Penny, always so sensible and law-abiding, was careening down the highway at top speed—cameras be damned. Her husband occupied the back seat, thrashing around like a rabid dog. He made ugly, moaning sounds through the gag she’d tied around his head. The problem was, he had literally turned into a goddamn zombie.
She took the third exit and went down the off-ramp. Coming up on her right was the rehab building. The staff, alerted to their arrival, had the cage wheeled out to the entrance. Penny turned around in her seat and saw that in the space of the fifteen-minute drive, the man she loved was even more hideous than when she’d lugged him into the car, green and mean.
“You’re going to be okay, Fred!” She didn’t know if he could understand. He certainly didn’t act like it.
At the front entrance, two orderlies in medical-tackle gear were ready to transfer her husband to the observation cage. They cut the ropes that bound his ankles and he tried to bound out of the car. As strong as he had become, they were able to guide him in and slam the door shut. Fred bellowed like an enraged elephant.
One orderly wheeled the stricken man into the corridor while the other, who was carrying a tablet, asked questions, and Penny followed them.
“How long has he been like this?”
“Not long, less than an hour.”
“How did it happen?”
“I don’t know! We were in the living room watching The Price Is Right, when he suddenly leaped up off the sofa and tried to bite me!”
“And did he?”
“Bite me? Hell no! I hit him on the head with the ashtray and he fell backwards. It gave me enough time to run out to the garage, where I got his hunting rifle and some rope!”
“That was quick thinking!” said the orderly pushing the heavy cage.
“Then what happened, Mrs….”
“Longman, Penny. Well, he came looking for me, and I can tell you that was creepy! He was sniffing the air like an animal. I snuck up behind him with the rope, which I’d fashioned into a lasso, then I hog-tied him. What I want to know is, what is the government doing to combat this? There are hundreds if not thousands of these unfortunate people all over the county!”
The orderly mentally corrected her statement to ‘world’. They were coming to the end of the corridor and the swinging double doors that led to the examination rooms.
“I’m going to let our medical staff answer all your questions, Mrs. Longman. You’ve been really brave. Good luck to you.”
The orderlies rushed back out to the parking lot where another victim would arrive momentarily.
A doctor approached in the same hybrid protective gear. He wore a helmet with a lucite facemask, knee and arm protectors under his biohazard suit.Two other medical personnel wheeled Fred into a cubicle, and the doctor lifted the visor on his helmet, holding his hand out to Penny.
“Mrs. Longman, I’m Doctor Maddock, head of research here at the Zombie Rehabilitation Center, and your husband’s attending physician.”
Penny brushed a cigarette butt out of the fold in her shirt and held out her shaky hand.
“Oh, Doctor Maddock, what’s going on? My Fred is not himself. I don’t understand how this is happening! We’ve been staying at home or sheltering-in-place since this zombie thing started!”
“We’re doing everything we can to find the cause, Mrs. Longman. You know it could be a multitude of things: viral outbreak, hazardous industrial materials or toxic waste, even–God forbid–scientific experiments gone wrong. We can’t rule out anything.”
“Then you even have those Wiccan people doing hexes and black magic–ancient rituals!”
The doctor shot her a dubious look and dropped the concerned doctor schtick. He went back to looking at his tablet. Penny knew instantly that she’d said the wrong thing.
“Your husband is in good hands, Mrs. Longman.” The doctor didn’t even make eye contact as he rushed away, and another attendant ushered Penny back into the corridor.
“You can go home now, Mrs. Longman. We’ll call you if there are any developments.”
This word had an ominous ring to it, and it was what finally brought a tear to her eye. She drove home, shocked at how quickly her life had turned into dog doo. Why she was would frame her situation like this had to do with the car suddenly filling with the unmistakable odor. She looked at the bottom of her shoe, and through her tears, yelled, “Fuck!” When the song, “Don’t Fear The Reaper” came on, she started screaming.
Penny, always so sensible and organized, did what any distraught woman of her ilk would do. As soon as she got home, she went into a super cleaning binge. Starting with the shoe, then the inside of the car, then the outside of the car, the garage and finally the entire house, room by room. The cat watched her with mute fascination, following her from one task to another, and especially in the bathroom, where it perched on the toilet while Penny, on hands and knees, scrubbed the tile with such gusto, she didn’t notice that the cat had knocked over Fred’s toothpaste with its paw and was eating it. When it had enough, it licked its chops and went down the stairs to where the water bowl was.
Penny was throwing out the third sponge when she heard low gurgling moans coming from downstairs. She went to investigate and found the cat splayed on the kitchen floor in a very unnatural position.
“What’s up, Cider?” She bent over and lowered her head to the cat’s level, which she instantly regretted as the cat threw up toothpaste all over her blouse and pants.
“UGH!” she yelled.
She stripped off her clothes, threw on her robe, and went down to the basement utility room to wash out the mint-green stains in the sink. She put on her rubber gloves and began soaking. Then she heard the cat and groaned again. Damn, I’m going to have to take him to the vet, she thought.
That would have been a reasonable thing to do, but today was turning out to be anything but reasonable. The cat stood framed by the open basement door, and even backlit by the kitchen light, she could tell something was wrong.
“Cider?”
She was about to go up to him, but he came leaping down the stairs and attacked her. Guttural cat sounds mixed with human screams. The cat attached itself to Penny’s right arm, and instinctively, she grabbed its head and clamped the mouth shut, went to the sink and plunged it under the soapy water. The cat let go, and Penny reached for the laundry basket within arm’s length. It fit over the sink, and the cat was trapped.
“Holy shit, you’re a zombie too?”
The cat was hanging on to the side of the basket, making awful noises. Its eyes were red. Clearly, she only had minutes before it would get loose and attack again. The cat was shredding the plastic with its claws. Penny looked on the shelves above the sink. There were boxes, tool chests and a very large soda cracker tin filled with bits and bobs from her arts & crafts courses. That would do.
She checked her arm and saw that Cider had only ruined the nifty plastic pokamon applique, no bites. That was a relief, but instead of going to the vet, Peggy returned to the ZRC. In her pocket was Fred’s toothpaste, which she never used because transparent toothpastes made her retch. At a red light, she took it out of her pocket and read the list of ingredients. She looked them up and read that in combination they were a cocktail of carcinogens: Sodium Lauryl Sulphate plus ethylene oxide, and sulfur trioxide, and the sinister 4-Dioxane.
Penny couldn’t wait to tell Doctor Maddock about her discovery. It was the toothpaste! She was excited to think that she might even be on the nightly national news, but she remembered that she had embarrassed herself with the wiccan comment. He might not believe her. If only she could get him to listen to her long enough to show him the cat. She pulled into the parking lot and saw him and the two orderlies staggering around, looking for people to bite. The doctor had taken off his helmet.
The cat, tied up in the soda cracker tin, was dead. “Aw, jeez,” said Penny, and reaching for the shotgun, she put the car in park and left the motor running. With the rope slung over her shoulder, she cocked her rifle and went up through the open entrance.
“Fred, I’m taking you to Washington D.C. How do you like that? We’re going to the CDC, you lucky bastard. You’re going to have your own Wikipedia page!”
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Thanks, Rob! I appreciate you.
Transparent toothpaste? Makes sense to opt for any alternative, so long as it's opaque. Translucency: ever a dangerous quality in a zoobie paste? Yes, I think so, ever since sensing myself taking a unheralded hit in the zoobies from a character wearing toofles one afternoon back in the day when I was earnestly reading A Clockwork Orange in hope of finding answers. There's been a time-lag but, reading this story from the wilder side suggests, after so much water had flown under the middle arches of the bridge of life, now I realise that it wasn't a character but a Zombie who impacted my dentition so violently. Wow!