As one leader falls, another joins the war - Part 5 of 5

CHAPTER 5

“Unnnnh, braaaaaaains.”

“T-shiiiirts.” “Beeeeeeer.” • Meyera Oberndorf and James Holley crouched in a thickening green mist as hordes of zombies filed into the Virginia Beach Amphitheater. No one noticed the former mayors. • The zombies had been lured by the promise of a Grateful Dead concert, overpriced beer and, most importantly, T-shirt giveaways. Undead Heads, indeed. • “Look how many there are,” Oberndorf whispered to Holley. • They had helped other city leaders hatch this plan to end the zombie plague that for three days had been sucking the life out of Hampton Roads. • As the undead kept coming, Norfolk Mayor Paul Fraim sidled up to Oberndorf and handed her what looked like a T-shirt cannon. • “Be careful,” he warned. “It’s live.”

“What’s she going to do,” Holley asked, “get a rash from the cotton-poly blend?”

Fraim didn’t have time to laugh. Admiring his own cannon, he explained that they were filled not with

T-shirts, but with grenades.

“The zombies won’t know what hit ’em,” he said.

“Where on earth did you rustle up grenades on short notice?” Holley asked.

Fraim was mumbling something about the perks of living in a military town just as a hand thrust out of the mist.

“And then the Navy – gurk!” Fraim gurgled as the rotting appendage clamped around his neck.

Oberndorf reached for her cannon’s trigger but hesitated, fearing she would blow them all to bits. The arm yanked Fraim forward, and he dropped his cannon as Oberndorf lunged for him. All she got was air.

“Oh, dear,” she said, picking up the cannon and handing it to Holley.

The pair waited. The zombie parade continued, slowly filling the seats, then the lawn area and even the aisles. The security guards obviously had the night off.

A voice crackled from Holley’s walkie-talkie: “Are you in position?” It was Chesapeake Mayor Alan Krasnoff, who with Portsmouth chef Sydney Meers was waiting on the amphitheater’s other side. They, too, were armed.

“Ready,” Oberndorf replied.

“OK, fire on three! 1 … 2 …”

“WAAAAIT!”

A broad-shouldered man in thick glasses ran up to them, panting.

“Wait! I know what this is! I followed the green mist all the way here!”

“Who are you?” Holley asked.

“Patrick Hatcher, from ODU.”

Hatcher bent over, catching his breath. “I’m in charge of our experiments to turn algae into biodiesel fuel. But something went horribly wrong!”

Hatcher had been in the Old Dominion University lab when the explosion occurred. The blast was intense and the heat overbearing. Then, the smell. When the air cleared, he saw his colleagues on the floor. He feared the worst. Something strange caught his eye: fragments of a DVD directed by George Romero.

“Maybe it caused some kind of strange reaction,” he said. “I don’t know. All of a sudden, the scientists started getting up.”

He shuddered.

“They were moaning, asking for brains. I told them they already had brains – that’s why I hired them – but they just kept lurching toward me. I ran.”

Since then, Hatcher had been tracking the creatures from a distance. It didn’t take a scientific genius to figure out what was going on. Like evil scarecrows, these creatures wanted – make that needed – a brain or two.

Hatcher had seen them biting folks, spreading the undead epidemic in their wake.

Now, he looked at the former mayors expectantly. Holley and Oberndorf looked back. They looked at each other. Then they raised their cannons and took aim at the undead throng.

“Wait!” Hatcher said again. “What are you doing?”

“Um, killing the zombies?” Holley said. “Sorry that some of them are your grad students and all, but they’re still a menace.”

Hatcher shook his head. “Think about what they were doing when all this started. Do you have any idea how much bioenergy is in that mist they’re churning out? Can’t you think of something you’d like to do with all that power?”

Oberndorf paused. She raised her walkie-talkie.

“Hey, Krasnoff? Don’t shoot just yet.”

Two weeks later, Obern­dorf and Holley lounged on the amphitheater lawn, reading The Pilot and admiring the scene below.

The venue’s seats had been removed, and in their place were treadmills and exercise bikes, conduits for all that undead energy. Hundreds of zombies walked and pedaled and walked and pedaled, going nowhere fast. A series of tubes captured the green mist and sent it to a nearby processing plant.

“Hey, is that Fraim down there?” Oberndorf asked.

“On the stair climber, watching Channel 13 on the video screen? Yeah, I think it is,” Holley said. “He looks pretty happy for a zombie, don’t you think?”

Oberndorf agreed and flipped the newspaper page.

“Zombies put zip into revamped Waterside,” read one headline. “Letter to the governor: Looks like we don’t need offshore drilling after all,” read another.

Story after story outlined the benefits of this zombie power. The new light rail line was running as fast as a bullet train. An Ocean View amusement park boasted three high-powered roller coasters. Suffolk’s Planters plant was churning out peanuts at a record pace.

“Not bad for a couple of former mayors, huh?” Oberndorf asked, then answered herself.

“Not bad at all.”

Story by Deb Markham, Jim Haag, Mike Gruss, Lorraine Eaton, Joanne Kimberlin and Jill Martin, The Virginian-Pilot

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<-- CHAPTER 4: How to trap a zombie