ZOMBIE WORLD ORDER Read online

  There was another thing that needed to be resolved as well. Marie was a good looking lady and she knew this. She was not under any illusions-she would probably never have been asked to be on the cover of fashion magazines even if she had never had to have plastic surgery, but that didn’t even matter. She was a girl, and The Creep and his whatever she was needed to learn that there were serious ramifications to cutting Marie’s face.

  Chapter Two: Rehab

  His neck still bruised and swollen from his latest suicide attempt, David strolled amiably through the entrance of the rehab.

  There was something frustrating to David about the concept of a failed suicide attempt. Suicide itself was such an acknowledgement of failure. Did not the concept of a failed attempt constitute an almost double failure? Or was it more like a double negative which turned into a positive?

  However you looked at it, while a successful suicide attempt was a resume killer, at least it pointed towards some competence and conviction on the part of the suicidee. A failed attempt was like the beginning of a bad joke.

  David had some bad memories that ambushed him a lot whenever he’d managed to put together a couple of non-pathological months, or weeks, or lately, hours. He couldn’t focus on a solution anymore, and didn’t know if there ever really had been one. Oblivion was becoming less of a viable option, since he was starting to become a danger to others when he drank. Non-existence seemed like a workable alternative, but he’d had some trouble in closing the deal. Truthfully, he’d had some incredibly bad luck in this regard. For the life of him, he couldn’t understand why that prison guard had walked by at that moment. He hadn’t been scheduled to go around for another twenty minutes, and David had really only required another five, realistically, to guarantee success.

  After the guard cut him down, he’d been visited by a psychologist who had asked him a bunch of questions and asked him if he wanted to go to a special rehab for alcoholics and drug addicts with “additional problems” such as David had. If he did it, he could avoid more jail time for his most recent foul up, which had involved David driving into a telephone pole near a school house at ten in the morning. It could have been a school bus full of kids for all David had known. He was looking at some real time, though when you’re suicidal, that’s not as much of a deterrent.

  David chose rehab over prison for two reasons. First, he felt he was starting to get the hang of offing himself, and, given enough freedom and opportunity, he would eventually get it right, and it seemed like rehab would provide a better opportunity. Second, although David was certainly nothing to rave about physically, some of the other inmates were starting to make him nervous. Whatever David had done, he didn’t think he deserved the indignity of jailhouse rape for his sins.

  In retrospect, it seems ironic that he chose as he did. Of course, David had no way of knowing about the new Homeland Security provisions which had been passed in top secrecy even as he waited in the holding cell for transport to the drunk farm, provisions which didn’t exactly stress David’s personal dignity either.

  In retrospect, it seems almost rational. The Government had at some point to accept the fact that it had acted incompetently during the various crises confronting it, and needed to take drastic measures to rectify all mistakes. By chance, David was one of the people who got to be in group alpha for the new plan for rectification.

  Lucky him.

  So when David got to rehab, it wasn’t all sweetness and light and sobriety tips. After a couple of days of orientation, the first and only full group therapy session consisted of the typical stereotype of such proceeding, a circle of chairs with others like him facing each other. Introductions were made. Still bleary from a long ride through the Pennsylvania wilderness and several weeks of sleeplessness caused by anxiety and an extremely uncomfortable bed in lockup, David was only dimly aware of the others. It’s almost funny, if you think about it. These would be the most important people in his life over the coming days. Almost every relationship he had ever had or ever would have would pale in comparison to the one he would have with some of the people sitting around him.

  One of the recent rule changes had been to deny bail to everyone, for every offense, unless they could post an exorbitant amount of Pill Alpha as collateral, since The Pill had become the new de facto currency since all paper currency had essentially collapsed. Since David had never desired The Pill and had none, he had spent the eight months sitting in a small cell with Nevermore even before he got convicted, sentenced and transferred to an actual prison. He had been cut off from all news of the world, except that which filtered through the county lockup’s grapevine, which was so outlandish it couldn’t possibly be true. Once he got to prison, all the movies he had seen prior to that experience convinced him the other inmates were just trying to scare him with fake news from the outside world for some diabolical reason. He may have actually succeeded in convincing himself of this. The Human Mind is quite good at creating a buffer zone of denial if reality becomes too onerous.

  So he’d been in rehab for two days, getting to know the basic rules of the place. There was free time where you talked with each other or read the literature. It was a really isolated facility, lost up in the mountains of Northeastern Pennsylvania, but people were from all over the East Coast.

  Friday nights were when they’d have the big sober jamboree. This was when everybody got into one big group that was like a big group therapy session. They were also supposed to meet some of the counselors who had thus far been absent from the smaller groups.

  The past few days had been a blur to David, but as the patients sat in the darkened circle, some names and faces did register. There was Gwen, a young married alcoholic with some kind of weird kidney disease. She didn’t drink much, but what she did drink was killing her because her body couldn’t process it. She was pretty. She seemed the sort of person who would drift from distraction to distraction, forestalling the loathed moment of recognition of her true despondency. She lacked the ability to live in a moment, purely for what it was, and it was killing her.

  Al was an extremely nervous heroin addict from Brooklyn. He would look very intently at each person once, and then look away forever, seemingly. Like David, he seemed to be there to avoid doing serious time. He seemed genuinely afraid to speak, which at the time was chalked up to self-consciousness, mainly. He took every smoke break allowed, and spoke to absolutely no one beyond the most minimal necessity.

  Charlie was this very plausible person who on closer inspection went from mystical spirit guide to spoiled rich kid. He was playing everybody, himself most of all. He had been to fifteen rehabs, and really did qualify as an expert on drug and alcohol treatment centers around the world. The one in Hawaii sounded incredible. David wondered what it was like to walk on a beach with black sand on it.

  Charlene was a black woman from Atlantic City who looked scarred, emotionally and physically. Her smile showed what ravages the world can perpetrate on a decent soul. At one time, she would have been the most beautiful woman in the room.

  Joe was from Staten Island. He had gotten some time off an armed robbery sentence by agreeing to do rehab. He had the very tough mannerisms of a person who has had an extremely hard time in prison and is terrified of anyone knowing it. In civilian life he had worked on a garbage truck and smoked crack. In his voice, the way it cracked and strained at key moments, you could hear the price Joe had paid in suffering for having a conscience.

  Gregor was from Russia, and worked for his family business in New Jersey, driving a truck, he said. He had some problems with coke, from what he said.

  Marie was a Pennsylvania girl, from some rust belt city about fifty miles away. She also looked as if she had recently been beaten up pretty badly. Anger was just one of the emotions emanating from her psyche, but it seemed to be the most dominant one at that moment. Even with bandages on her face, you could tell Marie was beautiful. She spent most of her free time reading. She had tried playing chess, one of th
e activities encouraged by this rehab, but she had beaten anyone willing to play so badly that either she was too bored to continue or had run out of victims. She’d been locked up for assault for the last six months, and had been specially selected for early release upon successful completion of this program.

  The other Marie (there were two) was a soft spoken Italian girl from New Jersey someplace. Her boyfriend had got her mixed up with hard drugs, and her family was trying to fix her and break up the relationship in one stroke by sending her to rehab. By some quirk of fate, this Marie had the same general build and body type as the other Marie as well, and the same general hair color and style too. This chance resemblance eventually resulted in a classic case where knowing what God’s Perspective was might have been really educational.

  Dwight was a well-spoken, affable, and charming young man of mixed Latino and African American race from South Philadelphia. He was heavily involved in all the discussions, and seemed completely earnest and sincere, asking intelligent and thought provoking questions about the underlying philosophy of sobriety and the history of Alcoholics Anonymous. More than once, he mentioned his gratitude, because he honestly seemed to think that by going to rehab he had thwarted imminent death.

  Navni was in his fifties, from India apparently. He played chess assiduously, and horribly, except on one occasion when Gregor had started taunting him mercilessly about how bad he was. Navni had then proceeded to wipe the floor with Gregor in three straight games, and had then left the room. Supposedly, according to rumor, he had run through the town he was living in his underwear shooting a pistol at nothing in particular. He was pleading “wet brain”, or alcoholic dementia, for his court case. At his core was a sort of despair.

  Keisha was a young blond girl from one of those fortress neighborhoods in the Bronx left over from the days before the Cross Bronx Expressway leveled such a large swath of that borough. If you aren’t from where she was from, it would be impossible to understand her, probably. On some levels, she was keenly mindful of the feelings of others, and her social morality was complex, imposing upon her a rigorous code of conduct. At odds with her finer sensibilities, which arose from her culture and her own nature, was her response to a society which would label someone from her background as “Ghetto Booty”. She played that role when she felt there was some expedience in appearing simplistic.

  Dante, a late arrival, was a large black man in his early twenties. He was addicted to crack cocaine, and wanted to quit, but whether he could or not seemed like anyone’s guess. He was complex in a frightening way-if psychotherapy or some other analytical tool had been used to break down his defenses, one wonders if he could have ever functioned again. He was wrapped so tight that unwrapping him might have destroyed him.

  The introductions went around the darkened room, and had almost been completed when suddenly, the lights came on. A tall, thin, almost graceful black man entered the large room and sat in the only vacant chair. He was extremely well dressed, as if he had just returned from some rarefied dinner party to grace this relatively unkempt group with his presence. He waited, patiently, for the last of the introductions to be completed, looking around the room, and when he looked at David, for a moment his eyes literally seemed to twinkle, though he immediately looked away. He then folded his hands and rolled his eyes toward the ceiling, as if gathering himself. Later, David remembered thinking that this would be the most interesting part of the show. He was right.

  “My name is Gerard. I am an alcoholic, a user, a pimp, a junkie, a thief, and a murderer,” the counselor began, after a suitable hush had fallen over the group.

  “You know, as I listen to you and look at you, I can’t help but think of my own experience at rehab. I would say first experience, but that would imply that there had been a second time. There hasn’t been. I am one of the few who got sober on the first attempt.

  "As I look around this room, I see a lot of people who will be dead within at least a few years, probably even sooner. I know some of you don’t believe me, but it’s a harsh reality. A month ago, I gave this same speech to a group a lot like this one. In just that span of time, one of them committed suicide, and two overdosed. They left treatment. This is a very frustrating job, and I’m starting to get tired of it.”

  The man paused, and waited for a long moment before proceeding.

  “Now, out of respect, I am willing to grant that every one of you means well, and has the best of intentions. This disease we have, though, the disease of Alcoholism, is cunning, baffling, and powerful. I wonder how many of you, if any of you, will be where I’m sitting in twenty years. You see, for me it was a matter of life and death. If I kept using, then I would have had to continue the same behaviors. Continuing these same behaviors would have led to a speedy death for me. I was pissing the wrong kinds of people off, and not just that, my disease had progressed to the point where I was liable to just overdose one day, intentionally or unintentionally. I was faced with the Existential Question.” At this point he paused and looked right at and through David. “I chose Life.”

  “How many of you will choose Life? How many will choose Death? What if I were to tell you that these are not just rhetorical questions? I do not mean choose Life or Death next year or in five years, or next week. I am talking about tonight. Right now, and over the next several days, you must answer The Existential Dilemma for yourself.”

  David was beginning to enjoy rehab. This kind of thing was quite entertaining, and was actually doing him some good, he thought. David also appreciated the fact that Gerard wasn’t dumbing it down much, if at all, though that fact alone should have set off alarm bells.

  “Which one of you wants to live?” He looked around the room as people nodded and murmured their assents. ”Which one of you wants to be the one who stays sober?” Again, nods, assents.

  “Statistically, not all of you will. Whether you know this or not, most of you will revert to old habits after leaving here and relapse. Your quality of life will suffer. You will not be useful members of Society; in fact you will even be detrimental to it. These are the hard facts. Still harder is the fact that our planet has rapidly dwindling resources. You all know about Pill Alpha and Pill G.” Gerard paused, briefly. “How much do you all know about the events occurring, as we speak, in the external world? How much do you know about Pill G Psychosis going viral out there? As of right now, armed troops are patrolling between here and New York City, shooting all afflicted individuals on sight. There are millions of these poor creatures. Each one at one time a fully functional person with a soul such as yourself, now just drooling maniacs who would literally feast upon the bodies of their parents while still living if they could catch them.

  "As you look around at each other, we need to realize that we are blessed, that I am blessed. You see, I have grown weary of watching my friends and charges such as yourselves die. Very few of you have any real sense of your danger. You stand to lose your only real possession, your lives, but have no conception of the magnitude of this loss. The United States Government has recognized this problem, and in their wisdom, has designated The Department of Homeland Security to attempt to solve it.”

  “Provision 3313”, said Gerard slowly, looking around the room with great sadness, “is your only hope. Many of my co-workers here disagree with this, many do not understand. In fact, almost all of them disagree with it. Not me, though. I understood instantly. I have everything, money, a beautiful woman, a magnificent automobile. I live in a mansion. You know what though? I always had those things, even when I was using. What I lacked then was an appreciation for the gift of life. Provision 3313 will give all of you that gift, the most precious treasure imaginable. Each of you will be given a survival pack. Each of you will be released, to find your way to a selected destination. Each of you will attempt to achieve goals, both personal and team, which by accomplishing will teach you the value of your life. You will wear monitoring and communication devices which will enable you to keep up with and
communicate with a base of operations. The difficulty will consist of the mission itself, which will pass through large swaths of area completely dominated by people afflicted with Pill G Psychosis.”

  His pronouncements were greeted with chilling silence. This was not a man who inspired sarcasm, in fact, his was one of those commanding presences that instilled belief. Still, from the puzzled looks on people’s faces it seemed to that there was some kind of assumption that this was a rehab head game of some sort. Maria, the beautiful young woman with the bandaged face raised her hand. Gerard nodded assent.

  She began, “Could I ask a brief questi…” but was abruptly cut off by Gerard.

  “Who are you?”

  “I am Marie, and I’m an alcoholic. Could I please go to the bathroom?”

  Gerard smiled a little, genuinely amused. “Could you hold it in for just a little more Marie? I promise this won’t be much longer.”

  Gerard began again. “When you leave this building, you will be in teams. Each team will be given both team and personal objectives, as mentioned already. Some of the personal objectives will remain just that, personal, as they won’t directly concern your teammates at all or until much later in this exercise. This building has been heavily fortified with security, and you won’t be allowed back here until all assignments are completed. We are designed to accommodate all kinds of people here, and since some of you are assumed to be flight risks anyway, the measures we have taken to insure you stay serve equally well in preventing your return.”