B's were aware of their surroundings and who they were as well, but they were more affected by sunlight and did not suffer from the neverending cycle of life and death that Variant C's did.
Submitted by JonnyX (user info) at 2005-12-05 18:18:06 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by Professional_Peon (user info) at 2005-12-05 12:48:52 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Submitted by BLITZKREIG_BOB (user info) at 2005-12-05 10:37:07 (#)
Ranking: 2
*gives crips gesture*
-----------------
AHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAAAAAAA
Submitted by simple_catalyst (user info) at 2005-12-05 11:42:32 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by pen_name (user info) at 2005-12-05 11:31:28 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by Axolotl (user info) at 2005-12-05 11:22:30 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
"Do the cripwalk"
Submitted by BLITZKREIG_BOB (user info) at 2005-12-05 10:37:07 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
*gives crips gesture*
Submitted by MyNameIsTim (user info) at 2005-12-05 10:34:28 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
phenominal. keep it up, and you'll begin to approach caes and jack's level of pandemic awesomeness.
Submitted by Axolotl (user info) at 2005-12-05 09:43:10 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
I don't really know about the Crip-Blood thing as far as NY goes, but there was a murder a few years back, and when the cops took the bullet out of the victim's brain, the bullet was blue. The Crips had done it as a rite of initiation.
Submitted by Nellypaal (user info) at 2005-12-05 09:34:09 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Do you get Crips in NYC?
Submitted by HadToBeDone (user info) at 2005-12-05 09:13:39 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Can you make a character named Stubbs?
http://www.stubbsthezombie.com