Pulseless Pandemic: The Zombie Outbreak

By William D. Gibson

It developed in the great apes of the Congo basin, making a cross-species jump to humans, like ebola and HIV. Its status blossomed into a world-wide pandemic. A virus, so virulent, it killed nearly every one it infected. And it didn't stop there. The virus caused the dead to reanimate. The walking dead fed on the flesh of the living, causing the disease to spread geometrically.

From Africa to the rest of the world, we follow several threads of mayhem, death, survival, reanimation and more death. These include a bitten airline pilot on a flight to Paris; a New Orleans celebratory bushmeat dinner for the local African population which turns into tumult in the Big Easy; a freighter headed to the Bahamas with a tainted cargo, a special passenger and an infected crew; a deathly ill U.S. Senator returning from Paris who spreads the disease in the Capitol; and a special game buffet of gorilla and chimpanzee meat flown into Key West from Kinshasa in the Congo which launches the story of our main characters. We follow them to the end of the story. They find a place of refuge they think is safe and survive a number of assaults by the living and the dead. A heavy measure of violence, a lesser measure of sex.

The unhappy circumstances unravel to an apocalyptic ending where a cure is created, but the end is perhaps uncertain.

• Language: English
• Publisher: William D. Gibson
• Release date: Jul 23, 2012
• ISBN: 9781452436227

William D. Gibson

Raised in Massachusetts, William Gibson is a Brown University graduate with a Bachelor of Arts degree. He served as a Special Agent in Counterintelligence in the Army during the Vietnam War, and obtained an MBA after that. Forty years of his working life have been at least partially devoted to putting words together, first writing intelligence and inspection reports for the military. Out of the Army, he followed a career in banking in Risk Management and Credit Administration. It was professionally satisfying to generate policies, plans, and reports for the bank. But when he retired, he opted for the fun of writing about zombies, science fiction, and now something real like Bigfoot. He currently resides in Berkley, Massachusetts.

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Pulseless Pandemic

The Zombie Outbreak

By William D. Gibson

Copyright 2012 William Gibson

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Important Stuff

This is a work of fiction in which I am taking certain fictional liberties. Although some characters may have the names of actual people, things or places, their resemblance to actual persons, things, or places is coincidental.

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Chapter 1 - The Bushmeat and the Virus

They were after bushmeat.

Rishi spotted the gorilla and her two infants. They were two hundred meters to his left off an old logging road. He motioned for Karome to stop his faded blue Toyota pickup truck. Both got out and walked in to a spot about 50 meters from the mother and her small family. Karome carried a 12 gauge shotgun given to his father by one of the local loggers. It was loaded with slugs, the favorite high-bore ammo for big game. Rishi took the shotgun from his son, aimed it carefully and pulled the trigger. The big female dropped in her tracks, bleeding profusely, fatally wounded in the chest. The two baby gorillas, instead of being frantic with the death of their mother, the sound of the gun, and two humans rushing toward them, did not scramble to escape by climbing a nearby tree. No, instead they just sat there. Rishi nodded to Karome who fired a smaller bore rifle, taking two shots to drop both little primates.

They looked over their kill. The mother made no real attempt to avoid the hunters. She was pretty big, an easy catch, but she looked a little sick. Her eyes sunk into her skull and they were bloodshot. She seemed listless before the shot was taken and made no effort to protect her young. The infants were not as well cared for as others they had seen. They were scrawny and weak. Rishi wondered if the young were sick, too. It wouldn't matter. Usually they would save some of the meat for their family or their village, but today they decided to bring it to market in Ouessos, a town in the Congo, located on a river linked by ferry to Brazzaville. They would take no chance of providing bad meat for their families or even their village. There was great risk to do so. A few years ago, hunters brought back a dead gorilla they had found to provide meat for their small village. Everyone who ate the meat died. All twenty-five dead. The authorities thought it might have been the ebola virus. Rishi wouldn't let that happen to his village. The gorilla was freshly killed but they weren't sure it was or wasn't sick. Rishi needed the money.

Rishi and Karome dragged the carcasses onto a tarp and pulled the tarp out to the truck. Then, with some difficulty, they loaded the bodies into the back of the pickup, covered them over with a canvas, and tied everything down for the ride to town.

Maybe these might go to Europe or maybe America, said Rishi. I'll suggest that to the old woman.

They knew some of their bushmeat kills traveled the world. There ain't a flight from central Africa coming into London that doesn't have bushmeat on it, said one of the illegal smugglers Rishi knew.

There was a burgeoning market for gorilla meat. It has a sweet taste and has been hugely popular as a subsistence meat for hundreds of years in the countries of central Africa. More recently, the expansion of the Africa's logging industry has resulted in both a higher supply and a higher demand of bushmeat, especially that of the great apes.

It used to be that the average man provided his own family with gorilla, chimpanzee, or bonobo (pygmy chimps on the south side of the Congo River) meat to eat. As logging operations expanded, more hunters provided more and more meat for workers and their families. Many turned to hunting bushmeat as a way of living, not just subsistence. Even the affluent city people in larger central African cities became consumers, as they yearned for the ethnic taste of bushmeat they remembered growing up in the forest. Transplanted ethnic populations in London, New York, Brussels, Paris and other cities eagerly paid for meat brought in illegally by individual couriers from all over central Africa. The demand for the meat of great apes had increased globally as it became available to central Africans who had emigrated to points around the world.

The French Photojournalist and the Five Chimpanzees

While Rishi and Karome drove to Ouesso to sell their gorilla meat, a French photojournalist was initiating an assignment for a nature magazine. Bernice Trejean was a Parisian working on a story about bushmeat, more specifically about the killing of great apes for consumption and profit. She had arranged to go out for several days with a chimpanzee hunter from Mokeko, a small village about 15 kilometers south of Ouessos. Today she and the hunter took an abandoned logging road around Lengoue, some 65 kilometers south of Ouesso, and came upon a group of five, mostly dead chimps. It was odd, they noticed, that they had not been removed for food, but rather left for dead. One of them was still alive, but seriously wounded, shot multiple times. Bernice and the hunter got out of their vehicle to examine the scene.

I've never seen anything like this, Miss Bernice, said Kip. All this meat and no one took it. I will. This is worth $250 at the market.

I'm going to get some pictures, said Bernice. Something's not right.

Kip worked hard to load the chimpanzee bodies into the back of his pickup. He shot the live chimp in the head and loaded it as well while Bernice watched in despair. She had already promised the editor and herself not to get involved in the emotion, politics and philosophy of taking great apes for food. She was on a fact-finding mission, not one of confrontation. Nevertheless, she found it extremely difficult to say nothing.

These were all shot and left on the side of the road, Kip, said Bernice. Don't you find that strange?

Maybe the authorities caught them, said Kip. Maybe they thought the chimps were sick and they didn't want them. Who cares? All the more for me.

Wait, before we go, I want to take some samples, said Bernice. There's something about them. She took out a small kit and took several samples of skin, blood and hair from each of the dead chimps. OK, let's go, she said. I've seen enough.

European and Asian logging operations paid huge governmental concession fees to cut timber on designated tracts in Cameroon, Republic of Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, and the Central African Republic. The number of acres under their control was immense. In order to support their logging operations in the thickly forested interior, they built miles of roads. In fact, more than 32,000 miles of roads were reported built by logging concessions in the six countries of Central Africa. These roads, representing almost 40% of all roads in the area, allowed significantly more access for poachers to hunt, snare and transport bushmeat that lived deep in the forest. It was a good living for Rishi and his son. They could drive to wild animal habitats that had rarely, if ever, been visited by humans.

Of course, they weren't the only hunters. There were thousands and thousands of others. Every logging town had its own hunting camp, supplied with guns and ammo, staffed with men and women from distant towns and cities, including immigrants. The trapped, snared and shot wildlife for meat. The logging operators built schools, roads, medical care facilities and strung electrical lines. Meat was available every day in any town or city of any size. The gorilla or chimps that used to be caught, trapped or shot solely for subsistence were now on the menus of high-end restaurants in Brazzaville, Yaounde, Kinshasa, and Bangui. Or it was shipped as beef in refrigerated cargo ships carrying mostly lumber to Britain, and even carried in personal luggage into Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris for sale to former Africans making a home in France.

Rishi drove into Ouesso and found the old woman at the marketplace who bought gorilla meat regularly from him. Deciding not to tell the old woman that the apes looked a little sickly, he sold the gorilla mother and her two infants for five times the cost of beef. The old woman cut off the major limbs and sold those, as they were, hair and all, the following day to three individual buyers who lived locally. She used some spare meat pieces to make a pepe soup, kind of like hot chili. She sold the main piece of meat, the trunk, to an entrepreneur who said he was taking it along with some other bushmeat to Kinshasa by air. From there, the gorilla was to be cut up into steaks. Some would be hidden in a shipment of dried fish to cover the smell which made its way to London. Some was carried in personal luggage to Toronto. Other steaks were sold to buyers in Brazzaville.

The Two Belgians and the Bonobos

Rene Gagne and Jean Dufuit came to the Congo as wildlife activists. They were loosely tied to one of the many larger wildlife organizations whose mission included the control of unsustainable logging and the illegal trading and killing of wildlife, including the great apes. The two flew in from Belgium into Kinshasa as tourists. They had plans to confront and document any and all evil-doers they could. Both were young, recent college graduates. They had some modest personal wealth, but beyond that, each could easily call home for whatever the wanted. They combined their resources, bought a 4x4 truck in Kinshasa, and made their way into the interior of the Congo, stopping along the way to familiarize themselves with the local population, surveilling ways to make their mark. Jean had heard about some selling of illegal skins in some of the larger town, but that did not interest them as much as the taking of bonobos south of Kinshasa.

Bonobos are pygmy chimps which live south of the Congo River. Bonobos and the common chimpanzee are two species of great ape which make up the same genus. The common chimpanzees live north of the Congo. Rene spoke with at least three natives who told them where the bonobos lived and where they thought the were being taken for pets or meat. They headed for Kinduti, 35 kilometers south. There they would place four or five trail cameras in along the road in hopes, whether misguided or not, of capturing something which would document whatever action was taking place. Further, they would conduct a so-called 'stakeout' along the road. They would wait with cameras at the most major junction of the roads between isolated Kinduti and the outskirts of Kinshasa, a sprawling major city of over 10 million.

Luckily or unluckily for them, it didn't take long before they saw some results of their amateur investigative efforts. One day, in fact. The next day, from their obvious stakeout position, they watched traffic go to and from Kinduti. After several hours of observation, the two young Belgians became familiar with the type of traffic traveling back and forth. The two large pickups with cages and four occupants with guns headed toward Kinduti seemed too suspicious for them to ignore. They gave them 45 minutes head start, then headed south in the same direction.

On the way down, one of the trucks passed them now going the opposite direction like a bat out of hell. They hollered something at the two, like a warning, but Jean and Rene didn't understand. The truck had come out of a side road a few kilometers north of Kinduti. The two looked at each other and agreed quickly to see what adventure and excitement lay ahead of them down the side road. They fully expected to see the other truck. And they did, not more than a mile or so in. The truck was off the side of the road.

There was blood splattered everywhere. One bonobo was in a cage in the back of the truck. It was doing its best to get out. There were several bonobos laying on the ground, dead from head wounds, obviously made by a rifle. The truck's two human occupants were no where to be seen.

Let's take pictures, said Jean. This is big.

They wandered around the bloody scene. The one bonobo was making a racket.

Look at that monkey, said Rene. He's weird-looking. Sick, like it's dead only it isn't.

Oh my God, there's one of the guys who must have driven this truck, said Jean. He's coming out of the forest. Hey, friend. Are you all right? What happened?

The man kept coming their way, saying nothing, dragging a foot, reaching for something.

I don't think he heard you, Jean, said Rene. Hey, buddy. What happened here? Can we help?

He's a mess, said Jean. Looks like he crawled out of a grave.

By that time, the man was within 15 meters of the two, not responding and clearly heading for them.

Get his picture. People will want to see this, said Jean. I want to get a close-up of this guy. He needs a doctor.

Jean and Rene were intently watching the man in front of them. He was crossing the dirt road, almost to the two.

Rene felt something close behind him. It smelled odd. He turned to see what it was, and as he turned, someone's arms draped around his neck and squeezed him tightly. As he lost balance with the weight of someone hanging all over him, he dropped to the ground. Another man's head pushed up against his own. He felt a warm mouth, then the sharp bite of someone into his neck. And another bite, and