The Rotting Dead

Children, remember well this name: Jonathan Michelsky. Remember him as the reason all your little heads are stuck good on your shoulders, and not being split open by the unnaturally sharp chompers of the rotting dead.

You know your history, right? You know how the plague spread out of the Everglades, taking first Florida, then advancing into Alabama and Georgia? You know how the brave men and women in those states under siege stayed their ground with shotguns and axes and sticks when even the National Guard decided there was nothing to do but build a wall? Our country’s soldiers tried to get them out, every last one, brave men and women them too, but some of ‘em just wouldn’t budge from their land. Ted and Angela Burton, who had enough ammo in their cellar to take out weeks worth of rotters, and then themselves when they knew there was no way out, rather than become one. Dick Horrace, who hunkered down on shortwave radio and kept people connected so they’d fight a better fight, and so the rest of the country would know what was going on behind the blackout, behind the wall. His broadcasts lasted three months before they, too, went dead.

You kids know, of course, about how horrible the silence was, before the bombing, and especially after it, when the President ordered the rest of Alabama and Georgia and some of Mississippi evacuated, and the area behind the wall pulverized. You don’t remember how we waited for news, but I do, I was just a bit older than you then. Teams in hazmat suits were sent in to the desolation behind the wall, to check for signs of the scourge. The nation watched. Everything was whitewashed by the bombing… everything alive was dead, and everything dead was dead, or so it seemed. They didn’t find much trace of the rotters. Everything had melted, and that was good.

You don’t expect a zombie to be smart. I still don’t think they were. I still think it was dumb chance that some of them were in the bomb shelters and the subways and the caves.
Still, it wouldn’t have made a difference. The Guard could have taken ‘em out. Florida wasn’t the battleground anymore. Or it wouldn’t be for long.

To this day they’re not sure if the Louisiana strain arose independently, or if some rotter somehow got from point A to point B, while no one was looking. They burned all the corpses, keeping only tiny little bits for science, which if you ask me was a hell of a bad idea, but there haven’t been problems yet, and they’re right that understanding the plague will help us fight it better next time, if ever, you know, God forbid. I mean, it’s science that got rid of them in the first place, after all. Science and Jonathan Michelsky.

Who was Jonathan Michelsky, you ask? Medical Technology senior at Louisiana Tech. He lost his parents in the Georgia advance, and he was watching live on TV when his girlfriend Ruth got attacked, bitten, and then headshot by a well-meaning soldier in the first of the Baton Rouge outbreaks. Jonathan lost everything that mattered to him, at the hands of the zombies. That’s where he got his determination, his will, to do something almost no one would dare try. That’s why he’s the hero we all have the responsibility of remembering. One day it’ll be you telling this story, won’t it, children?

Since Louisiana Tech is up in the northern part of the state, they weren’t hit by the first waves of the plague that seemed to come out of the bayous in the south. But the Louisiana strain was advancing fast – too fast to build a wall, traveling by land and by water, hitting the least populated areas first. Like it was smarter. The army sent in marksmen but there were too many of them, and too spread out. They headshot a lot of them but more kept coming.

The army’s efforts, although ultimately futile, did buy the civilians time to evacuate ahead of the wave. And also gave Jonathan Michelsky time to think. See, Jonathan knew he wasn’t going to leave with everybody else. The zombies had taken all he cared for. He wasn’t afraid of death. And he was going to try to take as many as he could of them down with him.

He stashed food into the lab where he had a part-time job, and when the sirens wailed in Ruston and the cops came to take everyone out of there, Jonathan hid. He hid while they shut the city down and placed electric fences to slow the wave of dead that was advancing, advancing and growing, snarling and hungry and relentless.

Alone in the infectious diseases lab of a ghost college town, Jonathan Michelsky broke into the most hazardous part of the facilities and grabbed some samples. He did what he had to, and then recorded a message on his webcam. He burned ten copies of the message, left some in the lab, kept the others on himself in weatherproof, fireproof envelopes, grabbed a heavy-duty staple gun, and waited.

The inevitable came.

Jonathan didn’t fight them.

I bet that the prospect of just letting the thing he hated the most in the world win, as the last act of his life, was worse for him than even being eaten alive. But his drive to save the rest of humanity was stronger than his hatred. Hatred is a selfish feeling, and Jonathan Michelsky was heroically unselfish.

The story breaks here, for a little bit. The Louisiana strain traveled silently, stealthily, giving off no sound, no heat. Traveled by water, traveled through the wilderness. Town after town fled or stood its ground, and town after town fell, and the ranks of the undead swelled.

You’ve all heard about the Battle of Springhill. Bet there’s not a child in America who hasn’t. Only about 7000 people in that town, and a lot of them ran, but some didn’t. Troops showed up and made a stand, because the helicopters saw them coming, the dripping, rotting dead. The helicopters tried to shoot them, but they moved through the pines, thick and dry. Someone called in an order, name’s lost to time now, to firebomb the advancing wave. Zombies burned and didn’t care. Pines burned and the forest fire spread even faster than the cadaverous menace.

Springhill was a disaster. Closed off on all sides by walls of fire, the soldiers and civilians in that town fought bravely, picking off the zombies one by one. Lots of men and women died in Springhill. Lots of rotters got dispatched, but lots of new ones got made, too. But most importantly, it was in Springhill that Jonathan Michelsky’s message got out.

A private named Anna Larkin noticed a rotter acting differently from the others. This was late in the battle; many on both sides were dead; she was holed up in the school cafeteria alone, hearing them outside, feeling the heat from the fires. One rotter came in acting strangely – twitching, shaking, hardly able to stand. Crawling towards her, driven by its unnatural hunger. Gnashing and spasming.

She watched it, jerking incoherently on the linoleum floor.
She shot it in the face.

She had time to bend over the body, intrigued, and find a fireproof, weatherproof envelope, before more rotters spilled through the door. She relayed the message to her superiors: A zombie behaving strangely had had a package stapled to it, that was now in her possession. A package that read ‘ATTENTION AUTHORITIES, OR ANYONE, PLEASE WATCH THIS’.

She didn’t have more time to be surprised. dozens were coming in, some still on fire. She shot them until she was out of ammo, then hit them with cleavers and hammers and knives, then died.

Reinforcements arrived too late, and Private Larkin’s colleagues ended up taking the package from her corpse, after wiping out the rest of the cafeteria zombies. They took it with them when they were airlifted out, the retreating living, decimated. Springhill had been lost to the undead. America watched it burn.

But Jonathan Michelsky’s video got to Washington. By then, there had been other isolated reports, just a sparse handful of them but all from north of Ruston, of zombies acting wrong. One elderly lady, sure she was about to die, was surprised to see the lone rotter crawling towards her drop flat to the ground, spasm a few times, claw helplessly, and then go still. She got out safe and sound, but didn’t think to check if the zombie had had an envelope stapled to it.

They played Michelsky’s video to the ground forces commander, who played it to the Secretary of Defense, who played it to the Commander in Chief. The Commander in Chief had it played to the Surgeon General and the head of the Center for Disease Control. Here’s what it said, word for word, exactly as Jonathan said it, really.

My name is Jonathan Michelsky. I’m a medtech senior here at Louisiana Tech, I work part time in the infectious diseases lab. They evacuated the campus a while ago, but I hid, I’m staying put. Zombies killed my parents and my girl. It’s retarded that I’ve had the revelation I’ve had, there’s no reason for it to be me, but then again, I mean, I guess there is. I’ve got nothing to live for except to try and save other people from the agony I’ve gone though. I’m gonna die here in Ruston, sorry to anyone else I might be leaving behind. I hope you’ll understand what I had to do.

I just infected myself with a virulent strain of CJD. Creutzfeldt-Jakobs disease. If the zombies don’t get me, well, I’ll be dead in a couple weeks I guess. If I was better at science, some kind of genius like in a movie, I’d concentrate the disease and put it in bullets or something, or a bomb, I don’t know. But even though my brain’s not super-smart, it is edible. So I’m gonna let them eat it. Ruth, Mom, Dad, I’m sorry. I’m gonna… I’m gonna let them eat my brains and get sick too. I hope the disease infects them good. I hope it progresses even faster in them. I know I can’t take out many of them – I’m not sure how they do their brain-eating thing, but there won’t be more than two or three divvying up my grey matter, I guess. But I can hope that they spread the sickness among themselves. I wish I had access to a zombie-specific strain. Or an antidote to give all the living people, and then sweep the nation with CJD. But life’s not like sci-fi, and so maybe I’ll have done nothing, or just made matters worse. But I wanted someone to know about my idea. I wanted you to know, Mr. President, if ever you hear this. Maybe it’ll help. Maybe I won’t be … be doing this in vain.

God bless America.

And that’s how he ended it.

The medical experts quickly agreed that the oddly-behaving zombies had been displaying symptoms of CJD, which people used to call Mad Cow Disease. So Michelsky had managed to infect them. He’d also managed to staple his message onto all of his attackers – more envelopes had turned up – and they unknowingly had carried the harbinger of their own doom with them as they’d advanced.

The President, the Secretary of Defense, the Surgeon General and the head of the Center for Disease Control deliberated for 37 hours. The risk of infecting innocent civilians with an incurable terminal disease made dropping a CJD prion bomb impossible. Even if they evacuated everyone before, like in Florida, the zombies were too spread out now, too good at moving and at hiding. The Surgeon General pointed out that a prion bomb would infect not only rotters, but everything, making one-fifth of the country inescapably lethal for years. They called in experts on prion-based diseases and determined that yes, making a quick-acting strain for biological warfare was possible, but an unspeakably dangerous thing to create. The President argued that if it was the only way of saving America from goddamned zombies, it would have to be done, and they’d deal with the consequences later. Even the Surgeon General couldn’t downplay the threat of the undead on public health and safety.

They called in the ground forces commander, who said that developing prion bullets was a useless waste of time and money and manpower, because they’d still need to shoot them at the rotters and that was the same thing as they were doing now, which was obviously not efficient enough a means of eradication. He said that the only way he could see to use Michelsky’s tactic was to do it like Michelsky had done: infect yourself, and kill off the two or three or four zombies that feasted on you. The president laughed, and said he thought America would not go for that.

He was wrong. There were volunteers in the very room, among the soldiers and assistants present.

The Secretary of Defense, who rarely spoke, spoke then, ponderously. It was estimated that there were 20 000 zombies in Louisiana, and that was the most conservative figure. Others claimed it was more than double that. Regardless, assuming the best tactical deployment of infected volunteers, that still meant a very bare minimum of five thousand martyrs to stop the Louisiana advance. Dark eyes looked calmly at the president, and a cold voice said that that was an unlikely figure.

That’s when one of the soldiers lining the walls, one who had not volunteered for martyrdom, spoke up. Given permission to speak freely, he said: With all due respect, General, Mr. Secretary, Mr. President sir, the problem isn’t having to shoot the sons of bitches, it’s having to headshot them, sir. If we could machine-gun them like living things we’d wipe them out in no time.

The President asked: What’s your name, soldier?

Sergeant Mark Caveway, he said, standing at attention. I fought at Springhill, sir.

That’s another name to remember, kids. And that a good idea can come from anywhere.

So in the end they okayed it. A hypervirulent strain of CJD for use in biological warfare was created, with the proviso that it would be used only against zombies, and that once the zombie threat was over the strain would be destroyed or neutralized. Thorough safety measures were put in place to prevent transmission to wildlife or people or human food or water sources. As they worked, and days painfully stretched into weeks, skilled marksmen both enlisted and civilian kept picking off zombies one by one, but villages kept being overrun. On the same day that the prion bullets were announced ready, news came of a California outbreak. Troops were dispatched to L.A. immediately, Sgt. Caveway among them. He had insisted to be on the front lines. And he was.

Soldiers trained machine guns laden with CJD on the lumbering advance of their rotting enemies. Bullets hit and pierced dead flesh, spreading infection into their bodies, curdling their brains. They sagged as they continued to advance, and some dropped in spasms as the disease made holes in their brain matter from the inside out, turning it spongy and useless, destroying them. Some lasted a little longer than others, but all fell.

Jonathan Michelsky’s crazy idea had worked.

The L.A. outbreak was stopped cold within days of the first sighting, and with minimal innocent casualties. Louisiana followed suit. Soldiers scoured the country looking in every hidey-hole, every stream of water, every pile of leaves. It took a long time, but the menace was quelled. All the corpses were destroyed, burned completely, every last scrap of zombie flesh was wiped from this earth except for deep-frozen cell cultures in high-security labs, to study so that we’d know more if ever this happened again, God forbid. The Secretary of Defense quietly made a proposal to the President, to genetically encode dormant CJD into the next generation of Americans, as a preventive measure, a timebomb to be triggered only upon being bitten by a zombie – so that anyone could follow in Jonathan Michelsky’s heroic footsteps, and they’d never have to worry about recruiting volunteers if there was another uprising. And our nation built itself up again, like it always does, and soon all of you were born, children. And that’s why we remember Jonathan Michelsky, without whom none of you would be here, and without whom everyone on the continent would be dead, or worse.