Zombies! Episode 3 - Love Bites by Ivan Turner Page A

private
security people to guard their wares and half of the security
people wound up stealing from them as time wore on.
     
    Day after day, the mayor, the police chief,
and police captains, with Naughton at the forefront, came on the
television to tell the public that things were under control and
people should go about their normal lives. People weren't having
it. Men and women stopped showing up for work. Shops were closed
down. The schools were practically empty. The governor declared a
state of emergency and FEMA stepped in.
     
    Meanwhile, other states and cities were
preparing for the worst. Governors and mayors all over the country
took to the airwaves to assure the public that no cases of
zombieism had been reported anywhere else in the country. It was
recommended that people consider this a particularly ugly form of
the flu and go about their lives.
     
    Still not having it.
     
    People got in their cars, trucks, and vans,
and got the hell out of town. And not just New York. The big cities
were deserted. As if you could just outrun a plague. With millions
of people trying to get out of a city, didn't even one of them
think that the plague was going with him?
     
    But the truth was that it wasn't really a
plague, was it? After all, three incidents in three weeks hardly
constituted a plague. In a week, the city seemed like a ghost town.
So many people had left and those who had stayed had stocked up on
food and barricaded themselves inside their residences. Those brave
souls who actually dragged themselves out of the house every
morning and went to work were giddy about the complete lack of
traffic. Plague or no plague, they considered it the best time of
their working lives.
     
    But then no one else died. No other incidents
were reported (although there were a few that the police squashed
nicely). The population of New York City and the United States in
general began to realize that they couldn't hide forever. Like
groundhogs after a long winter, they stuck their noses out of their
doors, wiggled their whiskers, and ventured into the well known.
People began to go back to work and school. Shops opened up again.
The supermarkets were able to restock and provide goods to the
public at a regular rate. Evacuees began to trickle back into the
city.
     
    The traffic got bad again.
     
    And the president informed the mayor of New
York City personally that the next time Hollywood encroached upon
reality, his police captain should think twice about making a
public statement. It was going to take everything he had to get
other nations to allow travel to and from the U.S. and the economy
was as upside down as it ever had been.
     
    It was a bad three weeks.
     
    ***
     
    JOHN Arrick was a teacher of English
at Clinton High School . He taught just a few blocks from Push Ups gym where he sporadically worked out after school.
He liked Push Ups . He liked Abby, the clerk at the front
desk, and Whitaker who was her assistant. He had never met the
gym's owner. Abby had introduced him to her husband once, a nice
bloke from London. But they hadn't had anything in common except
the side of the Atlantic on which they'd been born. Arrick was
never quite sure why Abby had introduced them but he suspected her
husband was having trouble getting on in the states socially. It
wasn't so different from the UK but it was different enough.
     
    When Arrick had first come over to the States
from Scotland, he'd been a little bit lost. Just a teenager then,
he'd heard about all these Americans who'd backpacked their way
across Europe, staying in hostels and living day to day. That had
seemed like such an adventure to him. But, as the favorite son of
some very rich parents, he'd seen most of Europe already. He'd seen
a fair bit of Australia and Africa, too. It was the United States
he'd never seen. Despite its prominence in the world and on the
television, his parents had never seen fit to travel there. So he
figured he'd turn the backpacking thing