Blind Date A Book 2020 – Book #2
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Chapter 1
“That’s right, John. You’re looking at the new veep of the whole Northeast Division.” Jack Tate sat behind an expansive wood desk with a giant plate glass window behind him that gave a view down on Fifth Street. It used to be a pretty good view until the Black Group Building across the street was blown up.
Jack had a fresh bullet wound in his temple, small and neat enough to have come from a .22 or something like that, but the ragged mess on the other side of his head was anything but. I’d caught sight of the hole as he was pulling a binder out of the overhead behind him, my stomach had threatened to heave and I’d barely stifled a ‘yip’ when upon seeing it. He must have done it without his suit jacket on; the collar of his white shirt was crusted thick with crimson, but the gray jacket was unstained. He’d been a living, breathing, non-flesh eating Jack Tate just before lunch. I shifted in my seat.
“Uh, congratulations,” I said.
“Hey, thanks, man. Means a lot.” No, it didn’t, but as a favor to us both, I said nothing. He’d been under a deadline, was all I had known. I was in accounts receivable, he was—or had been—my manager’s manager so we’d passed by one another occasionally. We’d actually gone to high school together; he’d graduated the year after me. I had already been working here eight years when he first started in the junior executive program.
The past few days he had had a bewildered look whenever I’d seen him, like whatever stress he’d been under was becoming too much. His eyes were still red-rimmed and he had the faint odor of vodka on him, but his eyes looked relaxed and the smile currently on his face had a sparkle. Jack was fresh enough to not stink and if you really zoomed in on his eyes you could almost forget about the gaping head wound.
And the flies.
Nobody tells you about the flies.
It’s never talked about in the movies. Not sexy, I suppose. But almost every one of them walks around with a cloud of flies buzzing around. Jack only had a few right now, but by tomorrow morning he’d be a full-fledged, card-carrying member of the walking dead.
Jack leaned back in his high-backed leather chair and laced his fingers behind his head. There was a hole with some of the cushioning coming out by his left hand. He must have done it right there.
“How long you been working for the company, John?”
“I’m not sure. Twelve years?”
“Jeez, that’s long. And you’re still in A/R? Hell, I don’t need to turn you; you’re already dead.”
“You’re going to—”
“No, no, no,” he said, holding out a hand. “It’s a joke. I brought you in to talk about the FOH.”
“Flint Osteopathic Hospital?” I’d started weeping and Jack shook his head.
“Stop it, already.” He held out the box of Kleenex on his desk and I took a few. “I’m talking about the future of humankind. I’m not gonna eatcha. Really, I’m not. Not hungry anyway.”
As you all know hoi don’t eat people all the time. I was surprised to learn how many have higher brain function, especially the ones who sustain damage to the brain. Like Jack. In the early days, they even corralled the prols and the living could walk around almost like nothing had happened.
“Where was I?” Jack said. That’s the other thing I learned. Sometimes you people get confused. Throw in a non-sequitur or two and you’re completely thrown. That’s a bad thing.
Jack got that dull look in his eyes. I’m sure you know the one. The one just before a z-word gets all chewy. Every day I walk to work and I was coming to intersection one morning when I saw a human and a hoi about to cross. They were dressed in the same navy blue suit, even had similar briefcases. A car drove by—a rare thing to be seen back then—and honked its horn. Two quick beeps. I guess one of the two on the corner must have known the driver. Maybe he or she was dressed equally in blue, I couldn’t tell because of the windows of the old Ford were caked in dirt. Anyway, both men, living and dead, looked up and watched the car. After it had passed, the human resumed normal routine, checking his watch, keeping the hat on his head. I remember that hat and him clapping his hand atop it because of the breeze. He stepped out into the street, but his partner was still there, frozen, it seemed. He turned around, briefcase up by his chest and hand on his head like he was halfway being arrested and he said something.
“Martin?” At least that’s what I thought I heard him say. He could’ve said ‘muffin’ for all I knew. But the hoi just stood there, still looking as if that car that had honked almost a half minute before had stopped right there and the driver was asking him for directions. The man in the street stepped by up on the sidewalk, laid a finger of the briefcase-holding hand on his shoulder. The look on his face at that moment… well, what I’ve convinced myself was the look on his face. I’ve come to the conclusion I can’t really remember the expression. I can’t remember what he looked like—how can I honestly say how his eyebrows lifted, the purse of his lips, the roundness of his eyes? But I imagine the look on his face was concern. I remember supposing they must have known each other when they both were alive. I can’t really recall why I supposed that, maybe it had to do with the man not dropping that briefcase and letting his hat catch in the wind as he ran for his life, but the hoi turned his head, giving me a full view of the back of it, and leapt on him.
He knocked the man’s briefcase up as he reached. It swung up on the handle still grasped in the man’s hand, high up on his chest and then the hoi grabbed him by the shoulders and fell over on top of him, the two falling into the street. In their brief struggle, that hat came off, carried a short distance before landing on the sidewalk, business end up and dragged to a stop in front of me. Until that moment, it hadn’t crossed my mind that I was no more than six feet from the two men. It became a very real possibility that I could have been next. But I froze, watching it—I’m sorry, but I thought of him as a thing in that very instant—eat the man’s face, holding him down by a fistful of hair as it tore away at his lower left cheek, stripping skin all the way down to the side of his neck. The man’s screams turned into drowning gurgles as it chewed through an artery, blood spurting several feet away from where they were in the street.
Then the hoi was back. He realized what he’d done and recoiled from his friend’s body. And then of all things—he tried doing CPR! I know it has to sound funny to at least some of you—the idea of a dead person trying to breathe life into anyone. I watched him count out—one, two, three, four, then pinch his nose and puff air into his mouth.
His friend did get up. The hoi backed off, facing me now so I could see the look on his face this time. When the other one stood, it was obvious the CPR wasn’t what did it. The hoi had eaten a big chunk of muscle out of his neck and he was clearly dead.
“Dave, I’m sorry man,” the first hoi said.
“Dude—my suit!” Dave said, looking down at himself. He checked his watch and hurriedly stepped into the street again. “C’mon, we’re gonna be late.”
They hadn’t even looked at me. Maybe that was the first sign I was different. Maybe that was the reason Jack had chosen me. By the time I knew, it was too late to ask.
“Ah, yes, the future,” Jack continued. “You know one of the keys to any thriving community, John?”
“No,” I said.
“Growth. Works the same with the living as it does in here. G.O.D., John. Either we grow or we die.” I must have given him a look for his little pun because he and his eyes shifted. “You know what I mean.”
“Right now they think they have us trapped in here. Every now and then one of the M.F.E.s—mindless flesh-eaters—slips through and they put him down, study him or whatever it is they do, but that’s pretty much it. They don’t realize we really don’t want to get out just yet. Full out aggression is too iffy at this point. We could succeed, we could fail, hell we could over succeed.”
“What does that mean?”
“Glad you asked.” He leaned back in his chair, made a face and sniffed. “Hey, what’s that smell?”
I was nervous, thinking he might have been smelling me. But he looked around and opened one of the drawers at his side, looked up at me and smiled.
“Wow, they’re really rolling out the welcome wagon.” He reached into the drawer with both hands and pulled out a pile of entrails, dropping the whole stinking mess on the desk in front of him. He put his face over it and breathed in like it was manna.
“I could use a little B.T.E. You mind if I?” he asked, pointing at it. He had that look in his eye again.
“No,” I said, covering my mouth and nose with my shirt. As disgusting as it was, it was preferable to him gnawing on me. “Go ahead.”
Jack grabbed a loop of intestine and bit into it, fresh blood spilling out. The smell got even worse as he became engrossed. The slurps, the moaning, the bits of flesh caught between his teeth and fingers, the flies—I scooted back a foot and it was all I could do to keep from throwing up. Jack was no different from any prol, lost in his food.
After a minute or so he looked up. He stared at me like I was prey, blinked twice, and was back.
“Over succeeding would be saturation above sixty-eight percent,” Jack said around a mouthful. “The human race would die out entirely if we converted too many.”
“So you’re not going to kill everybody?” I asked.
“No.” He swallowed what was in his mouth and waved a hand at me, a hunk of flesh falling off his index finger. “We need humans to survive ourselves. We just want a level playing field. We kill so many, we convert so many and for the most part, leave the rest alone. In fifty years, it’ll be the most normal thing in the world for an arist to be elbow to elbow with a hoi.
“Hey, look at me—I’m not trying to eat you, am I? Sure you have to be careful of the prols, but haven’t hoi police been rounding them up? We’re building infrastructure. There’s a clear future ahead and we need the arists. I need you to be a part of it—to help make it happen.”
He made a face at the half-eaten pile in front of him and swept it into his trash can.
“We’re going to utilize the B.O.S.T. strategy, initially—that’s bite one, spare two. Rough estimates say one out of every five in this country is an Undead-American, so that’s two of us versus eight of them. If we convert two then that’s four of us versus six of them, bringing us pretty close to the parity we’re looking for. Now we’ll have to quickly consolidate with all the ‘free-range’ prols—” he made quotation marks with his bloody fingers— “to keep them from killing off too many. Now our way calls for conversion of only twenty-five percent of the living. Twenty-five. That’s something most of the arists can live with, isn’t it?” He chuckled at his joke. “The problem is those free-rangers. If we can’t get out of here quick enough and head them off, then it’s boo time.”
“Boo time?”
“The crowd boos, the curtain falls, show’s over.”
“What do you want me to do?” I asked.
“We need an intacter.” He smiled at me.
“A what?”
Jack reached in another drawer and pulled out a pack of handi-wipes. He used damn near half of them cleaning his hands before reaching back in and grabbing a small, black rectangular case and sliding it across the desk. I scooted back, leaning over to take it.
“Go ahead and open it.”
Inside there was a syringe filled with a pale yellow fluid.
“Part of the new expansion strategy involves infiltrating the aristocracy with one of ours that can pass. Considering even the freshest of us could be spotted at twenty yards, we began looking into the possibility of a switch hitter. We needed someone who could always be counted on, someone who didn’t have anything to lose, someone ready to be a team player.” He pushed away from his desk, strolled over to the plate glass window looking down onto the street and began pacing in front it. If I’d had the guts, I would have pushed the both of us right through it. “Right after my promotion, your name was the first past my lips. You’re on a very short list, growing shorter by the day.”
I held the syringe up to the light.
“What is it?”
“Something the company came up with before the Conversion.” That’s what they call it in corporate—the Great Conversion. “That’s PF-429. The boys in marketing are calling it ‘Termicil’.” He explained further after turning from the window to see my blank face. “It’s pretty much a better version of the stuff they use to euthanize dogs cocktailed with some kind of preservative.” He waved a hand at the last word, indicating he didn’t know all the specifics. “A drop of that is enough to kill you. Get this—it keeps the heart pumping for up to ten hours after brain activity ceases. The original plan was to use it on death row inmates who wanted to donate their organs. Cuts down on transport time or something. The lab guys are looking into extending the duration of the drug. Make the other side more appealing to the arists once we take over. Completely painless—you’ll be dead in five seconds flat.”
“But I don’t… I don’t wanna die.”
“Listen!” Jack slammed his palms down on the desk, leaned over and stared at me. Anger. The other thing that makes the undead look at humans like food. Jack gritted his teeth, looking like he was about to fly over the desk at me. But he looked away, turned and went back to that window.
“It’s not about you and what you want.” He was calm again. “You’re not getting out of here. Every day there are more prols roaming the streets looking for a freshie, and hell, they don’t want you out there.” Jack jerked his thumb toward the river—Windsor, the local interpretation of where the still-living resided. “Either the prols out there overwhelm the arists and eventually get in here and kill you or the arists win, come in, and wipe this place off the map. The only reason they don’t bomb us all to hell right now is because they don’t know what effect it will have on the space dust that’s reanimated us.” He rolled his eyes at the last part.
“Wanna know a secret?” He looked at me and leaned against the window. “The space dust, the signal, the virus, the rads—it’s all BS. But it’s all true too. I know it’s a little 1984-ish, but it’s a good place to hide the truth. Right in the middle of the lie. The reason the scientists can’t all agree is because they’re looking for the reason for the dead walking around when it’s really a combo of several things, including a genetic mutation that began in human beings in about the fourteenth century.”
“How would you know that?”
He shrugged. “That’s the thing they’ll never figure out about the virus. It’s semi-sentient. You see a lowly prol stumbling around, trying to eat you, but there’s memory from a thousand generations in him. He has the memories of the one who bit him too. And the one before that. On and on like that. That’s why they like to eat the brain if they can get to it. To make that mind a greater part of themselves.”
Jack stared into the silvery sky for a long time. For a moment I almost thought he had really died.
“We are a growing community. A subgroup. We want to become part of the larger community. Do you understand that, John? Wanting to belong? We’re all human, just some of us lack a pulse. Nobody can fault us for that. But when you don’t belong anywhere, that’s when you’re really dead.”
“But humans—the living—won’t accept that. A family of four isn’t going to be okay with you killing one of them. We—they’ll fight.”
Jack waved his hand and slid it back in his pocket.
“You’re dead anyway you cut it. You get hit by a truck, get munched by a prol, jump out this window or keel over when you’re a hundred, you’re dead. And then you’ll get up. At least this way you get to go out on your own terms.”
He walked back to his desk and sat down, looking at that top desk drawer. He had that blank stare in his eye again, but it was different. I’d seen that nickel-plated .22 when he’d reached into the drawer to retrieve the case.
“You know what the big guys are thinking? They’re thinking that if the right guy can get this done he gets to come upstairs. Hell, you’d be my boss.”
“But nobody knows me. I don’t know how to do anything, how am I even going to sneak out of the quar—” I clapped my hand over my mouth. I hadn’t done that since… well, I don’t think I’d ever done that. But the Q-word was a big no-no. I’d seen one of the bougies disemboweled by several of his peers for saying it.
Jack didn’t seem to notice. “Don’t you see that’s the beauty of it? It will work because you’re a nobody. They’ll think you just escaped, they’ll check you for bites and find a needle prick. They think we’re all mindless over here, zombies don’t infect by injection. They’ll welcome you like you’re one of their own.”
“How would you know you could trust me? I mean, I could fake taking the shot, sneak over and then blab everything.” As soon as it was out of my mouth I regretted saying it.
Jack only laughed.
“Thirty-eight years you’ve been one of them and what have they shown you? I remember you in high school—you got beat up practically every day and from the looks of your personnel file it doesn’t look like it’s gotten much better. I’m giving you an opportunity to belong. You can try fitting in with them, but why would it work now? We need you. You could be one of us—all we ask is one thing. If you can move past a little needle prick you’re all set. When was the last time you got a raise anyway?”
Four years, two cents. He was more right than he knew. I covered my wedding band with my right hand, thinking of my Bonnie. Even she hadn’t waited for me. She pretty much had sped off in the station wagon with Connor and Kramer poking their heads out the back windows, wagging their tongues at me.
“What would I have to do?”
“Well, take that back to your desk, think about. Better yet, take the rest of the day off.” He put his hand over mine. It was still sticky from the meat he’d just eaten. “Get back to me.”
I looked from the case and back up to him, really wondering if this was something I could do. I didn’t have a life and they knew it. Bonnie and the dogs had made it out before the quarantine, maybe I could go see them if I could get through.
Jack looked at me. Really looked at me like I was a friend. They needed me—finally I was important to someone.
“Oh, and take this,” he said, pulling a crumpled business card out of his breast pocket. Something gelatinous oozed out of the open wound in the back of his head and rolled down his back. “I hear it helps with the craving, but I haven’t had time to go. They say the ones who can’t control it don’t last long.” I glanced at it and dropped it into my pocket, forgetting about it in the next second.
I would—might do it. It wasn’t the dying part. Suicide had risen higher and higher on my to-do list with each passing day. I believed it would be painless. I believed that one way or the other it was how the whole world was going to go, despite the “rosy” picture Jack had painted. But the thought of injecting myself with a needle!
I just didn’t know if I could do it. Even holding the case and looking at it made my stomach swim.
I closed it and stood. Jack looked confused a moment and remained seated.
“I’m embarrassed,” he said. “I can’t see you to the door. Rigor mortis.”
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