“Wait, the Z virus?” I immediately interrupted. “What…the Z virus?”
A corner of his mouth turned up. “It’s what they called the virus, or at least what they call it because they have all awakened as zombies…hence the “Z” part of the Z virus.”
I really hoped that Ash would now stop calling me “Z.”
“But they call them Awakened?” Ash said, voicing my own confusion before I had a chance to.
“It’s confusing. I know. The virus is called the Z virus. The victims that are awake and walking around are called Awakened. I didn’t make it up,” he said roughly.
“I’m just saying, the name ‘Z virus’ isn’t very original,” I muttered. My dad shot me an impatient look, so I shut my mouth and motioned for him to continue.
“Like, I was saying, they’re saying that it’s affected about a third of the population, maybe more. It’s mostly congregated in the areas with a bigger population, the cities they ultimately decided to eliminate. There’s no way to tell how many of them have been awakened, but it seems to be about 90% of them. They have completely overrun the urban areas.”
He sighed. “With about 100 million people out there with the ability to run faster than a normal human being and the desire to use their new razor sharp teeth to tear through human flesh, they obviously felt that it was a decision they had to make.”
With the pain and shock of the recent demolition of the city I had grown up in, I didn’t necessarily agree with that assessment. However, I kept my mouth shut so that he could continue.
“Everyone is insanely concerned about the fact they all seemed to awaken at the same time. Of course, that means when they got sick or when they died doesn’t give us any clue to why or how this happened.”
He sighed again, frustrated, and it sounded loud in the nearly silent car. “We were at the station, normal day. I was trying to keep up with the numbers, trying to see how badly this had affected our city when we started getting the phone calls. I immediately turned on the TV, and there was coverage everywhere, showing the Awakened. I was so…caught off guard. I’ve seen my fair share of shit here in New York but I’ve never seen this before and I couldn’t think.”
“Then you called me. I was so relieved. You told me about Madison, and I knew immediately what the media hadn’t quite figured out yet. The Awakened were the virus victims, and they had somehow come alive again. I knew that we had to go; we had to go now, and that’s when they hit the station.”
“It was like it was planned. A group of them came in, quiet, nearly hidden. They were on us before we even knew they were there. They’re so fast, sneaky, and they took down Briggs before we could even react. And we just started shooting, trying to take them out.”
He stopped and looked at both of us, and his tone shifted. He slipped into a sterner voice, dropping the slower lilt of a storyteller. “This is important. If we had known, if we had figured it out sooner, we wouldn’t have lost so many people at the station. Are you listening?”
We both nodded, looking like bobble heads. I felt a sudden urge to giggle at this and had to stamp it down.
“You need to be specific when you kill them. The head or the back of the neck. Every time,” he explained.
“Okay, the head makes sense,” I said quickly.
“But the back of the neck? How does that even make sense?” Ash chirped in.
“Yeah, I know,” my dad said, shaking his head. “It was an accident. We just started shooting, and we were hitting their arms and their legs, their chests or their backs, and they just weren’t going down unless we hit them in the head, directly in the head. We discovered the back of the neck on accident. Dolan was engaged in a kind of hand-to-hand scuffle with one of them, and he had another one creeping up behind him. I shot him, but I wasn’t aiming well and hit him right in the back of the neck, and he went straight down.”
“Are you sure though?” I asked. “That was one case. And does it have to be a gun?”
“I tried it a few more times on the way to the brownstone to get you and Ash. The head and the back of the neck. There’s no other way, not that I know of. As far as whether it has to be a gun, I don’t think so.”
I started to feel panic. It was incredibly specific. We were running away from the central centers of outbreak, but I had no idea if we would run into any more Awakened while on the road. There was no telling if their population was decimated in the bombs. If I ended up in a scuffle with them, I had more of a chance at slowing them down but not stopping them from getting me. “Dad, my aim…it just isn’t that great…” I said softly, my hand going to my holster reflexively.