Zombie Wake Read online

  “I don’t need an ambulance.” Phil hollered. I was still squatting in the space with one hand on his head. His movement was fluid. Both his arms went up and crossed as he grabbed my phone. He threw it into the kitchen sink. It made a splash as it hit the side and slid down between a half exposed pan and plate. I rose, taking one step back toward the kitchen. That’s when he leapt clear down the stairs and hit the ground running.

  Stepping out of the trailer is when I heard it first, the screaming, the roaring, the screeching. “Surcom,” I said in a futile effort to reach someone. Then I saw them. Under the glow of the pier lights, on the sand near the pilings, the silhouette of a bear standing on two feet with a writhing lump on its back. The lump was Bernadette; her arms and legs wrapped around his neck. Phil was nowhere in sight. A woman in a robe appeared staring at the spectacle in disbelief. “Please call 911,” I said to her as I started running toward the scene.

  Clutching the AR15 and kicking up sand, I ran. About the time I could focus on the bear’s sand-crusted fur I stopped. What a sight. The creature was a large black bear with one front paw missing. It must have been an old injury because the stump was unexposed and fur-covered. Bernadette relentlessly clutched. It was scratching at her with its left paw, clawing out chunks of flesh with each swat. Occasionally, a right pawless arm flailed without effect. I could see a crowd starting to form in my peripheral vision but couldn’t take my eyes off the episode.

  “Bernadette,” I yelled while pointing rifle, “Let go.” But she didn’t.

  After a few more swats, I could see Bernie’s exposed bone. Then the bear ducked, arched its back, and with a violent shake, tossed Bernadette off to the side like a bag of rocks. I brought the rifle up on target. Even as I pulled the trigger, I knew I was off target. There was the blast, there was the muzzle flash that lit up the night, there was the reflection of that flash in the red eyes of that bear, and there was something wrong.

  As the round went wide and only grazed the bear in the stump-leg’s shoulder, I realized I had a stovepipe, a malfunction that happens when the bullet doesn’t have enough powder. These failures were happening more frequently as a consequence of increased ammunition demands. Our government policy of purchasing from the lowest bidder had just struck with a vengeance. In training, when you experience a stovepipe or any other malfunction, you’re trained to let the rifle fall and hang from the tactical sling while you transition to your handgun. The idea is to avoid pausing in the middle of the fight, switch to the working weapon and fix the rifle when it’s safe. I attempted this maneuver but with a pissed off, wounded, three-legged bear barreling toward me, frothing mouth wide open and roaring, my hands got caught up in my jacket and I had to transition to running away.

  Refinery Emergency

  4

  I ran without looking back, without taking note of the crowd, without thought. I didn’t have many options and up seemed to be a good one. Since the boat hoist was in the process of being repaired, a semi-permanent ladder had been placed at one end of the pier. It was less than 10 yards from the bear and there was an added bonus. In the new location, my radio would have access to two additional repeaters and regain function.

  In high school, I was a hurdler. “Long legs,” my coach would say, “don’t run on your toes like that. You’re fast but you’re gonna tear something.” In college, on a bet, I hurdled a convertible Miata and somehow walked away without tearing anything and with twenty extra dollars in my pocket. And now, in a thoughtless flee, before it even registered that some jarhead had illegally abandoned his dinghy at the edge of that pier, I found myself hurdling a boat. It was small enough but pushing off in dry sand proved less effective than desired and my foot caught the boats edge. I fell to the base of the ladder. I heard the crunching of fiberglass and a ferocious growl. But I didn’t take the time to see what was happening behind me. I can’t say how I got up the ladder but I was on the pier regaining my composure when I heard my radio. “R1122, please report.”

  “Yeah,” I said. It took me a second to catch my breath. I had one hand on my knee and was looking toward the ladder into the black night. “I need backup. Where’s my backup? Where’s animal control?”

  There was an edge to her voice I’d never heard before. She said, “I’m sorry, they’re all at the refinery.”

  “What?” I gasped.

  Gaviota is nested between two oil refineries both of which are a constant source of tension within the community, park management and oil companies. Even though both are in the process of being officially abandoned, the “empty” tanks and pipeline are apparently hazardous. Community meetings with discussions about long-term contamination seem constant. And a biannual hazardous material training exercise involving mock spills and explosions is a mandatory part of my current duty statement. But we’ve never had a real emergency with either.

  “What? I said again.

  “I’ve had to divert all on duty and call-out personnel to the refinery incident. There are reports of an explosion. And… I’ve been asked to have you go.”

  “Me go? I’m in a situation right now. I’ve got a bear on my ass and victims.” And then I realized, I was on the radio. Think before you speak, is what I tell my trainees. The transmission, especially if there’s an ongoing emergency, is picked up by anyone with a scanner, the media and... “Shit,” I said without cuing the mic. I had heard neither explosion nor siren; there was no glow on the horizon like there had been with the recent wild fires. But something was going on.

  “Surcom R1122, who requested my presence?”

  “R1122, I copy. Cori Sledge and Clyde Montile wish you to report to the Gaviota Oil Terminal ASAP regardless of your current situation.”

  Cori is my direct supervisor but Montile is a Sacramento paper pusher. It made no sense. Yet I knew the protocol.

  “R1122, I’ll get there as soon as I can.”

  I had my flashlight out, scanning the edge of the pier. At first, I heard snarling and scratching. Then there was silence. Since the scraping sound came from the area near the ladder, I assumed the bear was still close to the pier and maybe even underneath. I had to leave. With orders being what they were and knowing the hierarchy of incidents, my only option was to take care not to become another emergency. I would locate the bear, shoot it, if it was in range, then make my way back to the truck. With luck, I would find a qualified bystander and delegate first aid. “Bernie, are you with me?” I shouted, moving to a prone position, situating myself to peek over the edge.

  Lying on my stomach, I heard splashing and saw that one-armed bear waist deep in the surf, clawing and licking at the barnacles on the pilings. I made my way down the pier, to a notch where a ladder let me lean out to get a good shot. In my peripheral vision I could tell that a crowd was forming. Not an unusual occurrence considering the circumstances. I took aim and shot. It was done; or so I thought. Now to find a good Samaritan. When I rose to my feet is when I first saw mass approaching. Initially, I started walking toward them, thinking they were coming to help. But it didn’t take too many steps to realize that something was terribly wrong. In hindsight I might say I was with luck, but at that minute I was experiencing the antithesis of good fortune.

  Remember the Head

  5

  Plum thumb, Earl, was now ambling toward me. A bit of his hair flopped directly in front of his forehead. This piece of hair was exactly what I focused on next. In the two previous shots, I had taken out his plum hand and left a serious wound in his chest. As I centered on his head through the targeting ring of my rifle, a thought brought me back to last year.

  Almost as if he were present, Ulric’s voice rang deep within my own head, “The head, remember, the head,” he told me. At the time, we had just started a bottle of whiskey after completing a bottle of the Ugandan equivalent, waragi. It was long after midnight in my campground residence. In the hours that passed after the children went to bed and our wives decided that a movie starring a woman with a prosthetic leg
submachine gun was beyond their interest, we watched three zombie flicks, chewed venison jerky and drank. We slipped into our familiar Peace Corps banter but after the third movie, and a good swig, Ulric became serious.

  Ulric Savage, now a professor of ecotourism has never been one to invoke discomfort. Even in the most serious of circumstance in Africa under rebel attack, Ulric had a knack of bringing levity to the situation. He could smile with his eyes alone. I once saw him make the victim of a cobra bite laugh while succumbing to the paralyzing effects of the attack and I'm convinced that Ulric had more to do with slowing the kid’s heart rate down enough to save his life than the healer did.

  Setting the tumbler on the wood floor with a force that caused the liquid to slosh up the walls of the thick clear glass, Ulric leaned in close to me. Uncomfortably close. The new growth of his scruff, blond, almost red stubble on his upper lip, moved to his words, “The head, remember, the head,” he said while tapping his temple.

  “Yeah, man,” I returned, “That reminds me, I have to deal with some feral pigs tomorrow. I think it's time to hit the sac.”

  Then he said one last thing, “Don’t forget about the night dancers.”

  Night Dancers

  6

  At one Peace Corps training Ulric and I witnessed the dark side of something grisly. It was near the beginning of our tenure. We were bouncing along miles from the training center in the back of a diesel land cruiser pick-up with two Ugandan park rangers. The rangers were pushing the envelope on travel distance in their attempt to impress us and as a result it was getting pretty late. We had at minimum an hour drive over heavily rutted roads to look forward to so we huddled down in the bed of the truck behind the cab. One of the rangers we were riding with was talking to the other in Swahili when he said something that captured Ulric's attention. Ulric interrupted asked if he was speaking of mulokalay. Both rangers looked at him expressionless without response.

  I wasn’t surprised at their reaction. On many occasions I had heard the term. The translation, Night Dancer, I understood as a mythical made up thing; a strategy mothers used to keep their children close and in at night. Sometimes people, drunk or mad with fever were pointed out as night dancers. One story told to me by a great grandma described them as drugged cannibals. Another pegged them as magical creatures akin to werewolves.

  I was always frustrated by the stories because each scenario played out the same time and time again. Some Ugandans would be talking, they would forget that the Americans were listening, they would mention the night dancers. When asked what a night dancers were, there was the deadpan stare again. The subject was dodged with platitudes and feigned language barrier. I had long since given up on trying to figure out what the hell a night dancer was, so when these two rangers froze in mid sentence and looked back at Ulric with that typical expression, I was ready for a long quiet ride home.

  But Ulric looked at them and said that he knew about Night Dancers and that he had seen some at Katonga. He told them that he knew that Night Dancers were real and they did not need to worry about us thinking strangely of them. To my amazement, the rangers told us about an incident that had occurred the previous night in a distant part of the park.

  There was a fishing village along the lake near the park boundary. Some fisherman had stayed out too long fishing and ended up beaching on a small island for the night. According to the rangers, Night Dancers came into their camp and killed them all. Six fishermen were found the next morning torn to pieces. Four were missing.

  “Could it have been lions?” Ulric asked. But both rangers were adamant that they had seen lion kills too many times and that these men were not killed by lions. Then they told us that the bodies had shown signs of having been eaten. At the time, I was a bit cynical about the Ugandan tendency to try to scare us about life in Africa. Ulric, on the other hand, continued to grill the two men about the incident. He seemed obsessed with the gory details.

  The next evening after class, Ulric was a million miles away. At Dinner I asked him what was up. He told me that he was thinking of sneaking out later to try and locate the Night Dancers. His plan was to steal a boat from the village and paddle up the channel to the island.

  “You’re nuts,” I said. African waterways at night are not safe places. If you were to take a poll of a thousand Americans and asked them what the most dangerous animal in Africa is, most of them would say lions, or hyenas, or leopards. Very few would know that the most dangerous animal title is a tie between the Cape buffalo and the hippopotamus.

  The Kazinga Channel was world famous for its hippo populations. Hippos are notoriously territorial and aggressive. Bulls sport canine teeth that are as big around as you forearm and as long. I had personally witnessed a bull hippo attack and bite a metal boat. He punched two large round tooth holes in the bottom of the boat and it almost sunk. The idea of paddling a wooden canoe up the channel in the dark sounded pretty stupid.

  But twenty minutes of Ulric talking his magic and I was transformed into a willing accomplice. Ulric convinced me that Hippos come to shore at night to graze so being out on the channel would, in actuality, be the safest place to be when it came to hippos. I couldn't fault his logic.

  Three hours later found the two of us kneeling in a 16-foot long canoe paddling up stream. It was a fairly bright night with an almost full moon. I could hear the mosquitoes and feel them on my face. Even worse were the clouds of lake flies. While harmless, the insects swarm over the water in the evenings so thick that anyone who goes to lake fly country has to quickly get used to inhaling bugs. They get in your eyes, ears, nose and mouth.

  Ulric was up front, leaving me to the steering. The canoe was difficult to manage and I found that I worked hard and didn't feel like I was getting anywhere. After what seemed like hours, Ulric hissed at me to stop. I noticed for the first time that there was a glow ahead. It looked like the headlights of a vehicle on the shore of the channel. Ulric motioned at me to keep silent and pointed toward the vehicle.

  As we bobbed in the water about 60 yards off shore, I saw armed men getting out of the vehicle. It looked like a military truck. I heard doors open and slam shut. The men walked to the front of the truck and spread out in the glow of the headlights. The truck was parallel to the channel’s bank with the lights shining upstream. It was then that I noticed there were people walking towards the soldiers. They were still pretty far away and were barely visible. I recall thinking that they didn't look quite right. They seemed uncoordinated and walked with a drunken stupor—sort of a shuffle with their shoulders slumped and their head down. I was just about the say something to Ulric when he turned, looked at me in an intense way and held his index finger to his lips. The look in Ulric's eyes gave me pause.

  Then the loud voice of a soldier shouted an order in Swahili. Ulric turned at the sound of the shouting just as the four soldiers started shooting their rifles. I watched in shock as they calmly and almost robotically gunned down the people on the bank. The shooting lasted for 20 or 30 seconds and then it stopped. There was a silent pause, and then one of the soldiers walked forward drawing a pistol from his belt. The man walked from corpse to corpse and fired one round into the head of each of his victims.

  “If you like breathing, you better keep quiet,” Ulric whispered. Somehow he got me to help him turn that damn canoe around and get the hell out of there. We both agreed that we saw nothing and that we would never speak about it again.

  Pulling the Trigger

  7

  I pulled the trigger. Plum Thumb's hand splattered first. I shot again. His head exploded the instant I heard the metal shell ting against the wood plank somewhere behind me. The whole event seemed, somehow, to precede the sound of the actual shots. Boom. Boom. It was done. He dropped. I felt a breeze against my face when tooth beak flapped her wings, swooping into the midst of the slimy pool now dripping through the planks. She scooped a piece of grey, white and black into her pouch and returned to my side. The odor, a musty smell, burn
ed my nose, turned my stomach and pushed me three steps back and into the wet night of the bus accident.

  I couldn't place it that night. I thought it was fresh skunk spray mixed with my adrenalin-induced heightened senses. It hit me as I stood in the mud watching a victim in the creek flounder half inside the submerged vehicle. He was a trooper, a survivor...the survivor. I silently celebrated as Joe and Dylan secured him to a harness and methodically worked against the fast moving water, pulling him to the safety of the dark morass. I learned later that he was not the driver of the golden crumpled automobile but was thrown from the bus and pinned between the water and the sedan. The smell increased my motivation to get the man back to the road and I relayed through dispatch to the Fire captain for assistance with the hillside transfer.

  The scent, skunk and rotten fish, was inescapable. I wondered if the smell was what drew tooth beak to the remnants. It seemed like an atypical animal behavior—at least for a pelican. Maybe it would appear more natural if the bird were a buzzard, or seagull even. Often, when I see a circle of buzzards, I hike to the backcountry location beneath to find a carcass half consumed. If it was anything of stature, I note my position and return later to collect the bones. Those situations, while vile smelling, never disrupt my sense of the world’s balance. They never seemed horrific or contaminated. No animal part could look or be as wrong as the chunk that tooth beak rolled out of her mouth—a piece of curved skull, with stings of mucus. It was impossible to distinguish color under the orange glow of the sodium lights but the hair attached, now matted with slime, displayed what could have been the same reverse grey pattern that I had seen on the woman in the bus.

  I wondered if the bus of patients were the hospital ward residents that my wife had spoken about. Could they be responsible for this? Three years ago, after the birth of our second child, Claire quit her position as a scientist at the university to stay home with the kids. But these last few weeks, she’s been touring the local research facilities, once again exploring her career options.