Resurrection: A Zombie Novel by Michael J. Totten Page B

who stay are hard-core. Everybody goes a little bit crazy. My buddy says they have a name for it. They call it going toast.”
    Going toast . Hughes liked that. Going crazy was going toast . He wasn’t sure what it meant, exactly, but he liked the sound of it.
    Everyone left in the world was probably going a little bit toast.
    Carol? Jumping at her own shadow and cleaning everything over and over? Toast.
    Annie? Toasted, for sure. The biggest catastrophe in the history of the species had just laid waste to the planet, and the poor girl couldn’t remember a bit of it.
    Parker? That guy was still in the toaster.
    And Lane? Lane was burnt toast. Burnt and black and stinking up the whole kitchen.
    Hughes was sure he’d go toast himself soon enough. Somehow he hadn’t already. Mostly because he didn’t feel anything anymore. Then again, he could be kidding himself. Maybe feeling nothing was his own way of going toast.
    He couldn’t help but wonder if his family might still be alive if they lived in New York or Chicago or Houston instead of Seattle. Because the only places in the world hit harder than Seattle were Calcutta and Moscow.
    That’s where it started. In Russia. Some dinky Arctic research town in Siberia was the first to get hit. A scientist up there was bitten by what everyone thought was a rabid fox. The guy turned and then bit his doctor. Since he was the only doctor around, they flew him to Moscow for treatment. The doctor bit a dozen passengers on the plane. He ripped a woman’s throat out with his teeth before a mob jumped him and bashed his head in with a fire extinguisher. After they emptied the plane, it was absolute mayhem at Moscow’s international airport.
    No one had a clue what was happening, and it took the Russian authorities much longer than it should have to shut everything down. They might have managed to contain it had they understood, but they did not understand.
    Most of the Russian infected stayed home, but someone in Moscow who got bitten but was otherwise initially fine flew to Paris. Another boarded a plane to Seattle. A third flew to Cape Town, and a fourth to Mumbai. And it spread like a motherfucker from there. Quarantines were impossible. Governments everywhere were two or even three steps behind.
    Since the plague’s insertion point in America was Seattle, the East Coast had more warning. Things might be a little bit better over there. Local governments could be two or three steps ahead. By the time the virus spread through Oregon and reached California and Idaho, the U.S. government knew what was happening. Containment was no longer possible, but at least they knew what was coming. New York, Miami, and Boston might not have had a single case before they knew what was coming. Maybe the Army was out in the streets. Northeastern Canada could have cut itself off completely for all Hughes knew. The Caribbean islands almost certainly did. Puerto Rico and Cuba might still be intact.
    But Seattle was the worst place to be. Hughes’ family stood no chance, not only because they lived at ground zero but because of his wife’s … situation.
    Sheila had been depressed for years. She went weeks in a row without leaving the house or even getting out of bed except to use the bathroom. Hughes earned just enough from his job that she didn’t need to work, so when Tyler was born, they agreed she should spend at least a few years taking care of their son. But it wasn’t long after she became a stay-at-home mom that she sank into a personal hell from which she never emerged.
    Hughes never did figure out why. It wasn’t because she stayed home. He hadn’t forced her. He wasn’t that type of guy, and it was her idea anyway. She seemed to love it at first. She took more pleasure in taking care of that boy than anything else. But something switched on or off in her head and sent her spiraling into a void.
    Sheila’s morbid depression frightened their son Tyler. He was too young to understand it.