Zombie Pulp

3

It was Doc who set up the shelter.

And like scattered metal filings drawn to a magnet, we came from every direction and he took us in like a crazy old lady collecting stray cats. See, Doc was an extremely practical man. He’d worked for the CDC years before the world shit its pants and the dead started rising. He knew sooner or later one of those nasty bugs the CDC field teams were always studying in remote places like Ghana and Zaire was going metastasize and become an infectious plague of biblical proportions.

So he took precautions.

He bought up an abandoned Air Guard weather station in Carbon County, PA. It dated from the Cold War and had a control center made out of reinforced concrete and steel with a bomb shelter below that could hold sixty people. Using his own money and financial support from a few wealthy friends with like minds, he updated the structure, put in dorms and a dining hall, generators, an air filtration system and a water purification plant. He supplied it with freeze-dried foods and military MREs, medical equipment, survival gear, you name it.

And then it happened.

A mutant virus appeared out of nowhere and mimicked the symptomology of pneumonic plague. Spread by a variety of vectors including the wind, the water, insect bites, and human contact, it ravaged the world. Within sixteen weeks, the world population was reduced nearly two-thirds by all estimates and then with the resulting collapse of the ruling political, industrial, and military infrastructure, there was only chaos. People got sick, they died, the world fell apart…and then the most incredible thing happened: the dead came out of their graves.

And they were hungry.

Nobody knew where the virus came from, not really, but there were lots of theories. Most claimed it had more than a little to do with the BIOCOM-13 satellite which had been sampling the upper atmosphere for alien microbes, was cored by a meteorite, and crashed outside Clovis, New Mexico. Clovis was the first city in the world to become a graveyard. But after that, they all went.

As it turned out, a great many people were immune to the virus. And one by one they began showing up in Carbon County. Doc and his boys gathered up as many as they could. Maria came from Pittsburgh and Shacks from Philly; Sonny came from Newark and Murph drifted in from Delaware. Earl had been one of the first and he was still there. Me, I barely escaped Buffalo. And they kept coming: New England, the Midwest, even the deep South. Some died, some were killed, some went by disease, and others were taken by the Wormboys. And still others won the lottery and were culled. But more always came. Always.

There were nearly forty people in the shelter now…what was six to save the lot?

What was six?

Yeah, that Doc was really something.

He gathered his flock, he tended them, fed and fattened them, kept them safe and sound. Then somewhere along the way he made a deal with the Devil and the Devil’s name was Dragna. Nobody seemed to know shit about Dragna other than the fact that he or it had wielded together dozens and dozens of zombie tribes into a single cohesive unit that was about as close to an army as you were going to get this side of the global holocaust. He was to the Wormboys and Wormgirls what Dracula was to bloodsuckers, more or less.

Somehow, someway, Doc had struck a bargain of sorts with this monster.

So every few months, Dragna demanded his payment, his protection money, like a good little extortionist from hell. And as long as Doc and his people played ball, there was safety. But the day we didn’t, Dragna would send his troops in by the thousands.

Yeah, Doc. Good old Doc. Father, therapist, priest, general, saint and prophet to those of us in the shelter. He was essentially good, essentially kind. He took care of everything from keeping his people busy to feeding and clothing them and delivering their babies and even presiding over makeshift weddings now and again. Everyone looked up to him. Everyone loved him. Everyone respected him. They did what he said and obeyed his rules and he kept them alive and somewhat sane.

With the good he did it was easy to forget he also created the lottery.

And in my mind that made him flawed, less than human. He was the farmer and we were the livestock. He raised us like pigs and brought us to slaughter come season.

And because of that, I hated him as much as I loved him.