We bolted across the airport runways, down the way we had come the day before. Dawn’s ankle seemed a lot better and for an older woman, I remember thinking she was really moving fast. Then again, we had good motivation behind us. Thankfully, most of them had been contained within the terminals, and only a few stragglers had tried to follow us, but we soon outdistanced them and got out of the airport fields, and back down into that part of Charlotte, attempting to retrace our steps back to the park.
In some ways, it was good how everything had gone down. Had we seen the zombies right when we got up, we might have panicked then, and maybe left many of our things behind, but as fate would play out, we were entirely packed up when panic mode hit us and made us flee.
Odd things went through my head as I was running across those runway fields.
I remember thinking it would be really wild if an airplane landed at just that moment, or that maybe I’d get arrested for a being a terrorist. Then at one point, I tried remembering if I had packed my journal from the night before, and thinking that it would have been horrible if I had lost it, not because of the lost information, but because I really hated to write, and would have given up writing anymore if I had lost all of that.
Our trek back to the park would have been mundane, and that would have been great after that morning’s near death excitement. The rest of the day, though, would turn out to be stock full of excitement, the near death kind again, but I really need to focus on a few things that I clearly remember from the walk back.
Maybe because they had lost their hope, or people they knew, or because death seemed that much closer to them, but the group I had rescued; Aaron, Evan, Lucy, Dawn and Tague, really began to open up. They talked about themselves, their lives before the comet and how they had survived up to this point. As I'm writing this tonight, I’m asking them again about what we had talked about, just to make sure I get everything right. I found it a little odd at first that they didn’t ask much about me, but, I found it a little heartening to hear about them. It made my new companions more, human, to me, which makes no sense, because they already were, human. Am I still not making sense? Being in a new world where most humans you met were no longer human, took away the humanity of those that had remained human. I am thankful for knowing them a little more.
To those who read this in the future, here is what I have found out about these fellow walkers.
Aaron and Lucy.
I put these two together because their pre-comet background is linked. Aaron used to be a lawyer, family law attorney. He used to deal with child custody cases, child support, and all that kind of stuff. He said he had become a lawyer to get rich, but had got into family law and while he said it had made him good money, it was all very disheartening to him. He mentioned how he had worked and gone against what he considered some of the worst people he had ever known. Mothers and fathers that were out to destroy each other most of the time, with children caught in the middle of it. He mentioned that it had begun to burn him out, and that he was contemplating changing his life right before the comet hit.
Aaron had been married with two kids. He had been at work the third day after the first zombie had risen, and had come home to a wrecked neighborhood, a house with the front door busted down, and his wife and children missing. He had gone inside, gotten his gun and tried calling the police, which, by this time, were either zombies themselves, or simply unable to deal with the exponentially growing disaster. Without any ideas about what to do, he tried calling his best friend, Robert, to see if his wife and children had maybe gone over there. Having gotten no answer, he drove over there, where he found another calamity.
Lucy was Robert’s wife. Robert was a police sergeant. They did not have children. The two couples had been close friends, and Aaron routinely dealt with Robert in his cases in Greensboro, North Carolina, where they all were from. Lucy worked for some magazine that was published out in California. She did all her work from home, editing or pre publishing, not sure which. At the time of the comet, she was not working for the magazine because it had decided they no longer needed to produce the publication due to the inclement end of the world.
Lucy had not seen or heard from her husband since he had called two days earlier and told her to get the guns out, pack some simple bags, and wait for him. The first knock she heard at the door turned out to be Aaron, looking after his own family. Without any idea about what to do, they had decided to head down to the police station to see if they could find Robert. They were forced to turn back because the police station was in a complete state of chaos attempting to deal with the phenomena of the rising dead. They returned to Lucy’s house, where they decided to flee to Charlotte where her family lived.
On a personal note, I can tell that Aaron is really shook up about that decision to leave Greensboro. It seems that he wasn’t convinced about his wife and children, although by now he probably is. But one never quite gets over that. I still don’t know if my father is dead, but, what other available results are there in this world?
It’s also obvious that the two of them are an item of their own. One of those things that the new world has thrown at many people I suppose. Your best friend’s wife becomes your partner, mostly because it’s the safest thing to do. I wonder just how much either of them thinks about their former spouses. Neither of them knows one hundred percent that they’re dead, but obviously know it to be true. In this world, I suppose finding comfort in each other is better than nothing.
They told me how Charlotte was an immediate nightmare, and that they routinely fought off zombies from their house after they barricaded, but after they began to run low on food, they packed up into their Suburban and tried to leave the city when they came across the Airport and soldiers. They were allowed in, and they made their new survival home at the airport with around three hundred people at first. The number swelled quickly to about a thousand, with military raids going out daily to bring back in food. At some point, flights with important people were routed there; Senators and Congressmen from who knows where, as well as some supposedly high ranking military figures and scientist people. For the first two months, there were flights in daily, bringing in supplies and weapons, but after those first two months, the flights began to die down, until six months after the zombies had risen, the last flight came in and the word was that they were essentially on their own.
They had been part of a larger group that volunteered to go out way past the city limits to find survivors and supplies to bring them back to the airport. They had been tasked to head up to Asheville, while other groups had been sent east to Raleigh and Wilmington, and some south into South Carolina and Georgia. (Something to note for in the future.)
Evan
Evan’s hometown is a small town south of Raleigh called Angier. On the outside, he is what you call a southern redneck, and is proud of the title. He’s the kind of guy who is comfortable in coveralls, riding four wheelers and getting up way too early on a freezing morning to sit in a blind and hunt. The funny thing is that he actually has three college degrees. His father owns a few restaurants up and down the Interstate 95 corridor and his family is well off. He went to school at Duke and majored in Business Management, among other degrees, in part to help and eventually take over the family businesses. He’s the epitome of two different worlds; a thick southern drawl, with a higher educated brain. When he speaks, you hear Larry the Cable Guy, but understand Stephen Hawking.
He had been with his family on the day the comet was supposed to hit, and when it was destroyed, he celebrated by getting, in his words, “fucked up”. A few days later he was up in Rocky Mount working at one of his father’s restaurants, when a pair of what would turn out to be zombies came barging into the restaurant, and managed to kill a score of people before they were themselves taken out. He stayed behind to clean up the mess of that supposed crime when the restaurant was attacked a second time, by a far larger group of zombies. This time he was one of two people left cleaning th
e mess from the first attack, and he wasn’t about to fight off a mob of crazy people. He managed to make it out of the back of the restaurant, get in his car, and head for Interstate 95 and try to get home. He was one of possible millions who realized that the wider the road or highway, the more possible accidents, people, and worst of all, zombies, there were. He remembered taking over two hours to drive only twenty five miles south, before he took an exit and tried to find other roads home. When he finally reached his home the next morning, having dodged masses of zombies as well as chaotic drivers, fires and people shooting at him, he found no trace of his family, except for the body of his father, blood in his mouth and clothes, walking menacingly towards him. He had to take a breath for a moment before telling me that he had shot his father six times, before a hit to the head took him out.
He told me how for the next few months he lived out of barns and abandoned houses, scavenging where he could. He took to riding a bike, the mechanical motorized type, mostly because it was easier to get by wrecks or to go off-road. He grouped up with some survivors in Albemarle, who had heard of the airport in Charlotte from radio broadcasts, and made their way there. It was a disastrous caravan full of injured, sick and tired men, women, children, and elderly, all a recipe for disaster. Of the seventy people that left Albemarle, only thirteen made it. They were attacked by zombies three times, and once, from within, from people who had died at night.
Evan made it to the airport right about the time the last of the flights had stopped coming in. He quickly turned out to be one of those resourceful types that volunteered to venture out into the city to scavenge and look for survivors. He was one of the first to volunteer to go further out to search for people and supplies.
There is one clear item of information I came across in my talks with him and the others; Evan knows how to use a gun and has pretty good aim. Years of hunting I'm sure. I will need to spend some time with him.
Beneath the southern redneck facade and the lone gunman type attitude, it was clear to me that Evan had difficulty when he was describing the scene at his family’s house. His voice faltered just a bit, a small hesitation, far different than his usual bravado, but just enough to show that even he was not immune to the horror of a lost family member. At least I have not seen my father zombiefied, and then killed. Is everyone out here just a fragment of themselves?
Evan’s Notes: He described me well enough.
Tague
I must start this section by mentioning that for those few first couple of days, I thought his name was something like Tak, or Tach, or something of that nature, because that is was his name sounded like. Well, today I finally figured out the proper spelling, and will have to go back and change the spelling on previous entries.
Ok, Tague is a French Moroccan (he calls himself that, an attempt at European humor perhaps), who looks nothing like either. He seriously looks far more like a Swede or some other Scandinavian. I found out that his mother is Danish and his father French, and that he was born in Morocco. Unmarried, unattached, Tague had been a CNN reporter for seven years before the apocalypse began. He was actually stationed in Spain to cover the last moments of humanity on earth should the comet have hit. He had been bound and determined to film any incoming mega tsunami, so that the rest of the world could see it live before being obliterated.
He, like Evan, described the partying that took place in the northern coastal city of Vigo, a small town on the very edge of the country facing the Atlantic Ocean. It was also in the Spanish countryside, under rumors of insurrection or infighting that he caught his first glimpse of zombies. He recalled how he got his camera out of his car to film the mass exodus of people, when another group of people came over the top of a hill just above the road. He talked about how he was filming and just wondering what had happened to this new group of people, as they must have been very injured in the way they walked. I remember a comment about him zooming in and having to rub his eyes, because he simply didn’t understand what he was seeing in his camera viewfinder. Then, the refugees on the road began a stampede as it seemed that the zombie horde had found the end of the crowd, and was fighting and eating their way through, right as this new group of zombies was falling down upon them from the hill. For the first time in his life, the guy who was going to sacrifice his life so that the world would have a live view of the comet’s crash, dropped his camera and ran as hard and as fast as he could.
He also mentioned that was the day he quit smoking.
He admits with some shame to having used his CNN credentials to board an airplane, which in this case, was bound to Atlanta. He recalled that he felt awful, but that he was so terrified of what he had seen, that he simply had to get out of Spain, while still under the assumption that this was something localized. It wasn’t until he got to Atlanta that he realized what the world was coming to. Along with a few other camera and reporting crews, Tague left the CNN buildings in an attempt to break through the zombie horde that was growing into a sea of death, and head for the countryside of northern Georgia or South Carolina.
“I just ran them over. They were human beings at one time, and I didn’t care. I just kept running them over, and they would get stuck, under the vans, or on the hoods. And the limbs and the sounds, and the blood. But I was so terrified.”
He wandered off the highways as much as possible as they trekked slightly north, trying to avoid major cities, mostly without any real plan for what they were going to do. They saw the evidence of the implosion of many small towns, piles of bodies, burned out houses and the litter of human corpses all over. Some places they drove through were already completely depopulated, even by zombies, who had already walked off as packs. In other parts they had to turn back when they saw zombies within the towns. They had to switch vehicles multiple times due to wrecks and damage caused by zombie attacks. The worst had come when some zombies jumped out on what had been a clear road while they were driving at seventy miles per hour. The driver and front passenger were killed, as the zombies shattered through the windshield like road kill. Tague had been in the back seat, and suffered only a bad concussion. Two others were torn to pieces by zombies that found them while still in shock from the wreckage.
Of the group that had first left Atlanta that September, only four remained when they found the radio transmission from the Charlotte airport. Tague related to me how they had been holed up in some half wrecked house for a few days, and were nearly out of any kind of food. He had been contemplating leaving the three behind and going at it on his own, hoping for a better chance of survival. When they heard the radio message, they made their way up to Charlotte, this time driving at far lower speeds at all times, no matter what.
Of the four that reached there, only Tague and another were alive when the leaders at the airport had begun asking for volunteers to go out beyond the city limit. Tague had joined up with Aaron, and had first had intentions of documenting what they did during their excursion, but lost his journal after the second night. He did mention that after seeing me writing in my journal, that maybe he would take it up again. It was a good idea to make sure that a record of this can be kept for historical purposes, at the very least.
Dawn
Our elder in the group, the very spitting image of a southern belle, was actually far from it. Dawn was a minister’s wife, and originally from Wisconsin. Her husband was one of those mega church pastors, the kind that preached that God wanted everyone to be rich, just that the pastor should get his first. (That’s my personal opinion. Obviously, Dawn thinks quite the opposite, but I haven’t said as much.) Along with her husband and about a thousand other church members, she had flown down to North Carolina, specifically the Outer Banks. The pastor had thought it best that they should all go to heaven in one large wave, quite literally. They had been on a praise and worship binge, when the comet failed to hit the planet like it had first intended to. Unfortunately, for the pastor and his wife, the church members were actually not overjoyed by this result.
For months, the pastor had been preaching that this comet was the wrath of God, and that this was the foretold end of the world. He had tasked his church members, the thousands of them that lived there in southern Wisconsin, to give up their goods and give their lives to God to the very end. Unfortunately for them, that end didn’t come as they had expected, and now these thousand that had followed him there, were stranded without cash or means to return home. To add insult to the lies was the fact that the pastor himself had not acquitted himself of all of his goods as he had preached to his flock. When he tried to sneak out that day to return back to the North Carolina coast, the rejected flock turned on him, and beat the poor liar to an inch of his life.
Dawn was with her husband, who was taken to a hospital in New Bern, along the coast, when the zombies began to rise. A hospital of any decent size was one of the worst places to be when the dead began to rise. Short of a battlefield, fewer places on earth have a large amount of recently deceased than a large hospital. She talked about how one morning, on her way to visit her husband, who had been recuperating and would be released in a few days, she arrived at the hospital to find police units being attacked by strange men. She had initially been barred from entering the hospital, and soon found herself trapped in the hotel she had been staying in.
She remained at the hotel for almost two months, while the food supplies dwindled and people slowly disappeared, either to their own salvation or to their own demise. After three months, she was the only remaining person at the hotel. Thankfully, food goes longer for just one person, and she seemed quite corralled inside of the hotel, keeping the zombies out. She heard the Charlotte radio transmission one evening on an AM station, broadcasting that everyone who can make it there would find safe haven. She also mentioned how that wasn’t the only radio signal she could pick up at night. She remembered hearing broadcasts from England, Maine, somewhere in Canada, and a whole larger portion of languages and places she had never heard about. She assumed correctly that Charlotte was the closest location to her.
Deadfall: Survivors Page 8
