Dark clouds gathering

Good morning Cambridge!

I got a ride into town this morning- walking up Mass Ave to the Big Library I caught this perfect view of Cambridge City Hall.

Nightfall

I am blogging all of this from an empty house in Somerville near Porter Square. Funny, I used to live not more than a block and a half from here, back when I was a bachelor and a zombie apocalypse was the furthest thing from my mind.

The family that used to live here is as far as I can tell in bits and pieces strewn about here and there where the zombies fell upon them. Here is an arm, a leg, a piece of scalp, and everywhere bones and pieces of skull. No one knows why they are so intent on eating our brains - perhaps because it is the only vital organ on a ghoul, the creatures instinctively seek it out in its prey?

The phone lines - both land-based and cell - are down all over but the Internet is still alive and kicking somehow. I load up Digg and find nothing but zombie stories; the same with Fark; again the same with Reddit. The major media outlets are all offline, but the great horde of unwashed nerds continue to go toe to toe with the living dead. There is something cheering in this, even as I think about my daughter and the fate which must inevitably befall her.

Aside from the zombies on the rooftop I didn't encounter any ghouls as I limped up Oxford Street across the Cambridge/Somerville line, a weird occurrence that rattled me more than their hungry howls and mindless shuffling would have at this point. Other bloggers were reporting a similar lull in the zombie attacks. What was happening - had the plague run its course, or had the undead simply run out of people to eat? Whatever the cause, the government still wasn't taking any chances. Acting President Pelosi and the surviving members of the Bush Cabinet had been flown to a remote bikini atoll in the Pacific where they could watch, wait, and pray that situation would somehow improve while directing what remained of the United States' armed forces to deal with the worst of the hot spots. There had been talk of a televised address to the public, but since most of the stations around the country weren't broadcasting there didn't seem much point in it - besides, what could she say to us at this point that wouldn't have been a lie?

I tried to see if I could send an email to my wife's cell phone, but I wondered if the SMS message would even get through. I had looked around for a phone here but couldn't find one, and I dared not wander around the neighborhood in the dark looking for another while at any moment I could stumble upon a pack of zombies who would begin the hunt anew.

If you're reading this, Mrs. Exile, I'm still out here and alive... somehow. My address is 123 Fake Street. Please send a helicopter and a clean change of clothes if you can!

Decision time

The zombies have been bashing against this door for what seems like forever, and I don't know how much longer I can hold them back. Besides, it's getting dark and I'm not sure if the Coast Guard would even be able to find me up here on the library rooftop once the sun goes down.

I take a look at the skylight where my cell phone disappeared and wonder what my chances would be of surviving a fall from that height should I slide down it myself and jump off the side of the building. There are trees adjacent to this side of the building, I remember suddenly. If I can use them to break my fall...

The moaning is getting louder. The ghouls are trying now - I shouldn't say "try" because there's no conscious effort here, just unremitting, unrelenting bottomless insatiable hunger - to use sheer volume to force open the door. It's only a matter of time, I realize, and that's when I make my decision.

When I stop pushing back against the door it flies open, disgorging a clutch ravenous moaning zombies onto the roof. I only have this one opportunity before they surround me and devour me right there on the spot. Taking a deep breath, I fling myself onto the skylight closest to me and slide down the roof, hoping that the glass panes will support my weight as I do so. The ghouls do their best to follow but the physics of this convex slick surface confound their animal instinct and they veer off far to the right and the left of where I come to rest against the rooftop's edge.

The trees are close but not that close, and it's a long way down even from their lowest branches. I curse the groundskeepers of Harvard Yard and leap into the evening gloom...

CRASH! I land smack in the middle of a tangle of branches that give under my hurtling mass, snapping around me and tearing my flesh as I fall through the leaves and shoots. Vainly I reach out for something to break my fall but there is only air for a sickening full second before I hit the grassy loam with enough velocity that it feels like pavement. Pain arcs through my left leg as I jam it upon impact. Please let me be able to walk on it, I think to myself, but in truth that wasn't really a concern. As long as I hadn't snapped the damned thing in half, I would not only walk on my hobbled leg but run... as fast as I could.

For a moment I thought of looking for my cell phone, but thought better of wasting those few precious moments on such a silly notion. This wasn't some cliched B movie I had found myself in the middle of, after all!

Turning of the tide?

It was my wife calling me!

"Hello?"

"Thank God you're okay!" Her relief was palpable over the bad cell connection, as was mine on her end I'm sure. I leaned my back against the rooftop access door and caught my breath for a moment.

"Well, I don't know for how much longer though."

Her voice became grave. "What do you mean?"

"I mean the library is crawling with zombies. I'm all alone on the roof now."

"The Coast Guard here is looking for survivors and flying them out to Cape Ann. The zombies don't seem to like the water, so Gloucester is safe now that they blew the bridges and pulled up the drawbridge along the Boulevard."

"So that's what they were doing this morning. How did you and the baby make it across if they blew the bridges?"

Mrs. Exile was silent for so long that I thought maybe I had lost the call. At last she spoke: "Baby Exile is at the hospital."

"What?"

"She... she was scratched... by one of them."

My heart sank. I didn't know what to say.

"Then she'll turn like the rest of them."

Mrs. Exile said nothing to this. What could she say? After this day of horror I didn't think I had the capacity to feel even worse, but my wife's news had somehow found a way. I considered tossing the phone off the roof and then jumping myself, but the voice on the other end of the phone, sensing that that's exactly what I was contemplating, didn't allow me to indulge that dark thought:

"They're sending helicopters all over the place. You need to hold on and they'll get out of there. Don't give up on me now, do you hear?"

Just then there was a massive THUD against the rooftop door that jolted the phone out of my hand and sent it skittering down the skylight to my right. I watched helplessly as my lifeline flew off the side of the roof.

"No!"

Another thud. I braced myself against the door. How had they clambered up the fire escape so quickly? Desperate, I scanned the sky for signs of a rescue copter, but all I could see were grey clouds. It was cold and clammy outside today - perfect weather for a zombie rooftop picnic.

Kobayashi Maru

It's not safe here.

How could I have forgotten that the subway runs directly beneath the library's bottommost steam tunnels? When the MBTA was extending the Red Line, they had to dig that deep in order to avoid tunneling into our library's basement levels, which is why the escalator ride into the stations outbound beyond Harvard feel like slow-motion descents into the lower reaches themselves. The ghouls, packed thick into the subway tunnels, must have latched onto a scent above and scrabbled through the substrate - with so many claws and so much force bearing in the direction of what was probably the only living meat within miles it was only a matter of time before they found a way.

We discovered the breach about a half an hour ago, when one of the security guards noticed on the surveillance cameras that something was setting off the motion detectors down below in the Stacks. Sure enough, it was Professor X. A distinguished older gentleman from one of the more prestigious universities in Western Europe, he generally gave himself carte blanche to roam the halls of the library whenever he damned well please, whatever the rules were for anyone else. He was also a notorious technophobe, and probably hadn't even heard the news that the dead had risen and were now walking the Earth. We tried paging him over the intercom system, to no avail - either he didn't hear the message (our system being notoriously flaky and prone to breakdown here and there) or he had heard it and decided that the notice, however dire, certainly didn't apply to him.

Someone was going to have to go down there and get him...

"Professor X?" I called out with ax in hand. The cameras had last picked up the cranky old scholar on C Level, but having roamed that floor of the Stacks from East to West I hadn't turned up any sign of him. As I went to reach towards the door heading to the stairwell, however, I could hear what sounded like a scream coming from one floor up. My heart pounding, I crept towards the source of the noise, which was the break room just outside the access door to the Stacks.

I swiped my card to open the door and turned the corner to see Professor X holding one of the women from the janitorial staff above his head with what could only have been inhuman strength, his normally clenched jaws wide open and dripping with gore. He had already taken a bite out of the poor cleaning lady, whose brain was now exposed in a gooey parfait of cranial matter and blood. As he sensed the arrival of new prey, Professor X let out that awful moaning cry.

Gritting my teeth I swung the ax again, burying the blade into the septuagenarian faculty's shoulder. Professor X howled and raked his claws at me, just narrowing missing my face by centimeters. I pulled out the ax, which came free of the zombie professor's reanimated flesh with a sickening sucking pop, and tried again to cleave through his head.

That's when I heard more moans echoing from the still-open door to the Stacks behind me. They were answering his call! In a panic I dropped the fire ax and bolted out the break room. While these ghouls weren't quite the lumbering slowpokes from many a Creature Double Feature from the UHF Saturday afternoon television my youth, I was still able to escape back upstairs to the Circulation Desk, only to find that the zombies had already made short order of the rest of the assembled survivors - blood and guts spilled over the long wooden desk, and I could only vaguely make out who was who amid the remains. It was probably just as well. Had the ghouls left anything recognizably human, they would almost certainly have been turned into the living dead themselves.

I realized that my only chance lay in getting to the roof and hoping I could keep the zombies at bay as they attempted to mount the fire escape one by one, so without waiting to see who or what would lunge at me next I sprinted up the steps to the second and then third floor of the library, my pace quickened by the sounds of moaning and shuffling below. My ID card could not open the door permitting roof access, so I did what any former MIT student would do in such a situation and slipped the card in between the lock and the doorframe, desperate that an old hacker's trick would work in my hour of need.

CLICK! The door popped open and I was up on the rooftop, at which point my phone began to ring...

I used to like Wednesdays

Today is Wednesday. Right now I should be eating a burrito and buying comic books in the Square, but instead I'm sharpening my ax and trying to scrub the blood of a dear friend off my hands. That'll teach me to get less than four hours of sleep on the night before the Zombie Apocalypse...

For some reason the Internet is still up and running - God bless the nerds of the world (besides, a server room is probably the most defensible place in an office building). News sites are getting slammed of course, but from what we can glean from blogs and other sources it looks like it's not just Boston that is overrun with the undead, but the entire world. How it started is still something of a mystery. My friend Jason reports that it may have started in Louisville, Kentucky, whereas other people are saying Asia. Not that it really matters at this point, I guess.

I still haven't heard from my wife. Gloucester gets lousy cell coverage to begin with, so she may just be in a dead patch - I can't believe I just typed that - but who the hell knows? I know I have to be judicious with the power on my phone because I don't have the charger with me and who knows how long the electricity is going to hold out in this place. Computers, cell phones - they all seem so fucking useless right now anyway. I wish I could get back there right now but I know that I can't, as local bloggers say there's a line of zombies stretching for as far as the eye can see from the ocean all the way to the Merrimack Valley devouring everything in their path. Someone said the Air National Guard has been trying to firebomb the shit out of them but their ranks are so depleted by the Iraq War that they can't muster enough sorties to make a difference. Then again, the story out of the Middle East is equally grim, so it probably wouldn't have mattered whether we had our soldiers here or not.

But I'm avoiding telling you something awful. Because it's Wednesday. And Wednesday is supposed to be comic book day...

There were only a handful of us in the library after they locked it down - the early-birds, the janitorial staff, and the security guards who stayed rather than try to make a break for it when they first heard the news. Though I'm not sure where they'd have gone. Someone said that there was a cruise ship down along the Boston waterfront, but getting there would have been a suicidal journey with the T crawling with ghouls all around downtown and zombies prowling the wide boulevards of Back Bay. Maybe with a gun, but somehow I doubt it. Because what use is a pistol when you run out of bullets and the dead keep coming?

Better to have an ax. A sharp one. All the better to split open the skull of a zombie. Or someone about to become one...

My best friend M. was at the library as well. He'd been smart enough to get the hell out of his Central Square offices and hightail up to Harvard as soon as the Internet started to buzz with strange reports of the living dead sweeping up into New England. Not only was the library one of the most solidly-built structures in Cambridge, but it also had a commanding view of the surrounding town and was large enough to permit a helicopter rescue if anyone managed to mount such an operation. Fortunately he remembered that I'd given him a Stacks Pass ages ago, so he used the dog-earned yellow square of card-stock to get admittance. I still can't believe that they were turning people away up until the very end, when it became terrifyingly obvious that there was noplace else to go. What a day to be a victim of our library's strict access policies!

M. had seen the initial waves working their way through Cambridge. Before the zombies had reached a critical mass it was still possible to try to avoid them as he did, but as they waylaid unsuspecting souls and turned them the streets choked at an exponential rate with their ranks, just like all those funny little simulations you'd find linked on Digg or Fark. Except avoiding these ghouls wasn't a game, and you didn't get time to figure out how deadly serious it was until it was too late. Briefly M. had considered getting into his car and trying to plow his way to freedom before good sense prevailed.

"Maybe in an SUV," he said. "But not my piece of shit Chevy."

I was glad to see at least one person who was dear to me still alive. Not only was the fate of Mrs. and Baby Exile gnawing at me, but I hadn't heard anything from the rest of my family as well save for a frantic text message from my dad shortly before Verizon's network got swamped:

"N CPMAY GOT BT B SAF"

If it meant what I hoped it did, my dad was on the Cape May Ferry, which could easily put out to sea and get away from the insanity at least until the food and fresh water ran out. Maybe that would be enough time...

"Dude, I don't feel so well."

It was then that I noticed that my friend M. had a long scratch running down his left forearm, like from a cat only larger. The wounds were a mottled purple and exuded a powerful smell of decay as he rolled up his sleeve to examine them more closely.

"Fuck!"

He was quick, but he hadn't been quick enough. While a zombie can turn a man on the spot with a bite - already we were becoming ghoul experts through Blogger and a sense of life-or-death necessity - scratches took some time to fester, which is what made the outbreak so easy to spread. Whereas a full-blown zombie was easy to spot and perhaps try to avoid, these walking infected could go for hours before suddenly attacking their neighbors without warning. And it was possible that even just their touch could infect a healthy host, although right at that moment that was so much idle speculation fueled by panic and fear.

Before I could even think I had the fire ax in my hand. We had recently been running through a series of Emergency Preparedness drills thanks to the carnage of the Virginia Tech shootings, and although I don't know what in God's name I would do with an ax in the event that a lone gunman stalked our library for some reason I made a point of memorizing its location when we did our assessment nevertheless. And now I knew why.

"Dude?" M. looked at me with horror mixed with a grim sense of understanding as I raised the blade over his head. I didn't even have the decency to tell him that I was sorry when I brought the ax down on his skull, splitting it in two. The brain is the only way to stop them, the reports all agreed. Makes the undead dead once more, and keeps the dead from becoming undead in the first place. It was the only way, I think to myself, but I know that won't keep me from replaying those awful moments in my head over and over again until the day that I die (which looks as if it will be sooner rather than later).

I sharpen my ax and scrub at my hands. Did M.'s blood infect me as well? I don't feel like a zombie. Zombies don't crave comic books and burritos. Zombies don't wonder whether their loved ones are alive, dead, or something worse. Zombies don't grieve for the friends they just killed with their own two hands.

Or do they?

Something is rotten in the People's Republic

Something is wrong.

I emerged from the subway station to find the Square completely devoid of people - no students, no people walking their dogs in the Yard, and most frightening of all no tourists. This is the prime season for dozens of tour buses to line up and down Mass Ave idling as they disgorge myriad sightseers from around the world who think of Harvard and MIT as the equivalent of the Magic Kingdom and Epcot Center, but there was not a one to be found this morning.

As I walked to the library where I work with ever-increasing panic I noticed that the security guards instead of opening the gates to Harvard Yard were actually closing them instead, so I broke into a run only to find a man shouting at me with his pistol drawn.

"Get back! Get back, you undead bastard!"

"Hey, I work here..." I tried not to piss my pants while I produced my ID card. The security guard cautiously lowered his gun.

"Jesus, kid. What are you doing here?"

"What are you talking about?"

"Haven't you heard - the dead are walking the earth!"

As the massive iron gate closed us off from Mass Ave, I looked at the man in disbelief.

"The dead?"

"Zombies, kid. Christ, haven't you been watching the news?"

I hadn't, of course. The train had deposited me and the other nervous commuters into North Station as always, but programmed as we all were to simply shuffle on to our daily grind it had never occurred to us to worry about the shufflings of the living dead as they too slowly worked their way towards the city.

Once I was on the subway I was completely incommunicado, and although I could swear I could see shapes moving in the pitch black tunnels once or twice as I made my connections to Harvard Square I just chalked it up to overactive imagination and a lack of sleep. Now as I listened to the security guard I realized how close I had come to meeting my maker:

"I just heard that the Red Line got stuck between Park Street and Charles. The tunnel was so full of ghouls that the train couldn't pass."

Oh, God. I thought. That was probably the next train after mine! I had always imagined what it would have been like had H.P. Lovecraft's creepy little story "Pickman's Model" had been true, but this was too much. I tried to keep my breakfast from coming back up as I digested the implications of what was happening.

"They're all over Boston now. They blew the bridges and tunnels in the North but the zombies came up through the Big Dig in the South. Waves and waves of living dead just rolled over the traffic and ate the commuters like sitting ducks trapped in their cars."

I thought of the Southeast Expressway at a dead standstill on a weekday morning at rush hour. Like a buffet for the taking...

So much for breakfast.

"Come on, we gotta get inside." The guard grabbed my arm as I finished retching.

I was confused. "Inside? Where?"

"The library, kid! It's built like a freaking fortress. If we're going to survive this anywhere, you at least came to the right place."

I nodded and let myself be lead towards the library entrance. But what about my wife? What about my daughter? What was going to happen to them in Gloucester? If they were smart enough to cut the connections to the mainland, then maybe Cape Ann would be okay. But we lived on the other side of the Cut Bridge. What if they hadn't made it across in time?

Desperate, I tried calling Mrs. Exile again, but the lines were jammed. I wanted to stay outside and keep dialing but then I heard a sound that made my blood run cold, a moaning howl that was like nothing my ears had ever heard in all my life. It was neither animal nor man, neither living nor dead, but I recognized it as a sound of hunger.

I looked at the guard and he looked at me. Suddenly there was a mass of bodies moving towards the large iron gate...

Tourists! Busloads and busloads of ravenous zombies in loud t-shirts, khaki shorts, and brand-new sneakers with their digital cameras and videorecorders still hanging around what was left of the flesh of their necks. I froze where I stood, but the security guard had enough presence of mind to squeeze off a few rounds at the undead horde of sightseers.

BLAM BLAM BLAM!

One slumped from a perfect shot to the head, splattering brains and blood everywhere, but ten ghouls moved to take his place at the gate as he did so. As we watched the old wrought iron strain under the inexorable weight of the undead, I knew that the gate wouldn't hold much longer.

I looked at my phone again - still jammed! - then at the zombie horde just paces away. We had no choice now. I said a silent prayer for my family as I went inside with the security guard and those who were already there closed and barred the door in the vain hope that it would hold against this unholy tide...