Zombies by Joseph McCullough Read Free Book Online Page A

Officially the government has never commented on what happened in Pennsylvania in 1968, but many witnesses survived and have come forward to tell their stories.
    It began in the hospitals and mortuaries. The recently dead stood up and attacked the living, stopping only to feast on those they had killed. As people died, they in turn rose up and joined the ranks of the zombies. Thousands died in less than a week,before the soldiers and local militia formed a cordon around the infected zone and, slowly tightening the circle, killed every zombie they could find.
    Pennsylvania ’68 is now a rallying cry for those in the animate necrology community. It is both proof of the dangers of atomic zombies and a test case for the effective overwhelming response needed to contain and eliminate a threat. Since 1968, the world has averaged nearly a dozen atomic zombie outbreaks a year. Most of these are small, and in the developed world they are quickly handled by specialist containment teams. However, the Third World remains extremely vulnerable to outbreaks, and it is often only with the assistance of the United Nations that an atomic zombie outbreak can be contained.
CREATION
    The atomic blasts of 1945 left the world vulnerable to a particular form of contamination. The contamination can begin in either the air or water, but it will eventually spread from one to the other and into the ground as well. Unfortunately, the process of contamination is still only partially understood. It is a complex chemical reaction, often involving forms of extraterrestrial radiation. However, cases of contamination usually involve so many different chemical combination possibilities, that a true “source” has yet to be discovered. That, of course, assumes there is one source, and that contamination isn’t achievable in multiple ways. In most cases, contamination can be traced back to the legal or illegal dumping of industrial waste combined with a particular cosmic event, although there is evidence that both have caused contamination on their own as well.

    The area of contamination is highly variable, depending upon the spread of chemical waste and/or the power of radiation. To date, no charted contamination zone has covered more than 100 square miles. Thankfully, contamination zones have a limited duration. Most last only a couple of days, though a few have been known to carry on for weeks. Only the Chernobyl event has lasted more than a year, and it currently stands as the largest continuous zombie-contamination zone on record. Again, the reason behind the duration of a contamination zone is unknown. Scientists and animate necrologists rarely get to visit a “hot zone,” and the Ukrainian authorities are still refusing to let international investigators near Chernobyl.
    Since the process of contamination remains obscure, it has proved impossible to predict where a hot zone might spring up. That said, once an area has become contaminated, the spread of zombification follows a predictable pattern. Unlike necromantics, atomic zombies only form from the recently dead. As a general rule, around thirty days seems the cutoff point for a corpse to be reanimated by chemical means. By then, much of the internal tissue of the body and many organs have turned to mush and escaping gases have ruptured the skin. The first to be affected in a hot zone will be the most recently dead. Hospitals usually form ground zero for an atomic zombie outbreak. One moment everything is business as usual; in the next a man who just died on the operating table gets to his feet and attacks the surgeon. Within a few minutes of the contamination, the corpses in the hospital morgue also reanimate. In less than an hour, funeral parlors and crematoriums are also affected. By the end of the day, corpses will be battering their way out of mausoleums or digging themselves up from their graves.
    There is a grim irony to outbreaks commonly starting in hospitals. Not only