Across the Dnieper, Kiev burned. Black pillars rose from the city center. We were downwind, the stench was terrible, the wood and rubber and stink of burning flesh. We didn’t know how far they were now, maybe a kilometer, maybe less. Up on the hill, the fire had engulfed the monastery. Goddamn tragedy. With its high walls, its strategic location, we could have made a stand. Any first-year cadet could have turned it into an impregnable fortress—stocked the basements, sealed the gates, and mounted snipers in the towers. They could have covered the bridge for…fucking forever!
I thought I heard something, a sound from the other bank…that sound, you know, when they are all together, when they are close, that…even over the shouts, the curses, the honking horns, the distant sniper fire, you know that sound.
[He attempts to mimic their moan but collapses into uncontrolled coughs. He holds his handkerchief up to his face. It comes away bloody.]
That sound was what pulled me away from the radio. I looked over at the city. Something caught my eye, something above the rooftops and closing fast.
The jet streaked over us at treetop level. There were four of them, Sukhoi 25 “Rooks,” close, and low enough to identify by sight. What the hell, I thought, are they going to try to cover the bridge’s approach? Maybe bomb the area behind it? It had worked at Rovno, at least for a few minutes. The Rooks circled, as if confirming their targets, then banked low and came straight at us! Devil’s mother, I thought, they are going to bomb the bridge! They’d given up on the evacuation and were going to kill everyone!
“Off the bridge!” I started shouting. “Everyone get off!” Panic shot through the crowd. You could see it like a wave, like a current of electricity. People started screaming, trying to push forward, back, into one another. Dozens were jumping into the water with heavy clothes and shoes that prevented them from swimming.
I was pulling people across, telling them to run. I saw the bombs released, thought maybe I could dive at the last moment, shield myself from the blast. Then the parachutes opened, and I knew. In a split second, I was up and dashing like a frightened rabbit. “Button up!” I screamed. “Button up!” I leapt onto the nearest tank, slammed the hatch down, and ordered the crew to check the seals! The tank was an obsolete T-72. We couldn’t know if the overpressure system still worked, hadn’t tested it in years. All we could do was hope and pray while cringing in our steel coffin. The gunner was sobbing, the driver was frozen, the commander, a junior sergeant just twenty years old, was balled up on the floor, clutching the little cross he had around his neck. I put my hand on the top of his head, assured him we would be fine while keeping my eyes glued to the periscope.
RVX doesn’t start out as a gas, you see. It starts out as rain: tiny, oily droplets that cling to whatever they contact. It enters through the pores, the eyes, the lungs. Depending on the dosage, the effects can be instantaneous. I could see the evacuees’ limbs begin to tremble, arms falling to their sides as the agent worked its way through their central nervous system. They rubbed their eyes, fought to speak, move, breathe. I was glad I couldn’t smell the contents of their undergarments, the sudden discharge of bladder and bowels.
Why would they do it? I couldn’t understand. Didn’t the high command know that chemical weapons had no effect on the undead? Didn’t they learn anything from Zhitomir?
The first corpse to move was a woman, just a second or more before the others, a twitching hand groping across the back of a man who looked like he’d been trying to shield her. He slipped off as she rose on uncertain knees. Her face was mottled and webbed with blackened veins. I think she saw me, or our tank. Her jaw dropped, her arms rose. I could see the others coming to life, every fortieth or fiftieth person, everyone who had been bitten and had previously tried to conceal it.
And then I understood. Yes, they’d learned from Zhitomir, and now they found a better use for their cold war stockpiles. How do you effectively separate the infected from the others? How do you keep evacuees from spreading the infection behind the lines? That’s one way.
They were starting to fully reanimate, regaining their footing, shuffling slowly across the bridge toward us. I called for the gunner. He could barely stutter a response. I kicked him in the back, barked the order to sight his targets! It took a few seconds but he settled his crosshairs on the first woman and squeezed the trigger. I held my ears as the Coax belched. The other tanks followed suit.
Twenty minutes later, it was over. I know I should have waited for orders, at least reported our status or the effects of the strike. I could see six more flights of Rooks streaking over, five heading for the other bridges, the last for the city center. I ordered our company to withdraw, to head southwest and just keep going. There were a lot of bodies around us, the ones who’d just made it over the bridge before the gas hit. They popped as we ran over them.
Have you been to the Great Patriotic War Museum Complex? It was one of the most impressive buildings in Kiev. The courtyard was filled with machines: tanks, guns, every class and size, from the Revolution to the modern day. Two tanks faced each other at the museum’s entrance. They were decorated with colorful drawings now, and children were allowed to climb and play on them. There was an Iron Cross, a full meter in size, made from the hundreds of real Iron Crosses taken from dead Hitlerites. There was a mural, from floor to ceiling, showing a grand battle. Our soldiers were all connected, in a seething wave of strength and courage that crashed upon the Germans, that drove them from our homeland. So many symbols of our national defense and none more spectacular than the statue of the Rodina Mat (Motherland). She was the tallest building in the city, a more than sixty-meter masterpiece of pure stainless steel. She was the last thing I saw in Kiev, her shield and sword held high in everlasting triumph, her cold, bright eyes looking down at us as we ran.
SAND LAKES PROVINCIAL WILDERNESS PARK, MANITOBA,
CANADA
[Jesika Hendricks gestures to the expanse of subarctic wasteland. The natural beauty has been replaced by wreckage: abandoned vehicles, debris, and human corpses remain partially frozen into the gray snow and ice. Originally from Waukesha, Wisconsin, the now naturalized Canadian is part of this region’s Wilderness Restoration Project. Along with several hundred other volunteers, she has come here every summer since the end of official hostilities. Although WRP claims to have made substantial progress, none can claim to see any end in sight.]
I don’t blame them, the government, the people who were supposed to protect us. Objectively, I guess I can understand. They couldn’t have everyone following the army west behind the Rocky Mountains. How were they going to feed all of us, how were they going to screen us, and how could they ever hope to stop the armies of undead that almost certainly would have been following us? I can understand why they would want to divert as many refugees north as possible. What else could they do, stop us at the Rockies with armed troops, gas us like the Ukrainians? At least if we went north, we might have a chance. Once the temperature dropped and the undead froze, some us might be able to survive. That was happening all around the rest of the world, people fleeing north hoping to stay alive until winter came. No, I don’t blame them for wanting to divert us, I can forgive that. But the irresponsible way they did it, the lack of vital information that would have helped so many to stay alive…that I can never forgive.
It was August, two weeks after Yonkers and just three days after the government had started withdrawing west. We hadn’t had too many outbreaks in our neighborhood. I’d only seen one, a collection of six feeding on a homeless man. The cops had put them down quickly. It happened three blocks from our house and that was when my father decided to leave.
We were in the living room; my father was learning how to load his new rifle while Mom finished nailing up the windows. You couldn’t find a channel with anything but zombie news, either live images, or recorded footage from Yonkers. Looking back, I still can’t believe how unprofessional the news media was. So much spin, so few hard facts. All those digestible sound bites from an army of “experts” all contradicting one another, all trying to seem more “shocking” and “in depth” than the last one. It was all so confusing, nobody seemed to know what to do. The only thing any of them could agree on was that all private citizens should “go north.” Because the living dead freeze solid, extreme cold is our only hope. That’s all we heard. No more instructions on where to head north, what to bring with us, how to survive, just that damn catchphrase you’d hear from every talking head, or just crawling over and over across the bottom of the TV. “Go north. Go north. Go north.”
“That’s it,” Dad said, “we’re getting out of here tonight and heading north.” He tried to sound determined, slapping his rifle. He’d never touched a gun in his life. He was a gentleman in the most literal sense—he was a gentle man. Short, bald, a pudgy face that turned red when he laughed, he was the king of the bad jokes and cheesy one-liners. He always had something for you, a compliment or a smile, or a little extension to my allowance that Mom wasn’t supposed to know about. He was the good cop in the family, he left all the big decisions to Mom.
Now Mom tried to argue, tried to make him see reason. We lived above the snowline, we had all we needed. Why trek into the unknown when we could just stock up on supplies, continue to fortify the house, and just wait until the first fall frost? Dad wouldn’t hear it. We could be dead by the fall, we could be dead by next week! He was so caught up in the Great Panic. He told us it would be like an extended camping trip. We’d live on mooseburgers and wild berry desserts. He promised to teach me how to fish and asked me what I wanted to name my pet rabbit when I caught it. He’d lived in Waukesha his whole life. He’d never been camping.
[She shows me something in the ice, a collection of cracked DVDs.]
This is what people brought with them: hair dryers, GameCubes, laptops by the dozen. I don’t think they were stupid enough to think they could use them. Maybe some did. I think most people were just afraid of losing them, that they’d come home after six months and find their homes looted. We actually thought we were packing sensibly. Warm clothes, cooking utensils, things from the medicine cabinet, and all the canned food we could carry. It looked like enough food for a couple of years. We finished half of it on the way up. That didn’t bother me. It was like an adventure, the trek north.
All those stories you hear about the clogged roads and violence, that wasn’t us. We were in the first wave. The only people ahead of us were the Canadians, and most of them were already long gone. There was still a lot of traffic on the road, more cars than I’d ever seen, but it all moved pretty quickly, and only really snarled in places like roadside towns or parks.
Parks?
Parks, designated campgrounds, any place where people thought they’d gone far enough. Dad used to look down on those people, calling them shortsighted and irrational. He said that we were still way too close to population centers and the only way to really make it was to head as far north as we could. Mom would always argue that it wasn’t their fault, that most of them had simply run out of gas. “And whose fault is that,” Dad would say. We had a lot of spare gas cans on the roof of the minivan. Dad had been stocking up since the first days of the Panic. We’d pass a lot of traffic snarls around roadside gas stations, most of which already had these giant signs outside that said NO MORE GAS. Dad drove by them really fast. He drove fast by a lot of things, the stalled cars that needed a jump, or hitchhikers who needed a ride. There were a lot of those, in some cases, walking in lines by the side of the road, looking like the way you think refugees are supposed to look. Every now and then a car would stop to pick up a couple, and suddenly everyone wanted a ride. “See what they got themselves into?” That was Dad.
We did pick up one woman, walking by herself and pulling one of those wheeled airline bags. She looked pretty harmless, all alone in the rain. That’s probably why Mom made Dad stop to pick her up. Her name was Patty, she was from Winnipeg. She didn’t tell us how she got out here and we didn’t ask. She was really grateful and tried to give my parents all the money she had. Mom wouldn’t let her and promised to take her as far as we were going. She started crying, thanking us. I was proud of my parents for doing the right thing, until she sneezed and brought up a handkerchief to blow her nose. Her left hand had been in her pocket since we picked her up. We could see that it was wrapped in a cloth and had a dark stain that looked like blood. She saw that we saw and suddenly looked nervous. She told us not to worry and that she’d just cut it by accident. Dad looked at Mom, and they both got very quiet. They wouldn’t look at me, they didn’t say anything. That night I woke up when I heard the passenger door slam shut. I didn’t think it was anything unusual. We were always stopping for bathroom breaks. They always woke me up just in case I had to go, but this time I didn’t know what had happened until the minivan was already moving. I looked around for Patty, but she was gone. I asked my parents what had happened and they told me she’d asked them to drop her off. I looked behind us and thought I could just make her out, this little spec getting smaller each second. I thought she looked like she was running after us, but I was so tired and confused I couldn’t be sure. I probably just didn’t want to know. I shut a lot out during that drive north.
