just one
An Unknown Debt
Dr. Shiri Goldman
Time Magazine, April 20, 2059
Today, fifty years after the Incident, as it's referred to darkly by various federal reports and CDC studies, the government has decided to permit the American people access to the details of that night.
First, some background. For several decades prior to 2009, there was a genre popular in Hollywood movies: "zombie" flicks. Those films survive today, and are widely emulated in several different media in contemporary popular culture.
Those films generally involved a government and/or medical experiment gone awry. This genre shares that basic premise in common with several others, particularly the "Extraterrestrial Invasion" sect. In this particular category, however, the results were what was widely referred to as "the living dead." Murderous, excessively aggressive, and cannibalistic, zombies were also highly contagious, transmitting their disease to their surviving victims. The typical outcome is the utter extinction of the human race.
We at the CDC have had, for fifty years, reason to believe that this very nearly happened out here in real life on April 20, 2009. Here, reconstructed from previously sealed records and interviews, is the story of one of humanity's most deeply-buried near-misses.
Will Heckler was a low-level analyst for a local accounting service in a small city in southern Florida, one of those metastases that typically erupt in close proximity to an even larger city. An incurable smoker with a yen for cheap art prints and trashy romance novels, Heckler was not a sociable type. Estranged from his parents and siblings, he would frequently go for several days without speaking to anyone, often breaking his long periods of silence by loitering outside of bookstores and theaters, chain-smoking and waiting for someone to ask for a cigarette or for his help in lighting theirs. He stuck in one particular woman's memory--when she was twenty-seven years old, she walked past him. Having quit only a few days before, she gave in to the smell of burning tobacco, turned around, and asked him for a butt.
He willingly gave her one, but hesitated. "Are you legal?"
"Huh?" That, she said, was the thing that caught her attention. She had been legal for nine years and looked it for five more. Nobody had ever asked her if she was old enough to smoke a cigarette.
He repeated the question, looking at her with an expression of earnestness tinged with a dash of irony.
He left her with a sense of utter disbelief and unforgivable flattery.
At night, he tended to spend his time watching one of his several hundred movies and updating a website he kept secret from his coworkers, not out of shame or a sense of inappropriate prurience, but because he was a man who felt his talents were for him alone. This was not a characteristic based on selfishness, it seems; rather, he thought that appreciation for his work would be too rare for him to bear.
One of his most cherished habits was sitting outside with a full pack of cigarettes and a book.
This was not possible at his current apartment. For the first time in eight years, he lived in a one-bedroom that had no porch, lanai, or other means of sitting privately and indulging his habit. Instead, he took to standing outside in the parking lot, pacing and puffing. His neighbors grew accustomed to seeing him roam a space precisely ten feet long and one foot wide for approximately six minutes every hour.
This is where he was when he first saw the zombie. At 9:37 p.m. on April 20, 2009--he remembered the time because he had just finished a movie and realized that it was exactly sixty minutes after his last break--he was pacing north and had reached his third stride when he noticed the unkempt man shambling toward him. Just down the road from his apartment, there was a small city park, popular with local families and dog owners. At nighttime, it was sparsely frequented, as crime was, if not rampant, common enough to make it common sense.
Not unjustly, Heckler suspected the man had been drinking in the park, and was working his way home. This lasted for a few moments, until the man took a misstep and twisted his ankle. Heckler could hear it snap from where he was standing, and the man crumpled to the ground.
Heckler uttered an oath (this was a detail he couldn't clear up later; he suggested "Jesus!" as the most likely candidate), and stepped forward.
He walked up to the man.
"Hey, you all right?" he asked.
There was no answer but a sort of low grunting. Insensate from alcohol, Heckler figured, and incoherent on top of that, too. He pulled out his cellular phone and called for an ambulance, taking the man by the shoulders and helping him up.
The grunting, Heckler said later, "sort of ratcheted up" to a "muttering growl," as though the man were attempting to speak. Once the man straightened up, Heckler got a good look at his face in the orange glow of a sodium-arc vapor light.
He said he took a step back, involuntarily, because the man's skin was gray, mottled with green and black, like a ripe drowning victim. Several teeth were missing, and the eyes were askew--in the sense that one was pointing down and slightly to the left, the other up and to the right.
The growl grew louder, and the man's head drooped forward as he stopped in his tracks. Swaying slightly, the growl returned to a grunting, and Heckler touched his shoulder, deeply concerned.
The man roared, seized Heckler's arm, and bit down on it. The few teeth that were left penetrated the skin, and blood erupted. Heckler tore it back, and stumbled backwards, stunned.
A zombie. The living dead.
According to an interview report, at this point, Heckler paused. He then gave a dry chuckle, lit another cigarette, and said, "I knew the movies would be right someday." He proceeded to inform the interviewer that he remembered nothing for several minutes after the bite.
The emergency response personnel who answered Heckler's call reported that when they arrived on the scene, one man was dead and the other unconscious. The dead man had been savagely beaten with a wheel axle torn loose from a municipal garbage can assigned to the rental property that had witnessed the confrontation. The axle itself was still in the dead man's eye.
An investigation later showed that the source of the infection had been a syringe deposited on the shore of a small lake in the nearby park. The lake served as a runoff retention pond and emergency reservoir for the city, fed by drainage pipes all over the city, including a local military base. The syringe was found and destroyed, and the neighborhood monitored for several years. Only one other case of infection was discovered: a Muscovy duck, which attacked a pair of investigators several hours after the Heckler incident; it was this which led to the discovery of the syringe.
The incident was deeply buried, and there are few living today who have detailed knowledge of the events of that night; I was the sole exception, due to my years of research on the zombie serum for the CDC. That has changed now, with the publication of this article.
At this point, you may be wondering what happened to Will Heckler, the man to whom we apparently owe the continued survival of the human race (an assessment based on the speed of infection and high contagion rating), thanks to his speed in terminating the first known case of zombiism only minutes after it first manifested.
He died on April 20, 2009, at 11:46 p.m., in the county prison, shot by a deputy after attempting to attack an inmate in a neighboring cell. You may recall that this was the same night; the infection required only two hours to spread, kill, and resurrect its host body. This represented one of the first measures of the virus's infection rate, and prison surveillance footage proved invaluable in determining the stages of infection.
This is one of the more unjust secrets hidden away in the government's vault. This one young man, who saw himself as utterly alone, gave the last few hours of his life in blood and violence in order to prevent the same thing happening to anyone else. What went through his mind in those last few hours?
A clue lies in the last lucid interview he gave. He seems to have known what was in his near future; when asked about his mental and emotional state, he laughs silently, coughs, and says, "Like I really wish someone would ask if I was old enough for this."
Dr. Shiri Goldman
Time Magazine, April 20, 2059
Today, fifty years after the Incident, as it's referred to darkly by various federal reports and CDC studies, the government has decided to permit the American people access to the details of that night.
First, some background. For several decades prior to 2009, there was a genre popular in Hollywood movies: "zombie" flicks. Those films survive today, and are widely emulated in several different media in contemporary popular culture.
Those films generally involved a government and/or medical experiment gone awry. This genre shares that basic premise in common with several others, particularly the "Extraterrestrial Invasion" sect. In this particular category, however, the results were what was widely referred to as "the living dead." Murderous, excessively aggressive, and cannibalistic, zombies were also highly contagious, transmitting their disease to their surviving victims. The typical outcome is the utter extinction of the human race.
We at the CDC have had, for fifty years, reason to believe that this very nearly happened out here in real life on April 20, 2009. Here, reconstructed from previously sealed records and interviews, is the story of one of humanity's most deeply-buried near-misses.
Will Heckler was a low-level analyst for a local accounting service in a small city in southern Florida, one of those metastases that typically erupt in close proximity to an even larger city. An incurable smoker with a yen for cheap art prints and trashy romance novels, Heckler was not a sociable type. Estranged from his parents and siblings, he would frequently go for several days without speaking to anyone, often breaking his long periods of silence by loitering outside of bookstores and theaters, chain-smoking and waiting for someone to ask for a cigarette or for his help in lighting theirs. He stuck in one particular woman's memory--when she was twenty-seven years old, she walked past him. Having quit only a few days before, she gave in to the smell of burning tobacco, turned around, and asked him for a butt.
He willingly gave her one, but hesitated. "Are you legal?"
"Huh?" That, she said, was the thing that caught her attention. She had been legal for nine years and looked it for five more. Nobody had ever asked her if she was old enough to smoke a cigarette.
He repeated the question, looking at her with an expression of earnestness tinged with a dash of irony.
He left her with a sense of utter disbelief and unforgivable flattery.
At night, he tended to spend his time watching one of his several hundred movies and updating a website he kept secret from his coworkers, not out of shame or a sense of inappropriate prurience, but because he was a man who felt his talents were for him alone. This was not a characteristic based on selfishness, it seems; rather, he thought that appreciation for his work would be too rare for him to bear.
One of his most cherished habits was sitting outside with a full pack of cigarettes and a book.
This was not possible at his current apartment. For the first time in eight years, he lived in a one-bedroom that had no porch, lanai, or other means of sitting privately and indulging his habit. Instead, he took to standing outside in the parking lot, pacing and puffing. His neighbors grew accustomed to seeing him roam a space precisely ten feet long and one foot wide for approximately six minutes every hour.
This is where he was when he first saw the zombie. At 9:37 p.m. on April 20, 2009--he remembered the time because he had just finished a movie and realized that it was exactly sixty minutes after his last break--he was pacing north and had reached his third stride when he noticed the unkempt man shambling toward him. Just down the road from his apartment, there was a small city park, popular with local families and dog owners. At nighttime, it was sparsely frequented, as crime was, if not rampant, common enough to make it common sense.
Not unjustly, Heckler suspected the man had been drinking in the park, and was working his way home. This lasted for a few moments, until the man took a misstep and twisted his ankle. Heckler could hear it snap from where he was standing, and the man crumpled to the ground.
Heckler uttered an oath (this was a detail he couldn't clear up later; he suggested "Jesus!" as the most likely candidate), and stepped forward.
He walked up to the man.
"Hey, you all right?" he asked.
There was no answer but a sort of low grunting. Insensate from alcohol, Heckler figured, and incoherent on top of that, too. He pulled out his cellular phone and called for an ambulance, taking the man by the shoulders and helping him up.
The grunting, Heckler said later, "sort of ratcheted up" to a "muttering growl," as though the man were attempting to speak. Once the man straightened up, Heckler got a good look at his face in the orange glow of a sodium-arc vapor light.
He said he took a step back, involuntarily, because the man's skin was gray, mottled with green and black, like a ripe drowning victim. Several teeth were missing, and the eyes were askew--in the sense that one was pointing down and slightly to the left, the other up and to the right.
The growl grew louder, and the man's head drooped forward as he stopped in his tracks. Swaying slightly, the growl returned to a grunting, and Heckler touched his shoulder, deeply concerned.
The man roared, seized Heckler's arm, and bit down on it. The few teeth that were left penetrated the skin, and blood erupted. Heckler tore it back, and stumbled backwards, stunned.
A zombie. The living dead.
According to an interview report, at this point, Heckler paused. He then gave a dry chuckle, lit another cigarette, and said, "I knew the movies would be right someday." He proceeded to inform the interviewer that he remembered nothing for several minutes after the bite.
The emergency response personnel who answered Heckler's call reported that when they arrived on the scene, one man was dead and the other unconscious. The dead man had been savagely beaten with a wheel axle torn loose from a municipal garbage can assigned to the rental property that had witnessed the confrontation. The axle itself was still in the dead man's eye.
An investigation later showed that the source of the infection had been a syringe deposited on the shore of a small lake in the nearby park. The lake served as a runoff retention pond and emergency reservoir for the city, fed by drainage pipes all over the city, including a local military base. The syringe was found and destroyed, and the neighborhood monitored for several years. Only one other case of infection was discovered: a Muscovy duck, which attacked a pair of investigators several hours after the Heckler incident; it was this which led to the discovery of the syringe.
The incident was deeply buried, and there are few living today who have detailed knowledge of the events of that night; I was the sole exception, due to my years of research on the zombie serum for the CDC. That has changed now, with the publication of this article.
At this point, you may be wondering what happened to Will Heckler, the man to whom we apparently owe the continued survival of the human race (an assessment based on the speed of infection and high contagion rating), thanks to his speed in terminating the first known case of zombiism only minutes after it first manifested.
He died on April 20, 2009, at 11:46 p.m., in the county prison, shot by a deputy after attempting to attack an inmate in a neighboring cell. You may recall that this was the same night; the infection required only two hours to spread, kill, and resurrect its host body. This represented one of the first measures of the virus's infection rate, and prison surveillance footage proved invaluable in determining the stages of infection.
This is one of the more unjust secrets hidden away in the government's vault. This one young man, who saw himself as utterly alone, gave the last few hours of his life in blood and violence in order to prevent the same thing happening to anyone else. What went through his mind in those last few hours?
A clue lies in the last lucid interview he gave. He seems to have known what was in his near future; when asked about his mental and emotional state, he laughs silently, coughs, and says, "Like I really wish someone would ask if I was old enough for this."
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