For a split second I wondered if my truck was going to have any dents in it. Insurance might deny my claim.
The zombie rolled off right as I hit the curb, and I might have seen one glimpse of my new passengers bouncing around behind me, as I looked back through the rear view mirror. I then sped down the road towards the location where I had planned to ditch the truck. I have never known just how fast zombies can really walk, but I wanted to get there in plenty of time to get a good distance between myself and the mass that I'm sure was already rambling on down towards that end of town.
I got to the park opposite the motel that I had stayed in the first night, and turned off the truck. I got out and got a good look at the first living human beings I had seen in over five months. I grabbed my pack out of the back of the truck, and motioned for them to follow me. Before I could get very far, the older woman gave me a hug.
She was in tears.
I was in awkward.
Unfortunately, the going was slower than I had expected. The other woman, Lucy was her name, had gotten some burns from a different fire (when they said burns, I thought somehow my fire had burned her) and was still rather tender, and therefore slow. And the older woman, Dawn, had been that sound I had heard crashing down from the ladder. She had twisted her ankle, and needed to be helped along. We hobbled along quite slowly and in a few hours, I made the decision to simply find a house and bunk down for the night.
But my hiking plans were still working. Following along the river back up to Mills River seemed to have thrown off our tracks, or scent, or sound. That or we simply were far enough away. Just to be safe, we crossed the Mills River; an event all unto its own with two hobbled people. The first house we found at the edge there along the Mills and French Broad is where I’m at now, and is certainly fitting our needs.
No one said much last night. I got out that large bag of rice I had scavenged just a few days earlier, and cooked it up with a large pot I found here at the house. None of them were in any way starving or famished, but they did eat the food eagerly. Maybe it was the safe setting, or just a pot of hot food, but it went down pretty fast. Evan, the guy I had seen that first day on the roof, told me a little bit about how they had been stuck in that grocery store for three weeks, and that they had scavenged all the food that had remained in the grocery store.
I didn’t really bother them that much last night. They seemed exhausted, and so I let them all drag mattresses down and we all bunked down for the night.
I got out my iPod last night and listened to two songs. It still had plenty of charge.
Evan’s Notes: If Brian is ever one thing, he is emotionally honest. The guy has the knack of telling us exactly how he feels about something, even if it pins him as an awful person. The truth is though, that he talks honestly about what he’s thinking while the rest of us would never voice such thoughts. It was clear that he could have left us all behind, and it shows his nature that he wrote down that even thought about it.
He also doesn’t mention that he let me listen to his iPod as well, and hearing music for the first time in so many months was at the same time bizarre, and also wonderful. I can’t say that I agree with his taste in music. It was something electronic, or musical instrumental, I don’t really know. It was still wonderful.
Entry 13 – Sometime After Lunch[13]
If you’re an avid fisherman, then the end of humanity (all except that lucky fisherman, of course) would be one of the best things to happen to you. I technically know how to fish, but have never been that good at it, but as I took a quick walk down to the river to get a bucket of water, I bet I could throw an empty hook into that water and pull out a fish. Trout I think. I may have to see if we have some fishing gear stashed away back at the house, and attempt it again in the future, as it might be a good way of getting some fresh meat.
One of the guys, Evan, came along with me. He seemed to be in the best shape. He is kind of a small guy, maybe five and a half feet, shrimpy, wiry, but the lean muscle type. He was complaining about not wanting to sleep anymore, while the rest of the group appeared to be quite content in just sleeping. My guess is they were simply catching up from what might have been three weeks of very light sleeping.
Evan has been the only one that has talked in any way. While the others have been polite, there hasn’t been much in the way of conversation, even between them. I’ll attribute it to shock of some sort. Meanwhile, Evan told me a little about their group. Apparently, they had come out of Charlotte, where a large group of living people had managed to make a workable fort out of the International Airport there in Charlotte. A few there were pilots, and they routinely flew out to scout. They had been sent up this way to supposedly try to find a group of survivors one of the pilots had seen in Asheville. They made it to the outskirts of Asheville when they simply couldn’t, or just wouldn’t continue on, as the valley city had created a pot of zombies. They seemed to have all poured out from the mountains as little creeks of post living, alien bug infested, human beings.
At this point, they turned back and when they stopped at Hendersonville for one night, they woke up the next morning to the sounds of a large zombie crowd. They had tried to make a break for it, but had lost two others that had come with the group, and then had barricaded themselves inside the grocery store. Three weeks later, I came along.
I didn’t take long outside, no need to draw the attention of even a single solitary wandering zombie. That's usually how the situation they found themselves in starts. It’s why I had been sticking to taking hiking trails through the mountains. Once inside, Evan and I sat down, and while chomping down on some cereal bars (I think I'm very nearly finally done with these), we talked a little bit about our experiences with the end of the world and specifically, the zombies. It was then, after he decided to go clean his gun, that I decided I needed to put into writing what I knew and had seen since the day the skies turned green.
I remember when I saw my first zombie. Like nearly everyone else, you had no idea these new things, these creatures, were here. I was rushing in to the start of classes. Since the great relief of the destruction of the comet, there was a rush to try to make the world start working again. School was started again, and it was a rush to get everything in order before the start of classes. I had parked outside the school and was carrying all my junk, books and papers, when I nearly ran into it. Here was this man, dressed in his finest suit, stumbling towards me. At first, I barely reacted, and I rather remember thinking for a brief moment if this was just some drunk guy. He, or it, stumbled over a knee high wall leading up the school, and collapsed on the other side. I was in such a rush to get inside, that I didn’t even stop to notice.
Just a few hours later, one of my co-workers comes running into my room, talking to me about the cops and a shooting on campus. Apparently, an older man had walked into the school, and had attacked a few of the teachers in a hallway. One of the teachers was seriously wounded. Supposedly, the man had tried to take bites out of the woman before having her face clawed off by this old, apparently extremely insane, man. The police were called, and the old man was found in the school gym, wandering around. The cops supposedly shot the man seventeen times, before he was finally brought down.
Now, a shooting on a high school campus; an attack of this nature, was sure to be big news. But the story kept getting bigger and bigger. That night, on the TV news, they had the story on the news, but here was the big, and of course, key twist. It turns out that the man that had attacked the teacher at the school had died the previous night of a heart attack. He had attended a ball of some sort, and partied a little too much for a sixty year old, and had suffered the attack and had died at the hospital. Hospital crew then informed police that the body disappeared at some time during the night, and here he was, apparently alive and well, and hungering for human flesh.
At first they were miracles. People were dying. They were dying of natural or manmade causes. But then in a few hours, they were coming bac
k to life, quiet and in an almost vegetable like state. Some would sit or lay for hours, in this awoken state. I remember the news stations and the internet exploding in those first few days. People weren’t staying dead. Death was gone.
Many churches began claiming that the comet had indeed brought upon the end of the world, and that we were now living in a new eternal world. I remember thinking that this world was no paradise at the moment. For nearly the entire world though, it was about to turn into a very real living hell.
Many scientists, of course, made the right correlation. I remember a few tidbits on the news before everything went crazy. A few tests had been conducted, and it appeared that the new creature, or virus, that had floated in on the comet, was taking over human bodies upon their deaths. This explained why people who had died previous to the landfall of the comet pieces were not coming back to life. Of course, further tests were going to be conducted to determine the nature of this control over dead human bodies, but, the nature of the news began changing dramatically that very next day.
There were well over seven billion people in the world when the comet pieces struck the upper atmosphere, burned off and released our outer space visitors. Because of this vast population, on average, every second, two people die, of whatever causes. That’s one hundred and five people every minute, six thousand three hundred and sixteen every hour. That means that on that first day that I saw Mr. Well Dressed zombie stumble into my school and attempt to eat Mrs. Gruzber, one hundred and fifty thousand six hundred people on this planet died. Very nearly every one of these came back to life within a few hours. That next day, every one of those newly risen “miracles”, turned into unlife, and began to attack, eat and mutilate whatever living creature, especially human, that they came across. Those that were attacked and killed themselves, woke up later as zombies as well.
I know these crazy numbers because my father and I ran through them many times during those first couple of weeks when the dead came to life. My father, for his own reasons, asked me to come back out to the mountain house the same day he heard about the attack at the school, and since the school was shut down now for a few days (little did they know), I obliged him. From our mountain fort, we watched the news as everything began to unfold into insanity. So we crunched some numbers.
We figured from what we were seeing that a single zombie would kill at least four people before being put down or destroyed. Many times that didn’t even happen, but, we assumed that for our numbers purposes. So within that first day, there were now over seven hundred and eight thousand people dead. Those turned into zombies, and on the next day, three point eight million people were dead. By the end of the week, well over four hundred and fifty million people had met their end, and then met their new beginning as zombies. Now, that is really still just a small percentage of the human race. Within those few days when the world came to a screeching halt, governments, the military and smart people in general, adapted quickly. People created forts out of existing cities. The military went on the world’s largest campaign, and wiped out large amounts of zombies. Smart people simply barricaded themselves inside of their homes, and that generally worked out. Remember, zombies aren’t very smart.
Then again, they didn’t need to be. The problem with everything people did was that this new affliction wasn’t anything they could keep out. No matter what kind of quarantine you created, everyone was in his or her own way, already doomed. The pathogen or creature that created the zombies was already in each and every one of us.
Evan, the guy who had walked outside with me, had told me his story of how he survived. He had holed up with a bunch of college kids, with some residents of some neighborhood, in a local high school. They had managed to gather enough food for some time, and were able to go out and scavenge from time to time. Evan himself had gone out with one other guy on a scavenge raid in the town. Unbeknownst to him, back at the gym, the tightly secured location, a fortyish year old woman suffered a heart attack and died, without anyone having paid much attention to her. When Evan and his buddy returned, they walked into a massacre. The old woman had revived as a zombie, and had proceeded to attack the unwary people inside of the gym. By the time Evan had returned, the whole bunch of them had themselves turned into living dead. As they walked into the school door, the man who had gone along with him was attacked at the door, and all Evan could do was turn and run.
I can only imagine how all over the world thousands of these situations took place. For all of humankind’s memory, death had been the end of everything; suffering and maladies. It simply wasn’t in our DNA to be on top of every single person just in case they died. If someone died, they died. It was sad, and we would deal with it. Now, you had to keep an eye on everyone and if they died, take care of it right away. It was a degree of stress never before dealt with by people. I can only imagine how people broke under that stress.
I remember hearing, before the TV and radio stations went completely dead (oddly enough, the internet died before the TV and radio. Well, it kept working, but people simply stopped updating it) of local shelters and areas people had managed to hole themselves into and actually survive, and then days later, no news whatsoever coming out any of those places. My father and I watched horrified as that first week unfolded. In the second week, the TV stations went off air, and in the third week, there was only one AM station we could pick up at night and it was from Mexico. By the fourth week, everything was quiet.
Humanity had imploded on itself and now, the only remains of it were those few people in lucky situations such as my father and myself. The rest were wandering the planet in their former bodies.
Notes: Brian’s guesses at the number of people that died each day is quite accurate. What made the zombie rush harder to deal with was that it never came from one direction. Instead, the threat popped up randomly all around, from every direction. It was hard to fight an enemy that was simply put, all around.
Entry 14 – Mid Afternoon[14]
I’ve gathered up with the rest of the group, which is actually up and about, a little bit. Someone found a stash of wood in the back of the house, and set to getting a fire going in the wood stove this house had. It was the intention, at least of some of them, to attempt to get a warm bath. So we made a few, very quiet, trips to the river to fill up as many water containers as we had, to attempt to fill up the bath with hot water. That idea in itself sounded good. I hope zombies aren’t attracted to the smell of wood smoke.
So while Aaron is going about getting the fire nice and hot and the water going, I’ve been asking them about all that they know about the zombies and I want to write down the things that we have come up with.
Two main points; they come back to life when a living person dies and so far, everyone that dies in any way, comes back to life, no matter who they are.
The biggest thought gotten from that is that everyone in this room is a potential zombie. The moment any one of us dies, we will become reanimated as a zombie. Not something fun to live with.
Zombies can be killed by making their brain stop (another technical term). All of us have noticed that while the rest of the bodies remain barely “lifelike”, in other words, it starts to rot, even it at a slower pace than normally, the brain of the former human remains vivid and grey. Whatever the bug does to keep them in their living state, requires that the brain be as fully functional as possible.
Dawn, the older woman, made a somewhat disturbing comment though; “What if they can still remember who they are, but can’t control themselves?”
Tague, the foreign guy (at least he sure sounds foreign) commented; “Probably not. They died first and then came back to life as something else.”
Philosophical discussions for some other time I think.
In either case, it seems that by ridding the zombie of the capacity of the brain ended whatever life they had. So, a gunshot through the brain, or a stabbing of some sort through the head, was usually the most effective way to stop one. Of course,
if you so happened to own a nice broadsword, or a katana, you could cut the head clean off. Some of them wondered if the head would keep living, and I had to sadly inform them that yes, the head of a zombie still retained some form of life.
The rest of them informed me of something that was new to me. Apparently, fire (that is fire burning their bodies) while not essentially killing them, really stunned them. That’s why my absolute failure of a bomb back at the grocery store worked so well. Now, adding that bit of information to what I already know, I informed them of something else my father and I had discovered. A tazer gun, while again, not killing them, knocked a zombie out cold for quite a long time. I told the group how my father had theorized that the shock to the body somehow knocked the nerves out of communication with the brain. In the same way, the burning of the flesh created a similar nervous shock to the body.
On the downside, that might just mean that someone might run into a whole bunch of badly burned zombies in Hendersonville.
We talked about how the zombies have a need to eat, as their attacks on humans nearly always involve attempts to bite at them, and not just bite to attack, but bite to rip flesh off the body. So many zombies I have run across are half eaten, but, oddly enough, they rarely eat off the face or head. None of my new found group members could remember an instance where a zombie ate from a face.
Lucy, the younger woman, thought that perhaps, the zombies didn’t need to actually eat, but were just attempting to convert more zombies. These were “alien” outer space bug things that were controlling the zombies. Of course, we had no proof that the zombies needed to actually eat, just as much as we had no idea of the zombies or whatever controlled them was more than just some nasty parasite.
Deadfall: Survivors Page 5
