Brink of Extinction Page 8

  “The millions who were infected became filled with a mindless frenzy – a fury that was instinctive and without conscience. They were bloodthirsty killers that rampaged in hordes. They did not rest, they did not sleep. The rage made them a relentless, overwhelming tidal wave.”

  Out of the darkness, the boy turned his head to where the tour guide was standing and asked a sudden question, his tone subdued. “How did the virus work? How could people possibly be re-animated as undead monsters?”

  “The virus re-wired the victim’s nervous system once death had occurred,” Bill answered with a note of authority, “and the pathogen spread through the blood system. It produced an insane and volatile state. The reanimated ghoul manipulated the body’s capabilities in much the same way as a parasite. What the pathogen manufactured within a body is a creature that did not feel pain, was devoid of reason, and was regulated only by one single biological instinct – the urge to re-spread the virus through biting and infecting. That instinct drove the ghouls on remorselessly until the cadaver finally reached a state of utter decomposition.”

  On the side wall, the map faded from view and was replaced by a montage of photographs, each one bursting onto the screen for a few seconds before being replaced by another.

  The photos were of people – some of them standing amidst the ruins of homes, clutching to a pathetic bundle of clothing or a tattered keepsake. Other were confronting images of people covered in blood, their faces a mask of horror, their mouths wide and gaping as if captured in the midst of a terrified scream. There were young children, lost and distraught on sidewalks, their little bodies racked with panic as fleeing crowds raced past them, and another of a baby left abandoned in an overturned and blazing car, the black smoke rising like a pyre as the infant in the vehicle burned alive. It was horror, compounded upon terror, fear driven to hysteria. The photographs went on for several minutes, ending in several black and white pictures of young soldiers.

  They were candid images, so confronting that the man felt himself overcome by a fleeting moment of nauseous vertigo. He teetered on the balls of his feet as though on the deck of a small boat in a rising sea.

  The first photo showed a young soldier. He was standing in a field of ravaged, ruined ground. He was facing towards the photographer, his shoulders slumped under the heavy burden of shock, his arms hanging limp by his sides. He had a weapon in one hand, loose in his fingers. The soldier’s face was covered in mud, but through the mask, his eyes were huge and haunted with the despair that comes only from the haggard exhaustion of hopelessness.

  At the young soldier’s feet lay the gnarled twisted figure of a young child, the head shot away in a mush of bone fragments and matter. The zombie child’s skin was grey, one clawed hand still raised as if it might seize the muddied, bloodied boot of the soldier. Across the bottom of the photo, written in shaky handwriting were the soldier’s words, ‘I was only nineteen.’

  There were more. Many more. The man felt the sting of tears well up in the corners of his eyes so that his vision swam, and his throat became choked and lumpen. He cuffed the tears away, and stood very still until the trembles went from his hands and the blood pounding at his temples subsided.

  At last the sounds from the speakers faded, the monitors melted to grey and then black. Concealed lights in the ceiling came on then so that the sensation felt like waking, still shaken and sweating, from a nightmare. The man looked to his side. The boy’s face appeared ghostly, his eyes clouded. The man let out a long sigh as if he had been holding his breath.

  Bill came into the middle of the room, somber and respectful as a funeral director. The man shook himself like he was casting off a dark heavy cloak and the two of them locked eyes, but said nothing.

  The boy moved at last, shuffling his feet, his movements somehow dazed and disconnected. He glanced up at the man, and then looked carefully into the eyes of the tour guide.

  “I had no idea,” the boy’s voice was hushed and small.

  The tour guide’s face became a bleak wintry smile without humor. “That’s why this museum exists,” he said benevolently. “So that you, and others of your generation will one day understand.”

  * * *

  Bill led the man and the boy to the closed door on the far wall of the room and paused there for a moment, turning back, his expression serious and the tone of his voice becoming cautionary.

  Painted in grey lettering across the door were the words:

  ‘No Entry Without Supervision by an Authorized Museum Representative’

  Bill had his hand on the doorknob. “The next exhibit details the dark days when America went from plague to apocalypse,” he explained. “It is the only sealed room in the museum, and you must be prepared to be confronted. The exhibit attempts to give visitors an insight into what life was like for our soldiers as the infected zombies broke through the military’s southern defensive perimeter and then spread the virus. At that moment our Army was caught unprepared and were forced to throw up hasty defensive lines in an attempt to halt the surge into Kentucky, Missouri and Kansas.”

  He looked into the eyes of the man and then the boy, searching their expressions to be sure they understood, and then he pushed the door open and stood aside with a last word of warning.

  “Watch your step.”

  The man went first, down two steps and into squelching mud. The boy stood behind him. They were perched on a narrow wooden walkway, and on either side of them rose up claustrophobic earthen walls so that all they could see was a section of narrow trench before them, and overhead, a thin strip of the building’s high ceiling.

  The stench in the room was putrid: a cloying sickening miasma of detritus and corruption. The air was so thick that the boy choked reflexively and then felt a sudden acidic burn of vomit scald the back of his throat. He dry-retched as the smells of rubbish and death and decay and dirt filled his nostrils.

  Behind them the man heard the sound of the door being pulled closed, and then the tour guide came to stand close by them on the muddy boards. He seemed unaffected by the nauseating odor. “Look down,” Bill said.

  Beneath the boards was a quagmire, filled with the litter of empty cans, rotting paper, boots, bandages and sewerage. The raised platform had been constructed of narrow planks that ran in wavering lines along the full length of the trench, twisted and swayed and caked with layers of dry mud and spattered blood.

  “In the First World War, trench warfare was the way armies engaged in battle,” the tour guide explained. “A hundred years on, we found ourselves fighting the same way. The boards you are standing on are called duckboards; a raised platform of wooden slats, necessary because the trenches were often flooded and filled with rats and vermin.”

  The man took a few tentative steps forward, feeling the thin narrow strips of wood spring and sag beneath his weight.

  The trench ran straight ahead for ten yards and then dog-legged. It was just six feet wide, dug down deep into the earth so that even on the tips of his toes, the man could not see beyond the raggedly gouged ramparts. The walls were of raw earth, fortified with hundreds of sandbags and rusted lengths of corrugated iron, all of it reinforced by uprights of heavy wood.

  The tour guide came to where the man stood and leaned his shoulder against one of the posts. “These sandbags and just about everything else you see in this part of the museum are not replicas – they are the actual sandbags, the timbers and the iron that were transported from a battlefield in Tennessee,” he said heavily. “What you are experiencing is a glimpse of daily life in one of the many defensive fortifications that our soldiers spent weeks and months, fighting against the zombies. Our boys lived here,” his voice became hushed and respectful, “…and they died here.”

  The sandbags had been stacked in densely packed layers, rising like crude brickwork to the full height of one wall and spilling over the top of the earthen trench to elevate the lip by a couple of extra feet. The reverse wall was a more ragged mixture of sandbags a
nd sheets of iron. In some places wooden boards had been piled up to hold back the earth against collapse.

  Bill drew the palm of his hand over one of the sandbags as though he were trying to reconnect with history. “The mud is real,” he said. “So are the bloodstains, the sweat and the tears.”

  The man could see tattered scraps of paper pinned to some of the sandbags. He went forward and leaned close to the nearest one. It was a yellowed shred, blotched with grubby fingerprints and covered in a frantic scrawl of handwriting. The tour guide came up beside him and the boy followed.

  “Notes,” Bill explained. “Letters to loved ones; parents, girlfriends… We found hundreds of these, wedged between the layers of sandbags. They were written by our soldiers and left on the battlefield. They’re haunting,” he cautioned. “The words, the thoughts and fears… they’re all here.”

  The man peered at the shred of paper. Some of the words had faded and some were smudged and illegible. He began to decipher the writing and as he did he felt overwhelmed by a sudden sense of heavy melancholy. It was a letter from a soldier to his girlfriend. It was a ‘goodbye’ note, written in a hand that had been made shaky with fear and dread. The man read until his eyes misted and the young soldier’s words changed from a plea for the girl’s love into a prayer to his God. The man looked away quickly and cuffed at his eyes.

  The wall of the trench was like a noticeboard after a natural disaster, filled with hastily scrawled messages and small faded photographs with curled and crinkled edges of pretty girls and families.

  “During the first outbreak of the zombie infection, our soldiers stood against the undead in prepared trenches that were twenty feet wide, concreted in places, and supported by massed artillery or tanks,” Bill went on, his voice never rising, never thickening with emotion. “Sadly, when the contagion broke back out of Florida and the plague became the apocalypse, the ragged remains of our Army were not so prepared. The trenches were narrow scars in the earth exactly like this, crammed with troops. The men who were not on duty slept right where we are standing, curled up and cold in the mud and the blood, and the rain. Those on guard were lined up along the fire step – the raised platform you can see in front the sandbags. That was the forward wall of the trench – the thin line of defense against the horde.”

  The boy stepped up onto the fire step and teetered for balance. It was narrow, lined with more of the twisted trench boards. He could see the muddy imprint of boots on the boards and smell the peculiar odor of the hessian sandbags right before his face. He lifted his head slowly and peered over the lip of the trench.

  Before him lay an area of churned brown earth that stretched for ten yards before ending abruptly in a brick wall which had been painted with a detailed landscape mural. The painting depicted distant hills of bare broken earth below a lowering sky rimmed red along the horizon line. Between the wall and the lip of the trench was a tangled maze of coiled barbed wire. The wire was rusted, the posts that secured it hanging at lopsided angles. Dangling on the snags of wire, like gruesome dirty washing, were waxen effigies of the undead.

  The man heard the boy gasp and saw him seem to waver on the narrow trench boards as if he might fall. He stepped up beside the boy, put a hand in the middle of his back to hold him steady – and then his own eyes drifted over the barricade of wire. He went suddenly very cold, and very still.

  One of the undead figures had been strung within the tangled barbs, his clothes ripped into bloodied shreds, his arms hanging like those of a scarecrow. The face of the ghoul had been sculpted into a furious enraged snarl, the mouth open wide, and the grey flesh of its face hanging in loose flaps from the jawbone. Beside the figure was a second zombie, with one of its arms ripped away, the white of its shattered shoulder bones protruding from the bloodied stump of ashen flesh as it dragged itself forward through the dirt. The wax figures were so real in gruesome detail that the man felt a slither of some cold heavy nightmare uncoil and writhe in the pit of his guts. He shook his head numbly, and it required a conscious effort for him to breathe the stinking air. He stepped back down into the muddy trench, his legs shaking and sweat dripping in ice-cold beads down the inside of his shirt. He stood alone in the eerie silence for long seconds, staring down the length of the trench, his gaze vacant, until he felt the tour guide’s hand on his shoulder and he flinched and spun round.

  The guide’s expression was benign. “Are you okay?”

  The man nodded and flustered a self-depreciating gesture. “Yes,” he croaked the lie. “Of course. I… I was just looking ahead to the bend in the trench and wondering what it leads to.”

  They went forward together, walking quietly and hushed as if they were gathered reverently in a cathedral. At the bend in the trench, Bill suddenly stopped and pointed ahead.

  The new section of the trench stretched for another ten yards, the reverse leg of the channel’s crude zig-zag pattern. Here were more sandbags piled high against the facing slope of earth and more boards and rusted sheets of corrugated iron fortifying the reverse slope. It appeared the same as the first section of the exhibit, yet different.

  Halfway along the reverse slope was a section of duckboard slats that had been painted red, faded over the years to brown, and beyond it stood a six-foot square culvert hewn out of the earth, the walls reinforced by timbers so that it looked like the interior of a miniature log cabin. Several sheets of buckled corrugated iron were hung across the top of the opening to create a small crude cubicle with a roof against the cold and rain. Nailed against one of the support posts for the structure was a faded wooden sign painted white with a red cross.

  ‘Evac. Point’

  In hand painted black lettering below the message had been added the words, ‘Command’.

  “This section of the trench was where the battle was planned, and where the wounded and dead corpses were piled until they could be evacuated by helicopters,” Bill explained. “Take a look inside.”

  The boy ducked his head under the edge of the rusted iron roof and stared into the small gloomy space. The smell of raw earth and sewage was stronger here, seeming to seep odorously from between the logs. He saw a small table covered with a creased and crumpled map beside a discarded metal mess kit and canteen cup. Another, larger map, was pinned to one of the log retaining walls, it’s detail faded by brown water stains and spatters of mud. On the ground was a rusted metal box, its lid open, stuffed with rolls of bandages.

  The boy stepped back, relieved to be out of the tiny claustrophobic space. He swallowed hard and looked a question at the tour guide.

  “I thought everyone who was bitten became infected with the virus and turned into the undead,” the boy was frowning. “But you said the bodies of soldiers were laid here until evacuation.”

  Bill nodded. “What you said was true during the first outbreak,” he said. “But then our USAMRIID teams developed the Debex-343 injection. The soldiers called it the ‘gush needle’. Every soldier that the Army put into the field was vaccinated. They didn’t turn into the undead – they bled out before the contagion could infect.”

  The boy nodded. He had remembered the man telling him about the infection when they had stood on the overpass. He glanced back into the interior space, and then realized suddenly that the trench boards he was standing on were not painted – they had been stained with the countless gallons of blood that had spilled from the bodies of the soldiers as they bled out into the mud. He took several quick steps, bumped shoulders against the man, overcome with a rising sense of panic. The confined space of the trench was suddenly like a suffocating open grave, and he cast his eyes from one side to the other looking for an escape. The tour guide grabbed the boy by the arm.

  “Take a breath,” Bill said. The boy was hyperventilating hoarse gulps of air, his gaze frantic. Bill pressed his face closer. “Relax.”

  The boy closed his eyes, forced himself to breathe deeply. When he opened his eyes again the horror was gone, his gaze steady but shadowed. Bill le
t go of the boy’s arm and glanced over his shoulder to where the man stood.

  “Do we go on?”

  The man and the boy exchanged glances. The boy gave an imperceptible nod of his head.

  “Yes,” the man told Bill. “We go on.”

  The man and the boy fell in behind Bill and they walked slowly along the rest of the trench until suddenly the tour guide stopped again.

  At eye-level, a knife had been thrust into one of the sandbags, the handle protruding from the hessian, and hung from the knife by its chinstrap was a soldier’s helmet. There was something forlorn and touchingly symbolic about the memorial. Bill turned to face the man and the boy, and pointed to the helmet.

  “When this section of trench was excavated in Tennessee and brought to the museum for re-assembly, the decomposed bodies and skeletons of one hundred and forty one American soldiers were found, ground into the mud and dirt below the duckboards,” he said. “Some of the victims had been buried alive, most had been killed in the endless waves of zombie attacks. The original trench line had been defended by soldiers of the 4th Infantry Division. They held out against the undead for eighteen days before the survivors were evacuated. This helmet is a tribute to their heroism and sacrifice.”

  Beside the helmet was a badge. The man and the boy shuffled closer. “That is the 4th Division’s shoulder sleeve insignia,” Bill explained. “It shows four green ivy leaves joined at the stem and opening at the four corners. The ivy symbolism is a play on the Roman numerals for four – the ‘I’ and the ‘V’.”

  Below the badge was a small laminated card, the size of a cigarette packet. The words on the card leaped out at the man.

  ‘A Soldier’s Prayer’

  Deliver me from mine

  enemies, oh God.