I reluctantly handed Kelly my Glock as I looked at the girls, as I looked at the horrible pain in Kelly’s eyes, the kind of pain that a mother should never have to feel.
“I’ll do this,” I said sadly to Kelly.
“No,” Kelly replied weakly, “I need to do this for my girls and for you. Charlie, go upstairs don’t watch, please.”
I took my last look at the girls, but I knew my last real look at the girls had been earlier today.
The two little bodies in front of me were no longer my little girls, they were something else that only resembled my girls.
I looked at Kelly, then I turned and walked over to the steps.
I could hear Kelly crying loudly as I started up the stairs.
I stood at the top of the stairs, dreading what I would hear next.
I soon heard two muffled gunshots, partially drowned out by the sound of Kelly’s sobs.
I was grateful that I hadn’t heard a third gun shot.
I just stood there. I didn’t want to turn around, but when I heard something at the bottom of the stairs, I turned to see Kelly sitting on the bottom step with a blanket wrapped around her, the gun sat on the step beside her.
I walked down and sat on the step next to her.
I put my arm around her and pulled her close as she cried.
“I wish we would have all died when we saw the missiles overhead on that first day,” I said. “Died all together in one quick flash.”
“I don’t,” Kelly replied.
“Why not?” I asked. “If I would have had the choice, I would never have wanted any of us to have to go through this.”
“I wouldn’t because at least this way, I know you still have a chance to live,” Kelly replied.
“Live for what?” I asked. “There isn’t anything left for me to live for.”
“I don’t believe that,” Kelly replied. “I know you will find something good out there somewhere, it may take a while, but I know you will find it. I want you to live and find it. Please remember us, but don’t obsess about us, don’t let our memory keep you from living a good life, you deserve a good life. Remember, you promised.”
I hugged Kelly tightly against my side.
Neither of us could hold the tears back.
Finally Kelly said, “I don’t know how much time I have left, do you want to go for a walk? Remember that was how we met, we were hiking at Badlands National Park and you had to help me get up over a bunch of rocks.”
“I remember,” I replied. “But if it’s OK with you, I would just like to sit here so that I can look at you a while longer. It’s dark outside.”
I watched as Kelly ran her hand over her forehead, wiping the perspiration away from her eyes.
I could feel her body heat coming through the blanket, I knew she was burning up.
“Charlie, will you do it before I turn into one of those things,” Kelly asked me. “I don’t want to die knowing that will happen to me.”
I just nodded because I couldn’t find the words to answer that request.
I wanted to talk to Kelly, but just like the day we saw the missiles being launched, I couldn’t find any words.
However, the big difference tonight was that I could see the end of my world closing in around me like a freight train.
It’s hard to think of the right words to say, when I knew they would be the last words I would ever get to say to Kelly.
It also felt different to know that we would not be going together, but that I would soon find myself here alone, without Kelly.
“You should head out west,” Kelly said softly.
“What if I want to stay here so I can be close to you and the girls?” I replied, barely able to choke out the words.
“The weather is nicer out west,” she said. “It will also be better for you to get away from here. Too many bad memories here.”
“A lot of good memories too,” I replied.
“Take the good memories with you, leave all the bad one behind,” Kelly said.
We had twenty-five minutes left together before the end came.
Kelly sensed I was too broken up to talk, so she told me to just listen and let her do all the talking tonight.
I listened as she relived our life together and thanked me for sharing my life with her.
She sounded so happy as she talked to me.
It was the saddest but also the most beautiful twenty minutes of my life.
Kelly knew when the end was coming, she squeezed my hand and asked me to kiss her.
Before I kissed her, she looked into my eyes and whispered, “You promised me, remember I’ll be watching.”
I lowered my face to hers and kissed her, then I felt her body go limp in my arms.
When I was able to stop shaking, I wiped my eyes and felt for a pulse.
After I was sure she was really gone, I kept my promise and did what I had to do.
I walked up stairs and sat down in our debris covered living room, and I cried.
How I wished that we would have all departed this miserable world together four days ago.
But for some reason, that’s not how things were meant to be.
I had told Kelly that I would keep my promise, but I honestly didn’t know if that was going to be possible.
The world had just ended and things would never be the same again.
Chapter 10
I woke up the next morning and found myself lying among the leaves and debris that covered the sofa in our living room.
I had fallen asleep sometime in the middle of the night after being tortured by the visions of what had happened during the night, but most of all I was tortured by what I had done.
I understood why I had to do it, but that knowledge didn’t make me feel any better.
I heard the voices in my head that kept telling me that maybe I didn’t have to do it, that maybe Kelly wouldn’t have become one of the undead, that maybe she had just died peacefully in my arms. The voice kept telling me that I had put a bullet in the back of her head for no good reason.
I tried not to listen to the voices, but the doubts were still there, creeping into my thoughts.
Before the voices could drive me insane, I got up and did what I knew I had to do. Like many other things over the last week, it was something that I had never thought I’d be doing.
I would be burying my wife and kids.
It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.
It wasn’t the hardest thing I ever had to do, the hardest thing I ever had to do, that I did last night after Kelly breathed her last breath.
But this morning was a morning of doing things that didn’t fall very far down on the list of things that were hard to do.
Carrying the three bodies up from the basement and arranging them carefully together at the bottom of the grave I had dug in the yard right outside of the kitchen window. The window that I had looked through, out into the yard every morning for the last few years while I drank my morning coffee and thought about my upcoming day.
Picking up the shovel and throwing in the first shovelful of dirt in to the grave. With each shovelful of dirt, I watched my life slowly disappear before my eyes.
When I tossed in the shovelful of dirt that finally covered the last visible part of my family, I knew that my life, what had been left of my life, was now gone forever.
The finality that it represented took my breath away as the tears I had been fighting back, broke through and flowed freely down over my face.
I quickly finished covering the grave and walked into the kitchen and sat down in my chair at the kitchen table and looked at the familiar surroundings.
“Now what?” I asked myself. “What comes next? Does anything come next?”
I looked at the coffee pot that I would never use again, the clock on the wall with the hands on the clock frozen at 6:25, the time the power had gone out after the rumbling off in the distance had started as the missiles began to hit their targets, knock
ing out the electricity.
I looked down the hallway that led to the girl’s bedroom, the hallway where I would never again see the girls rubbing their eyes as they walked down the hall for breakfast each morning.
I turned my head away, but now I was looking at the basement door, the place where we went as the winds picked after the attack and where my world had ended.
I again turned my head and looked out the window into the yard only to see the mound of dirt on my family’s grave.
I couldn’t sit here any longer or I would go crazy.
I walked out and got into my truck and decided to go for a ride.
I needed to clear my head and to decide what I should do next.
My first thought to help take my mind off things was to check out some of the other neighborhoods and maybe see what downtown was like after the last week.
My drive didn’t last very long because within the first few minutes I discovered that Bismarck and the surrounding area had become the city of the undead.
The streets and yards were crawling with the walking dead.
I didn’t have any hesitation about running into the undead with my truck to get through some of the streets. After yesterday, if I thought I could have run them all over, I would have done everyone a favor and runover every last one of them.
They weren’t people anymore, they were dead, and they killed the innocent.
I had learned that the hard way and wouldn’t forget it anytime soon.
After seeing all the undead, I decided that I should just go home, the drive wasn’t going to help me relax and think as I had hoped. If anything, it was only making me more angry and frustrated.
On my way back home, I decided that it was going to be too painful to remain in Bismarck.
There was nothing for me here any longer, there wasn’t anything here any longer for anyone.
Kelly was right, there were too many bad memories here.
My short drive also told me that it would soon be impossible for any living person to survive in Bismarck with the increasing numbers of the undead.
I knew it was time for me to leave.
I carefully drove home, switching streets frequently to confuse any of the undead that saw me so they wouldn’t be able to follow me home like they did yesterday.
I needed to buy a little time so that after I got back home, I would have enough time to gather up what I wanted to take with me when I left and hopefully some extra time to say my last goodbyes.
When I arrived home, I loaded my guns and ammo into the truck along with a few extra shirts and pairs of pants.
I took what food was left in the house and put it in the truck too.
Then I went out back and sat down in the grass near my family’s grave and for the next ten minutes I talked to my family.
I said my last goodbye and told Kelly I was going to head west like she had suggested. That I would do my best to keep my promise. I hoped to come back for a visit someday if I could, but as far as coming back to Bismarck, that best I could do was only to promise that I would try.
When the groaning sounds began to move closer I took my last look around then I slowly got up, walked to my truck and pulled out of my driveway for what would be my final time.
I was never able to return to North Dakota but a part of me stayed behind when I left. I can honestly say that a day never goes by without something reminding me about my life in Bismarck.
I took all the memories with me, both good and bad. I could never forget about the bad memories, but as time went on, I found myself thinking more about the good times than the bad.
I worked my way around the outskirts of Bismarck to avoid the undead, until I was able to get on to Route 94 West.
When I started out on my journey, I envisioned that I would be going on a road trip, driving the long lonesome interstates for days at a time until I would one day arrive at some destination out west.
By this point in my story you already know that wasn’t how my journey went.
Shortly after the nuclear attack the undead began to appear.
The people that had survived the radiation and the fallout, unable to understand or defend themselves against the undead had to flee the cities and towns in a desperate attempt to survive.
When I drove onto Route 94 I found the highway was lined bumper to bumper with abandoned cars, their owners, who were trying to escape the city where the number of the undead seemed to be doubling every day, were no longer anywhere to be seen.
I imagine that they had all joined the ranks of the walking dead and were now out looking for the living.
I found all the highways to be the same. They had become parking lots where the passengers inside the cars became sitting ducks for the mobs of the undead that had followed them out of the cities.
I spent my first week trying to follow Route 94 but could only manage a few miles a day as I slowly worked my way around and over the bloody cars that were scattered over the interstate.
I was able to siphon enough gas out of the abandoned vehicles to push on, but I finally had to get off the interstate and try to follow the back roads.
The back roads were a little better, but they had their disadvantages too.
The side roads either didn’t have signs or the signs I could see had the names of places that I had never heard of before, so I never knew for sure where I was going. It also became increasingly difficult to find enough gas to keep my truck running.
During my first few days on the road I did a lot of thinking.
I also had many opportunities to watch and study the dead and I began to understand them a little more and I also developed a few theories.
First, I was convinced that the undead were actively hunting the living. Every time one of the undead saw me, they would come after me and wouldn’t stop until I either lost them or killed them.
It was also during these early days of my journey that I learned that the only way to kill them was to destroy the brain by shooting them in the head or clubbing them over the head with a good solid club. But I also found that guns made too much noise. The sound of a gunshot actually attracted more of the undead than the bullets could kill. I began to search for quieter weapons.
It was also during these early days that I thought about what Kelly had said. She felt that the radiation from the nuclear blasts was killing people and then turning them into the undead.
But as I began to drive across the country, I started to question that theory and feel that something else might be responsible for the existence of the undead.
I started to question that idea because I noticed that there were two kinds of dead bodies. There were dead bodies that walked around and then there were dead bodies that didn’t walk around.
At one time that observation would have been considered a ridiculous statement made by a crazy person, but now that was a perfectly rational observation.
If radiation was killing everyone and then turning them into the undead, then why were there dead bodies still lying around? Why wasn’t every dead body out walking around?
You might say that the radiation only turned some of the people it had killed into the undead.
But after observing the dead that were walking around, I knew that wasn’t the answer.
There were two kinds of the walking dead. The walking dead whose bodies were mangled and chewed up like they had been attacked and then there were the walking dead bodies that were just dead, like they had died of natural causes with no obvious signs of any serious trauma.
The people killed by radiation had sores and burns all over their bodies, none of the undead appeared to have any radiation burns on their bodies.
That meant that the walking dead didn’t die from radiation before they became one of the undead.
That told me that there was something else going on that had turned those people into the undead.
So if the nuclear war wasn’t responsible for the appearance of the undead, then what was?
That observation of the undead that were covered in bite marks and severe wounds, also told me how the condition was being spread. More and more people had been turned into the undead by being attacked and bitten.
So all the time I had with nothing to do but think during the early days of my journey, was what led to my curiosity to find out the answer to these questions about the undead.
Finally, somewhere in Montana, my truck broke down. I decided I had enough of the interstates, back roads and driving in general. The undead were still stalking the highways hunting for the living and finding anything to eat was becoming almost impossible.
I didn’t have anywhere in particular that I was trying to reach, there was no time schedule to get anywhere, and I was tired of constantly battling the undead on the highways, so I decided to change my approach.
In a little Montana town, I found a small hunting supply store that hadn’t been completely cleaned out by the looters.
I found a backpack, a walking stick, a box of lighters, a bow and ten arrows and a pair of hiking boots.
I knew that I probably wouldn’t live much longer, from what I had seen, I was the only living person still alive in this part of the country.
So I decided that I would spend my final days living a quieter slower paced life, I would live on my terms and not those of the undead. I would try to get closer to nature and live off the land as I made my way west.
I was going to try and find a little enjoyment in nature before my time was up.
So I set off on foot.
About a month later, somewhere in the hills of Montana I found a little wolf cub whose mother had been killed, of course that was Wolfe and my journey took on a new meaning and purpose.
Apocalypse- the Plan Page 33
