the beginning

“I remember sending people out on calls to the river that Friday. There were all kinds of stupid things going on that night. Some girl eating a duck, people getting bit and drunks attacking people. I sent people out on those calls not knowing I was sending them to die. You know I blame that Rodney King stuff for a lot it though. We were kinda back on our heels cause of bad publicity like that and, let’s face it, these were rich kids we were dealing with for the most part. I guy comes in swinging and he’s likely to lose his badge because of it. Some moaning kid looking like shit comes towards you and you just tried to take him down as easily as possible.”

“The problem with Zach is that he don’t take “no” for an answer. Beat him all the fuck you want and the bastard gets right back up. I had officers talking about macing, tazing and sapping these suckers and they just kept getting up. We was thinking that we had some wild drug out there making all these kids crazy. Had the god damned government informed us we would of knew not to fuck with the things. Off em fast. That’s the rule we got now but then was different. They tried to do it gently. Can you imagine being gentle with one of those things? Damn near every cop sent down there got bit. And what did they have to do when they finally got em under control, hell, they brought them back here for the lock up or took them down to hospital cause they were pretty dinged up looking and most of the cops needed some tending to as well. Yep, all we did was take them to more food.”

“We calling in every cop we got and trying to call every cop from the other districts. It was getting out of hand, quick. There ain’t no such thing as one Zach. Once one gets in they start making Zachs real fast. Turns out the medical center over at the university had been having students coming in talking about bites. Some asshole was planning on writing up a report after the weekend but as you know the weekday never came.”

“We did start to catch on though. Two things happened. One of our guys got tired of hassling with the suckers and just started flinging their snapping little butts into the back of the cars. Well, you know what he found out? The damn things would even take a nip out of each other. Once we got that info, we just started throwing them in the back of whatever we could find. I mean, fuck Rodney King. We were going to get through this night then we were going to worry about some asshole lawyer taking our badges. This worked out fine till somebody threw a live one in a van. I mean, unless you understand things; a new Zach acts like a really drunk person. This guy was seriously fucked up and they just tossed him in with the others. By the time, they popped the door open this kid was in pieces and blood was rolling out the door. They looked up with those dead eyes and their faces all covered with blood and the cops pulled their guns. They ordered them to stop and when they didn’t they put some lead into them. You know this story too; they didn’t hardly stop snacking. Leg shots, arm shots, nothing stopped them until some female cop in disgust popped one in the head, when he acted like he was going to make her dessert. We didn’t care what they were on then, we knew we had to take serious measures.”

“Our next piece of luck came from Sparrow Hospital. You know were hauling them down there too. It was getting messy. People were getting bit and they were running out of gurneys to tie them down on. One of the people called over to the local CDC guy and he came running. See this guy was British and had been keeping up with what was going on around the world. What he knew was sketchy but he had heard enough to know something bad might be coming.”

“He shows up and sees the mess and grabs a scalpel and jabs a Zach and can’t get blood. Hell, he can’t get a pulse. He remembers what he’s been told and stabs the Zack right in his heart. They thought he was crazy until the thing didn’t stop moving. Every bloody thing he had heard was true. Suddenly, he started shouting orders. “Stab them through the eyes!” No one got Zachs then and they just couldn’t do it. He knew Sparrow was done then. People could turn in days or hours. The hospital was going to be overrun probably within hours because sick people turn very fast.”

“This doc didn’t live this far from here and he came right here with his wife and told me of what he knew. Now, I didn’t know him from Adam and I had half a thought of tossing him in the lock up too. Hell, we didn’t need another crazy running around. He showed me enough ID and finally I got it through my thick skull what he was talking about. I walked him to his car cause he was leaving and watched him drive off. I turned and looked across Grand River at the university. There were thousands of them over there and they would be coming real soon and there wasn’t a damn thing that we could do about it. I loaded up my revolver and got on the horn and called all my people. Fortunately, the news about the incident at the van had already circulated. They all came back got all the ammo they could and we just started. We swore to serve and protect and from what the Doc had said we knew most of us were going to be Zachs soon enough. Most of us were bitten and we were angry. There weren’t going to be any more weekend barbeques or holding our kids. You go to work to put your eight hours in and you wind up standing there dead. Couldn’t even call on the cell phones to say good bye cause they went down fast with all the students over there screaming for help and calling their parents.”

“We had our riot gear and we moved out to them at first with the hopes of getting to the dorms and maybe helping those kids out but we never even got across the river. These bastards weren’t strong but there was enough of them to force us back to Grand River. We were the first and last line of defense for the people of East Lansing. We were going to make a fight out of it. First bullets, then gun butts till finally we couldn’t raise our arms anymore. We bought serious time for a bunch of people but I’m the only one you can talk to left so I guess we paid dearly.”

“What the hell were we thinking about? Help the kids, we couldn’t even help ourselves. They had us fucking surrounded. We were damn near in the middle of Harrison and Grand River fighting back to back and knowing we weren’t going to make it and then a good swath of them were missing. A big white Caddy just mowed a bunch of them down like a bat out hell. That was the breathing room we needed and we ran up through the gap.”

“We fought our way back down Michigan Avenue to the golf course, which was fenced in. That proved to be our strategy, if you can call it that. We went from one fenced in area to another. There is a problem with this strategy: somebody has to stay behind and hold off the Zachs will the other people get over the fence. We didn’t draw lots.”

He paused and began blinking as if a strong light were shining in his eyes. He looked down then skyward and swallowed.

“We just knew. We’d start going over a fence and one of us would turn and hold them off. We did this again and again till finally we got to the skate park and then broke into Sears. Remember, fully half of us had come out of the military so we knew something about fighting and we had learned something about the nature of the enemy. Daybreak was coming and we knew we couldn’t stay at Sears. There were just way to many windows and easy entrances.”

“You know people have to fight for something and I realized that most of them were fighting for me because I was the only one who hadn’t been bitten. They wouldn’t hardly let me do anything after awhile. It was all about getting me to safety. We had one good piece of luck. They were coming from MSU so they were driving us into Lansing down Kalamazoo. We were lucky because the section of town they were driving us towards had a serious drug problem going on at that moment. Drugs meant that everybody’s house was setup to prevent intrusion and the people in those neighborhoods knew how to care of their selves.”

“We came out of Sears and pushed down Clippert and climbed into this walled transmission building for a cellular tower. We hunkered down there because this was a pretty formidable place but it had no supplies. We couldn’t stay there but the tower allowed us to climb up and get a look at what was happening around us. It didn’t take long to see that we were seriously fucked. The Zacks were filing down Zoo and Grand River. The only hope we saw was that some one had barricaded the underpasses to Lansing. This meant there was some organized resistance out there but there was maybe 200 yards of hard slogging to get to the barricade.

“Kirchner Park is right there and totally fenced in and it would bring us 100 yards closer. There wasn’t to many Zacks between us and the ballpark so it wasn’t that hard to get over there. We weren’t going anywhere though and unlike the transmission station, Kirchner Park was visually wide open so the Zacks could see us and start building up. We did something weird then, we turned on the ball park lights. We figured it would attract the Zachs to the baseball field and they would start building up on the eastside of the park and we would make our exit on the west.”

“It was strange. I’m standing in right field with Zachs pushing on the fence and I’m standing right where I use to play in the “Over Thirty League” for that bastard “Big Red” who was the manager of the team. I sucked so he would stick me out in right field where I couldn’t do any harm and all I wanted to do was to throw a strike to home plate. It never happened but I was always ready.”

“We had to leave Jurgens back at the transmission station. He was too far gone and he knew it. He asked that we haul him up the tower and he would call us on the walkie-talkie to direct us as long as he could. He saw the Zachs turn for the park and he told us that a bunch of people were headed towards the gas station.”

“We didn’t know what their intentions were but they were fighting their way in our direction and it gave us a chance. We ran to the dugout on the Westside of the ball field and climbed on top of the dugout roof. We got everything ready in a moment. It was all or nothing, no holding back – shields, guns, hatchets, knives and swords. We dove off and charged across the parking lot and then Clippert. The gas was flowing by the time we reached the station. They shoved me into the arms of the people trying to scramble back then wheeled and closed shields and pushed into the Zachs. I was dragged across the barrier and rolled onto the ground. I stood and saw my people holding the Zachs as the gasoline ran past their legs. One would drop and another would close ranks as they were being driven back to the expressway. Their line couldn’t be broken. They had no hope and they had Jurgen calling commands from the tower. Still they were slowly being crushed. Someone thrust a bottle in my hand, it was a Molotov cocktail. I gripped it as my friends went down under the weight of the Zachs. When the last one went down, someone lit it and I ran forward and threw it through the underpass.”

“It was a near perfect throw. I’ll always remember that.”