10 Minutes From Home | Book 1 | 10 Minutes From Home

by Howard, Bill

  confirmation that all indicated properties infected have been uniformly incinerated.

  2.Farm near Pontypool, Ontario, lot 5, sector 17-b, two (2) residents confirmed in dwelling incinerated with property, lot confirmed destroyed, one (1) open grave found beneath maple tree, no body. All area infected destroyed.

  3.Continuing orders throughout sector 17-b through 30 Aug 09, followed by reporting to Kingston, Ontario, base camp.

  D.P. Kessler

  MCpl

  3PL 1 Sect Comd

  1138

  COMMUNICATIN

  SPECIAL PREVIEW OF

  WRATH OF THE LAMB:

  A SEQUEL TO

  10 MINUTES FROM HOME

  PREFACE:

  THE CLEANSING

  The kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains;

  And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth upon the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb:

  For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?

  Revelation, 6.15

  Scars are the rivers of consequence. The catastrophic after effects of World Wars, Atomic Bombs and natural disasters have forever changed the landscape of our planet, reshaping its physical appearance and rerouting mankind’s possible futures. We hope that at the very least we can take away lessons that will allow us to better ourselves, better our world. Some things will always be beyond our control. The Black Death took up to 75 million lives. The Spanish Flu claimed between 50 and 100 million in only 2 years. 25 million have been lost to AIDS, 200 million lost to measles and 300 million to smallpox. The one thing all the pandemics in history have in common is that once a host dies, and the infection from that host is contained or destroyed, it is no longer able to infect others. The viral outbreak of 2011 caused its hosts to grow ill and die, but then rise from death with an insatiable need to feed on the living. Man created a concoction and we injected it into our children to battle something created in nature. Yes, it may have been with good intentions, but when people are hasty and impatient, or worse, when they react with fear and anticipation of past ghosts returning to haunt once again, bad things can happen. And boy, did they happen.

  It started with the usual preventative shots any child would receive from the time they were babies. Shots to protect them from the childhood ailments we all know. Measles, Mumps, Rubella and so on. In late 2010, a new virus sprouted up and spread amongst the population like a California wildfire. The media dubbed it The Swine Flu. Medical practitioners that were scrambling to do something about it called it H1N1. But as is often the case when a vaccine is being developed, the time needed to perfect it may not be adequate if the virus has already taken hold of the population. The pressure to get a treatment to the public was immense. Tests were not thorough and time was not taken. The treatment against the virus was administered to hordes of panicked people waiting in long lines at mall clinics, walk in’s and doctor’s offices. Unfortunately, after millions of people received the miracle cure, it reacted with the medications that were already in the veins of the world’s children, and the result was unimaginable and terrifying.

  Once the reaction took place, madness, paranoia and disorientation took hold of the host, mercifully followed a short time after by death. The real problem lay in what came next. The mixture of chemicals caused a very distinct reaction in the human body that no one could have anticipated. After the body had died and stopped feeding the virus, the unique cocktail in the system would bind and react violently. The body would not know how to handle this shocking infusion, and once the heart stopped and the body died, the immune system, still active, would jumpstart the corpse. However, the brain didn’t start up the same; it was altered by the trauma of death and the damage done by the now lethal mixture in the bloodstream. The immune system would try desperately to fix the brain, but the best it could do was recreate it on a much more primal level. The result was animal instinct within a human vessel.

  It didn’t take long before the vile disease spread. One bite became two, multiplying exponentially from there. Within 72 hours the results were catastrophic throughout most of North America. Thanks to easy access to world travel and the highly contagious virus being transmitted through mobile, rabid hosts, within 7 days most of the planet was teeming with the infected monstrosities. We went from living our lives to running for them. The government tried to get a foothold on control with a heavy military presence, but the things that mankind became were hard to kill and control would not be had. The infected popped up everywhere like dandelions in the population, eventually outnumbering the blades of grass and taking over the entire lawn.

  Survivors gathered in groups for practicality, usually holed up and huddled together trying to manage with meager supplies and food. Some travelled in search of loved ones, or in search of a safer place to hunker down. There were very few places that provided refuge from the new scourge. Networks of wanderers began to spread information, what areas were safe, where the greatest concentration of infected were, where supplies and food could be found. The event started to be referred to as The Cleansing. No doubt it had its roots in the religious communities, but it fit in a disturbingly appropriate way. At first people referred to the infected as zombies as our only frame of reference, as with most things, was pop culture. We were living a scenario right out of a George A. Romero movie. But as it dawned on society what was actually happening, it became much too disconcerting to call them that, it would have been like admitting our late night movie nightmares had indeed come true. Among those who survived, the term “Zombies” became the slang for the infected. I think everyone felt strange using the term that was popularized by George A. Romero movies but I’ll be damned if that’s what they didn’t look like. Pop culture was something that used to be important to us, it only made sense. Any road travelled was sure to include sightings of Zombies at some point. They shambled around like seniors at a mall on pension cheque day. Unless they caught sight or wind of anyone uninfected. Then there was no stopping them. Just like in the movies, they could usually be taken out by some sort of debilitating blow to the head. Anything that would stop the still functioning brain from sending signals to the rest of the body. I guess in the movies that made the most sense and in life it seemed to be the best course of action as well. It’s hard for a body to chase you when there is no brain telling it to, even if it is operating on a purely primal and instinctual level. Zombies were easily identified by the bright yellow eyes usually accompanied by reddish yellow foam around the mouth. They often displayed injuries from run-ins with survivors or other Zombies, sometimes missing limbs or eyes and almost always covered in blood.

  The initial infection was just over a year ago and the world is a much different place now. Cities have been abandoned. Uninfected people are few and far between. There are many groups of hostiles who pillage whatever they can from whomever they can, but their recklessness usually culminates in their demise. Bravado doesn’t count for much anymore. Many people left the cities for the country or even for the wilderness. The security may not be as good in terms of concrete walls to hide behind, but there are far fewer Zombies in the country and it is easier to see them without the urban landscape blocking every view. In the wilderness, there are even fewer Zombies, but you must have the capacity to be able to build your shelter and the ingenuity to survive without any conveniences.

  All in all, estimates were that over 90% of the population of the planet had been killed or reanimated. That left the living population down to just over 700 million people on the entire earth, roughly the population as it was in the year 1750. Needless to say, one could travel for quite some time without seeing another uninfected human.

  Electricity was a thing of the past, except for the odd gas powered generator. There was still a fair bit of gas around, wait
ing to be siphoned out of cars, gas station tanks or tanker trucks themselves. The world had been thrown back into the dark ages 50 times faster than it took to get out of them. Strangely though, and I guess this is attributed to basic human nature, one commonality still remained within most survivors. Hope. Inexplicable as it was, people still lived with a hope that something would change, that some kind of bearable life would one day return. You don’t stay alive just to avoid death, not in such a desolate landscape. Hope is one of the most powerful traits of humankind, even when it’s false.

  CHAPTER 1:

  WANDERING SOULS

  My name is Denver Collins, although most people call me Denny. Or used to. My wife Diane and I survived the initial outbreak of the infection now known as The Cleansing, the spread of the disease and the destruction of the world. We lost our daughter Jordan to the infection during those first days and our home shortly after when it was burned to the ground by military troops; we narrowly escaped with only two backpacks of supplies and our lives.

  I had been stranded in Toronto when the outbreak hit with my best friend Thom, but Diane and Jordan were still at home on the farm in Pontypool. The week that followed was one of the most harrowing, terrifying and transformative experiences of my life. I did manage to get home, reuniting with Diane, but the loss of our daughter was almost too much for either of us to bear. The fact that we had found each other after the weeklong separation was a driving factor in our decision not to give up. Without each other, we surely would not have survived another day let alone another year.

  We have managed to stay alive for a year amidst a crumbling wasteland of a world. We have experienced more horror in that year than a hundred lifetimes of nightmares could ever have conjured. In our travels, we have taken shelter in basements, stores, sheds, sewers, under porches, in holes in the ground in the woods, and under bridges. We have gone up to three weeks without food, but luckily water does not seem to be too scarce, we can still find bottled water scattered around, and rainwater isn’t too hard to gather either. Food can still be found in the canned varieties, but it is hard to get near anywhere that might have food because of the zombies. Even though other survivors can be a great threat themselves, the zombies are what we still fear most. They are relentless in their presence and although we have become somewhat used to them being around, we don’t get used to their reactions when they encounter the living and healthy. The disease, infection, whatever you want to call it has transformed mankind into a kind of primal beast unlike anything the history of our planet has ever seen. Part human, part animal. They have already died, but are newly alive in the strangest sense. Like in the old zombie movies, most people instantly thought the old shot to the head would end their existence but in fact, that usually just started the process over again. Die, then the chemicals restart the engine and they are back in business. We eventually found out that the only way to ensure they didn’t get back up was to actually sever the head, destroy the communication between the brain and body, stop blood flow to the brain and stop brain activity to the heart. That would essentially pull the guts from the machine and stop the chemical from rebooting. It was all about the lines of communication within the body. Bub’s are technically still living, blood coursing through their veins, heart still beating. So, when a bub got injured and survived, the wound would just bleed and get infected. After a year, these wounds, or any wounds they may have had when they changed, just stay wet and dripping or dry out and look just as disgusting. The blood loss and trauma never seemed to lead to their destruction; they just keep walking, eternally walking.

  In the last couple of months, we have been noticing something different. Not even really noticing, more like feeling. There have been indicators of a change, although we cannot yet pinpoint what that change is. It was an energy in the air itself, something indefinable but definitely tangible. Both Diane and I have had heavy feelings that something is beginning to shift, that something major is about to happen. There is almost an electricity in the air. We fear what this change might be, but it doesn’t really seem possible that things could get any worse. But we must forge ahead and see what this new world has in store for us.

  Special Thanks

  A very special thanks to those who supported this book and inspired it.

  Thanks to Joanne McKenna Howard, Evangeline McKenna Howard, Lee Howard,

  Jason Khan, Erin Barr, Paul Silliphant, Stephanie Moulton, Sean Sansom, Nate Taylor, John Palisano, Rodrigo Gudino, Chris Alexander, Dave Alexander, Greg Nicotero,

  George A. Romero, Jovanka Vukovic,

  Jack Ketchum, & Clive Barker.