Resurrection: A Zombie Novel by - (ready player one ebook .TXT) 📕

Lane ordered all the men but Roland into the cooler for the night. Carol and Annie were allowed to sleep on the floor near the bathrooms, but Hughes, Frank, Kyle, and Parker couldn’t be trusted, especially not in the dark, not when Roland and Lane were down a man and needed to sleep.

Hughes took it in stride. He wasn’t planning to move against Lane or Roland in the night anyway. They’d be on guard. Sure, it was dark. One would be asleep and the other one tired, but they’d be on guard. They’d expect an attack and be ready to shoot.

The best time to strike would be when Roland and Lane are distracted, preferably by a pack of those things. They couldn’t possibly make it all the way to Olympia and then up to an island without running into a pack or even a horde. That’s when Roland and Lane would go down.

So what did Hughes care if he spent the night locked in the cooler? All he wanted was sleep. Roland and Lane wouldn’t sleep well—that was for sure—but Hughes would. In the morning he’d be fresh and rested and ready to kick the shit out of sleep-deprived Roland and Lane.

Frank grumbled under his breath about being locked up. Hughes understood. Kyle cringed when Lane padlocked the door. Hughes understood that, as well. But Parker banged on the door and shouted that Lane was an asshole. That, Hughes did not understand. That was just stupid. Parker might make an outstanding foxhole companion, but he was no good at all under purely psychological pressure.

The cooler was big enough for everyone to spread out. It was a long rectangular metal box about the size and shape of a shipping container. Hughes and Frank took spots on the floor near the back. Parker sat by the door, no doubt so he could bang on it some more when he got mad. Kyle stayed up there with him. Those two were always fighting. Kyle was perfectly welcome in the back away from Parker and his combustible attitude, but those two had some issues to resolve. Hughes could hear them arguing in low voices. Maybe they’d come to terms. They’d better, or Hughes would crack their heads together once Lane was out of the way.

Hughes lay on his back on the steel floor and laced his fingers behind his head. Frank stuck a Maglite between his teeth so he could use two hands to move some boxes out of his way.

“Ain’t this a bitch,” Frank said.

“S’all right,” Hughes said. “Just try to get some sleep. Rest up for tomorrow.”

Frank took the Maglite out of his mouth and kicked the last box out of the way. Then he shut the light off and fidgeted while trying to get comfortable on the floor. The cooler was pitch black now, so Hughes closed his eyes. He saw spectral purple afterimages on the back of his eyelids.

The electricity had been off for a long time. The walls and the air inside had long ago adjusted to the ambient temperature in the store, which wasn’t much different now from the ambient temperature outside, which was getting colder by the day. Still, Hughes felt just a tiny bit colder inside the cooler. It was probably just his imagination.

Frank finally stopped fussing around and got still. “I wonder if the president got bit,” he said in the darkness.

“The president of what?” Hughes said.

“Of the country,” Frank said.

“The hell you talking about, the president getting bit?”

“Can you imagine him chasing his staff around the White House?”

Hughes chuckled and shook his head in the dark. “Frank, my man.”

“Go ahead and laugh, but it’s not funny. Just about every famous person you’ve ever heard of has either been bitten or eaten. Think about it. Stephen King. Justin Bieber. Barack Obama. Bit. Imagine getting chased in Hollywood by Arnold Schwarzenegger after he’s been bit.”

“Jesus Christ, Frank. The president hasn’t been bit. He’s in a bunker somewhere.”

“Okay, but Arnold Schwarzenegger isn’t in a bunker somewhere unless he dug it himself in his yard.”

“Go to sleep, Frank.”

“I can’t stop thinking about this stuff.”

“Then think about it quietly, okay?”

Hughes’ back hurt. Sleeping on the floor wasn’t doing him any favors. He rolled onto his side to relieve the pressure, but the pain just moved into his shoulder.

“A buddy of mine used to work summers as a mechanic down in Antarctica,” Frank said. Hughes sighed. Frank was not going to be quiet anytime soon. “They even sent him to the station at the South Pole once. How awesome would that be?”

Hughes just wanted to sleep, but he didn’t want to be rude and couldn’t get comfortable anyway. Frank wasn’t the smartest person around, but he was an okay guy, and anyway he was Hughes’ friend.

“You want to go to the South Pole?” Hughes said. He had no idea they had a station down there.

“Well, kind of,” Frank said. “I mean, it would be cool, wouldn’t it? That’s not something you see every day. The guys at the South Pole station are probably fine.”

Yes, Hughes supposed the scientists at the pole probably were fine for the time being. “Until they run out of food and fuel. Nobody’s going down there to get them.”

Hughes imagined himself stuck in Antarctica. What would he do? Would he even try to get back to the warm parts of the world, or would he hold out on the ice as long as he could until he died peacefully? Freezing to death had to be better than getting chewed up by teeth. He imagined a team of scientists braving the most hostile conditions on earth and actually making it back, only to return home to—this.

“You know it’s winter down there in August?” Frank said.

Yes, Hughes knew it was winter in August on the bottom half of the world. “So I guess it’s spring for them now that we’re going into November. How many people are down there?”

“I don’t know. Not a lot. They have a pretty small crew during the winter. My buddy left at the end of the summer. Most people leave then. The ones who stay are hard-core. Everybody goes a little bit crazy. My buddy says they have a name for it. They call it going toast.”

Going toast. Hughes liked that. Going crazy was going toast. He wasn’t sure what it meant, exactly, but he liked the sound of it.

Everyone left in the world was probably going a little bit toast.

Carol? Jumping at her own shadow and cleaning everything over and over? Toast.

Annie? Toasted, for sure. The biggest catastrophe in the history of the species had just laid waste to the planet, and the poor girl couldn’t remember a bit of it.

Parker? That guy was still in the toaster.

And Lane? Lane was burnt toast. Burnt and black and stinking up the whole kitchen.

Hughes was sure he’d go toast himself soon enough. Somehow he hadn’t already. Mostly because he didn’t feel anything anymore. Then again, he could be kidding himself. Maybe feeling nothing was his own way of going toast.

He couldn’t help but wonder if his family might still be alive if they lived in New York or Chicago or Houston instead of Seattle. Because the only places in the world hit harder than Seattle were Calcutta and Moscow.

That’s where it started. In Russia. Some dinky Arctic research town in Siberia was the first to get hit. A scientist up there was bitten by what everyone thought was a rabid fox. The guy turned and then bit his doctor. Since he was the only doctor around, they flew him to Moscow for treatment. The doctor bit a dozen passengers on the plane. He ripped a woman’s throat out with his teeth before a mob jumped him and bashed his head in with a fire extinguisher. After they emptied the plane, it was absolute mayhem at Moscow’s international airport.

No one had a clue what was happening, and it took the Russian authorities much longer than it should have to shut everything down. They might have managed to contain it had they understood, but they did not understand.

Most of the Russian infected stayed home, but someone in Moscow who got bitten but was otherwise initially fine flew to Paris. Another boarded a plane to Seattle. A third flew to Cape Town, and a fourth to Mumbai. And it spread like a motherfucker from there. Quarantines were impossible. Governments everywhere were two or even three steps behind.

Since the plague’s insertion point in America was Seattle, the East Coast had more warning. Things might be a little bit better over there. Local governments could be two or three steps ahead.