The Zombie Letters Read online

  -----------------------------------------

  -Dr. Nathaniel Winters-

  “Without hope, there is no dream!!!!”

  LockeII Research Center, Washington DC

  X

  NATHANIEL WINTERS EMAIL

  SECURITY CLEARANCE ‘A’ ONLY

  CLASSIFIED

  ---------------------

  Harden,

  March 8th, 2016

  Your withdrawal and removal of my research must be re-considered, sir. Brian and Samantha’s passing yesterday further cemented for me the extreme need to continue on with this research. LYNN001 was harmless and yielded fantastic results. LYNN002 was incorrectly formulated and concentrated at too high a capacity. My wife WILL be honored and vindicated. Please, allow me to appeal your decision. I will not let her death be in vain.

  I WILL NOT.

  -----------------------------------------

  -Dr. Nathaniel Winters-

  “Without hope, there is no dream!!!!”

  LockeII Research Center, Washington DC

  XI

  NATHANIEL WINTERS EMAIL

  SECURITY CLEARANCE ‘A’ ONLY

  CLASSIFIED

  ---------------------

  To General Harden

  March 10th, 2016

  I know I had a meeting scheduled for tomorrow. Sorry about that. I took a plane back to Iowa. I had some better plans, you see. No hard feelings. You can fucking k KEe keep Brian. If what I think is correct, you will be seeing him soon. See . . . they are dead, but their mitochondrial function . . . those PPo power plants I mentioned? They are still active. Think, you dense prick. Dead tissue with living cells. Yeah, I took it. I injected myself and that Kareshi caught me. I convinced the staff to have you terminate him. Some were easier to convince than others. Darin couldn’t handle it and quit. So yeah . . . I took the injection right under your nose. But . . . its not psychosis like I thought initially. This is the next stage of evolution, my friend. I jumpstarted it. We are perfect organisms. If human protein is ingested, the strength of LYNN is exponential.

  And the best part? The part I didn’t tell you? Higher concentrations of LYNN exist in a subject’s bodily fluids, especially blood and saliva. Cgh888 nhh A new development . . . to you, anyway. Blood, spit and sweat. So easily distributed.

  Samantha. She is with me. I left to be with her. You should see her . . . so lovely. So raw. Like an animal. She is even physically stronger than she was before. My drug is something to behold. I wish I could evolve alongside her, but I only injected myself with LYNN001. I will get LYNN002 soon, but I have work to do. Gotta stay sharp.

  You will be hearing from me. I guarantee it. You will come for me. I know you can, but you are already out of time.

  -----------------------------------------

  -Dr. Nathaniel Winters-

  XII

  NATHANIEL WINTERS EMAIL

  SECURITY CLEARANCE ‘A’ ONLY

  CLASSIFIED

  ---------------------

  To General Harden.

  Marrrrrrrrhhhch &*&@ 200166

  Wg;uiB

  To whho it may conc

  Concer,

  Concern,

  Can’t think,= cant seem to formulate thought. Eyyes hurt. SAMMANNnthaa. I can hear her. I can hear her scratching at the inside of the tank. Pounding on it.

  LET HER OUUUT.

  I am going to syat in here. Stay in here. Safe in here. I will not let this take me. I can beat this. Just need to get some sleep. That’s all l l that that’s all. Just need sleep. Everything will bBEE B better In EHHOO THhee MOrnringi.

  Brucie.

  ==

  Brucie. So sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you. SO hungry. I was weak, but niowefg nirrew nott this time. Can CoNTorol it. Jesus, man, get ittt together. 2+1 is 3. Racecar is a palindrome. Grover Vl cjjc Cleveland was the only President to serve two non-consecutive terms in the oval office. Esf LLLLLL

  When I was a little boy, I was walking out by the train tracks. I watched a man get eaten alive by wolves.

  Sending t t leters now. I only need hands to do that. While they still work. When you get these letters LET HER THE FUCK OUT . . afjajajf I will be gone. I hope you can help us.

  I hear her.

  I need you, Sami.

  Come give daddy a kiss.

  -----------------------------------------

  -Dr. Nathaniel Winters-

  CHAPTER 4

  I

  He wrote two more emails and forwarded them to me. They were completely incoherent. That’s the last I heard of him. Nathaniel took LYNN002 like he said he would. It affected him quickly . . . but still gave him some time to give him some clarity to do what he needed to do. He sounded remorseful in that unsent email . . . but I know the real reason why he wrote like that. Nathaniel was creating a super-concentrated version of Lynn; one that could kill and reanimate subjects instantly. LYNN003. Nate wasn’t remorseful. Son of a bitch wrote that letter to make himself out to be some kind of mistaken hero. A victim.

  Then, what the emails didn’t tell your General. One of the ones he never sent talked about what he neglected to tell anyone else. By the time he wrote it, he had already created twenty-five hundred gallons of LYNN003. He . . . oh, god. Quibin Reservoir . . . ground zero. That reservoir supplies the drinking water for all of Des Moines, Iowa. In one night . . . my friend, my mentor and by brother Doctor Nathaniel Winters personally infected 203,433 people by dumping it into the water. The water treatment facility feeds directly from the reservoir. Somehow, I don’t know how he did it, but there is a cemetery down the hill from Quibin’s spillway and campground area. Just right down the hill from the grounds. He found a way to get the solution into the soil. Cambria Cemetery. The largest cemetery in the state.

  See, all Lynn is made up of is the simulated plant material and a basic saline solution. You may think that thousands of gallons of the stuff would be impractical to make, but any concentration of the drug is about ninety-seven percent saline solution. During our tenure in Washington, we had over three-hundred buds of that plant growing there. If just one plant could make that much of the drug, imagine what an entire lab of those things would do. Man . . . I left the university and didn’t tell anyone how far he’d gone. I didn’t tell anybody just how much he cracked. I know he injected LYNN001 while we were in DC. Christ, I helped him do it. This was all my fault, you know. I said absolutely nothing because I thought he could turn all this around. He grew reckless and unethical. I had no idea he would do something like this. The LYNN001 results were fantastic. We were so sure.

  When he escaped back to Iowa with Samantha, he took the stronger LYNN002. After the outbreak, he shut himself inside the university facility. I was at home asleep. That place was impossible to break into. Even for . . . them. It was a fucking fortress. I managed to get there after the outbreak and I saw it with my own eyes. Nathaniel had shot Brucie in the head. It appeared as though Nate tried to eat him first. Brucie had two large bites on his back and was partially skinned. Nathaniel also let Samantha out of the large tank she was locked in. She got out and there was nothing left of Nathaniel. She got out. She got out and ate him alive.

  It happened faster than I could have imagined. How I stayed alive was quite remarkable. See . . . the plant, Archaeamphora or Archie for short, is harmless by itself. My study proved that if I were exposed to the plant’s pure PQP, I wouldn’t be affected in a negative way. About two days after Des Moines was deserted, the dead found their way into the lab complex. You can’t imagine how terrified I was. I knew I was going to die. In desperation, I grabbed an Archie Nathaniel had hidden and spread some of the bulb’s oil on my face and hands.

  They didn’t attack me.

  I was able to exit the facility and . . . God, what I saw. There were just parts; all parts of people everywhere. People here and there were being dragged out of first-floor windows and cars by their arms and legs. They were torn apart. In every corner of the city, I could hear them
eat. I could hear booms off in the distance . . . the smoke from the city still reaching the sky. Fires were everywhere, but no one was there to put them out. I have no idea why the plant extract worked. I figured possibly because of some kind of sensory perception that LYNN003 gave them. They terrified me. I could hear their scratches on windows and outer walls at night. Their footsteps were the only sound in the near-silent streets. A couple times, I felt one breathing on me as I tried to sleep. They’d walk right up to me. These rotted monstrosities . . . they would observe me for a moment and then leave.

  I wandered everywhere. Anywhere. I found nobody. I’d stay up at night, listening to someone trying to hide . . . making the slightest of sounds. I would never make it to the person quickly enough. Those things would run after the person and attack them in the hundreds. Then, I would hear the screams.

  I found a car with a full tank of gas in Osburg. It’s a suburb of Des Moines. I wasn’t aware I’d walked that far. I sat in that car with Archie, listening to static on a radio for three days. Nothing. No broadcasts. No news reports. Just empty static. Even the radio had become death. I dozed off in a car one night with the potted plant bulb in the passenger seat. I snatched a bottle of water from a ransacked grocery store that had a puddle of blood and teeth behind the counter. I gave Archie a nice, cold drink of the water and I fell asleep. I was so thankful I had read Nathaniel’s emails before I left the lab. I read what he’d done to the water supply. It was too late for me to do anything.

  That first night was the worst, though. I found a liquor store that hadn’t even been touched. The reason I didn’t call the General that night was because I had quite a bit to drink. I wish I had a better excuse.

  I remember the one night. I was yanked out of a deep sleep by the sound of a gun going off. I looked around . . . my heart fluttering in my chest. There was a man with one of those old bolt-action rifles running toward the car as a group of about twenty of those . . . whatever you want to call them . . . chased him. He spotted me almost immediately. “Hey! Hey! Over here!! I can help you!” I shouted, rolling down the window and holding up the plant. As if he knew what the fuck it was, anyway. If the guy weren’t running for his life, he probably would have thought I was some sort of crazy person. In his wide-eyed panic, the man in the blood-spotted business suit didn’t seem to notice me. I was frightened for him, but at the same time I was nearly giddy seeing another unaffected human being. Such a bizarre cocktail of emotions, given what was happening. He got about twenty feet from my borrowed vehicle when he tripped and fell. He went down face-first on the pavement and twisted the hell out of his ankle.

  “Shit! Get up!” I opened the door and ran after him, screaming at the top of my lungs. When I got close to him, I saw what made him fall . . . the thing that grabbed his ankle. A young girl, no more that thirteen or fourteen. She had one leg torn off and another twisted backwards. The girl climbed on top of the man before I could get near him. I ran as fast as I could and kicked the girl right in the large laceration that lined her cheek . . . hoping it would hurt. She turned to look at me and hissed; an airy and dry sound like a caged python.

  “Get off of me! Get off of meeeee . . .” he shouted, attempting to position the rifle in his arms.

  I looked toward the car.

  The plant.

  Christ, why didn’t I bring it with me? It would have saved his life. The man raised the rifle and used his knees to knock the creature back. He pointed the gun to her head at point-blank range.

  “The blood . . . No! Don’t!”

  The shot went off, instantly making my ears ring. The young girl reeled back and its dark, oily blood splashed onto the man’s face. It landed in his eyes, his mouth . . . everywhere. The group that had been rushing after him caught up. They surrounded us, stared at the man for a moment, and walked away. He had already turned. That was the quickest I had ever seen someone do it. I walked back to the car. I could hear him get up . . . muttering painful gasps of incoherent mumbles. I got back into the car, swearing I heard more footsteps running in my direction. Thousands of them.

  The passenger-side window shattered inward, making me scream. For a second, I thought I was dead. A dirty, sweating woman with torn clothes and bloody hands jumped into the window, nearly crushing the plant. I quickly grabbed it and placed it in a car seat that was buckled in the back. “Drive! DRIVE!!” she shouted, uttering a cry of pain as her shirt rode up and caused her to scrape her stomach on the broken beads of tempered glass she had shattered with a crowbar. I looked behind me. My heart skipped a beat when I saw them. They filled an entire block. Half-burned, torn and mutilated people were coming closer. Some were running, but mostly all of them walking. They didn’t need to run this time. The girl was a sitting duck. They were going to tear the car apart, pull her out and skin her alive. “Start the car! We’re gonna die!”

  “No, we’re not! Listen! I have a second to explain, so shut the fuck up!” I reached inside my pocket and removed the small baggie of liquid I had extracted from Archie the previous day. It didn’t matter that it worked, though. When you see a fucking legion of those things coming for you, you pray to god that your spur-of-the-moment, flimsy theory really works. I was absolutely horrified as I took the oil out of the bag and lathered her hands with it. She tried to pull away from me, but I held her down by force, rubbing it into her hair.

  “What the hell are you doing? DRIVE!!”

  “Trust me!” I said, reaching around her to open the passenger door. I took hold of the woman’s slender shoulder and pushed her out of the car. She landed on her bottom, looking at me with an expression that would have driven me over the edge had she died. That look on her face . . . a woman in the midst of impending doom and certain fate, sitting and staring at me with such hurt eyes . . . tears already running down her cheeks. She sat with her eyes locked onto mine when the stinking, festering and rotting crowd of them closed in on us . . . and kept walking. The woman looked around, darting her head back and forth. She was nearly hysterical. “Sorry I had to do that. Get in the car.”

  She complied, squirming away from the dead walkers that passed us like a sea. She sat in the car dumbfounded. Her once quite attractive gaze was now a tear-shrunken thousand-yard stare. “How . . . how did you do that . . .”

  At first I thought she was much older, but when she pushed her back-length matted hair away, I was mistaken. She was young. Probably mid-thirties. Her face was caked with dirt. Her complexion was the same color as the stuff under her fingernails. I could tell she was considered beautiful. Probably married. She was the kind of girl I would ask out back in the real world. I felt bad seeing someone so distressed and broken down; and trying to see if she had a rock on her finger. “Listen. We’re going to Washington. A tiny amount of this stuff lasts roughly twenty-four hours before it dries out, so we will be fine as long as we keep my pal back there alive and well,” I said, pointing back to Archie nestled in the car seat. “We have him, we’re fine. Trust me. But, we are going to DC. Hope you haven’t made any other plans.”

  “How did you know? Where did you get that plant?”

  I smiled at her. “My friend, do I have a story to tell you.” She stared with wildly terrified eyes out the window as the mass of them shuffled past us. “Don’t attack them. They won’t hurt us. Provoke or agitate them and I don’t know what they’ll do. Probably shish-kabab you. I haven’t found out how predatorily-sound they are yet and weather or not they will kill us if threatened. More than likely not. I’ll explain on our way east. Have you seen anyone alive on the way here?” She continued to look out the window, not speaking. “Hey!” I startled her.

  She shrank back, shaking her head. “No. They’re all dead. Everybody.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to shout like that. We’d better get going as soon as this crowd thins out.”

  “Why are we going to Washington?”

  “Just do what I tell you.”

  II

  As hordes of the dead, mil
lions strong, rose out of the sea, they outnumbered other countries quickly. The ‘zombies’, if you want to argue that name by sheer root-definition, weren’t invincible. They were extremely strong physically, though. Their mouths were capable of biting a person down to the bone. When my new passenger and I reached Des Moines, we passed a group of them that collectively ripped a car door off its hinges to get to a person inside. Anyone not underground or in a hardened area was doomed if their presence was known. If they made the slightest slip. I did have a cell phone. It was useless now. After the main tower in the city was torn down when an army tank crashed into it, there was no use having a phone. A Smartphone, though . . . those come in handy. I used the sound recording app as kind of personal journal where I would record my observations about the creatures. I drove around destroyed cars, fallen buildings and streets littered with the dead and the parts of the once living. I had this phone in my pocket the whole way . . . dictating.