by Gareth Wood
The station had been cleaned out ages ago. There was nothing left to loot or salvage, the tanks were long empty, and the few shelves in the front held only leaves and twigs and a few old newspapers. Someone had shattered the windows, the door was torn off its hinges, and the cashier’s register was missing entirely. The garage was in similar condition. There were no tools left, and no undead lingered. The only sign of them was a blood spray pattern on the ground at the back of the garage, and a bloody trail showing where a corpse had been dragged out front, presumably to be burned. Sanji and I returned outside to the others.
We passed the time here quietly. The station, with the overgrown grass and weeds encroaching on the pump island, the broken windows and barely noticeable breeze blowing through the trees around us, was like an image out of the wildlife and nature photography collections that were all the rage a few years ago. It would have been kind of pretty, if I hadn’t known that the rest of the world looked exactly like this as well. Whatever else we knew about the zombies, and about the way they ‘reproduced’ and spread, it was well known that this thing was everywhere. Last winter we had received reports and information from other places on the planet where survivors had managed to hold out. The American government had relocated to Hawaii at the start of this nightmare, and had gone through three presidents by the time they finally stopped transmitting messages that they were going to “retake the Americas from Alaska to California”, presumably with large units of heavily armed soldiers. They attempted a miserably failed landing in California, and we haven’t heard from them since then. Our own government started talking to us as well, with a new Prime Minister, and that lasted a few weeks before they stopped transmitting too.
Out in eastern Canada there are a few military bases still operating, and we know the island of Newfoundland has survivors on it as well. Apparently the city of St. John’s was overwhelmed early on, but the rest of the island is pretty safe. There are about fifty thousand people there now. England and Europe have turned into vast graveyards of the unburied walking dead. If there are any survivors left there, they are completely out of touch with us. No word has come from across the Atlantic in a long time. It’s the same with Asia. As far as Africa goes, nobody had heard anything from them since this started, and we all assume the entire continent is lost. South America is another story. For some reason the outbreaks of the walking dead were not as bad there, and there are reports of cities like Rio, where the dead were contained in a small area, or Lima in Peru, where several hundred thousand survivors have banded together to wipe the city clean of the undead. We apparently still hear from them via radio bounced off the satellites.
Jess and I sat together on the tailgate of the Explorer and held hands casually. We each had a hand free in case of wandering undead. The thumb on the hand I was holding hers with ran lightly over her scars. A bullet had torn large chunks out of her muscles and shattered a few bones in her hand, and the scars were impressive. It was nearly healed, and she had regained a lot of mobility, and could shoot as well as before. I raised her hand up to my mouth and kissed her fingers lightly, and was rewarded with a smile. I love her smile. She has been the very best thing for me, and I don’t know how I would have gotten through all this hell without her. She’s my balance, the thing that that keeps me sane in this nightmare that never ends.
“Where are we now?” she asked. I pulled out a map and showed her.
Another two hours on the road and we should be at Slave Lake. The town is unsecured, meaning it is teeming with the living dead and the prospect of living survivors is minimal. A military expedition made it there last year, but turned back without going farther along that road. Only a brief incursion was made into the town, so we really have no idea of conditions there.
Chris got on the radio and reported our location to the operator at Athabasca, and then we got on the road again. The surface of the highway here was a mess. Over a full year without any sort of maintenance had taken its toll. Weeds and tree roots had invaded the roads with gusto, and before another decade passed it was going to be hard to drive on them at all. And that is assuming we have fuel that long. What gas we do recover is even now losing its kick. I never knew that gas had an expiry date until I was told so by a soldier in Calgary last year.
Driving along, watching the gas gauge now, thinking about how soon we were likely to be using horses, wagons, and bicycles to get everywhere, I decided that my plans to leave the Cold Lake settlement were a good idea. The feeling of looming disaster I had had since the spring was stronger than ever. I hadn’t talked to anyone but Jess about it, and I wanted to make sure I thought it through completely. I made up my mind to ask Sanji and Darren what they thought. If I was going to make a go of it with a smaller group, these were people I wanted along.
We had traded passengers, and now Eric was driving, and Chris was in the back seat while I rode shotgun. In the following Explorer, Sanji was driving while Jess sat in the passenger seat, with Darren riding in the back.
“I miss football,” Eric suddenly declared. I turned to look at him. He was staring ahead at the road, and we were weaving between several abandoned trucks, going slowly to avoid potholes, broken glass, and random debris. His sunglasses hid his eyes, but I could tell he was feeling a little morose.
“Me too,” agreed Chris from the back seat. “I miss all kinds of stuff. I miss television. Video games. I never did finish Halo.”
“I miss swimming pools,” I said. “The smell of the chlorine in your hair, the clean water and the diving boards.”
“There’s lots of stuff to miss,” Eric said, “but I miss football most of all. I used to sit on a Sunday afternoon and watch the games, drink a few beers and shout at the TV with my friends. Not much chance of a league starting up again now.” Eric frowned as he said this. I remembered doing the same things, but for me it was hockey. The Flames had been doing really well when the undead rose up and started killing us all, and I can’t help but wonder if they might have won the Stanley Cup if it had all gone differently.
The road ahead was clear now, and I paid more attention to our surroundings. Forest stretched away on either side of the highway. The trees were not tall here, but low spruce and some deciduous trees that I did not know the names of. We would climb a rise in the road and be able to see several kilometres into the distance, and it was all the same, trees as far as we could see. They were encroaching on the highway in places, and the normally clear ditches were filled with overgrown grass and weeds. Animal life was thriving here as well. We saw at least half a dozen moose, who would turn away and run as we approached, vanishing into the trees as we drove slowly past. There were birds by the hundreds, and coyotes, and even a bear, a large black bear that growled at us from the bank of a creek that the road passed over. The wildlife seemed to be coming in strong now that there were almost no live humans to hunt and kill them. I wondered what they made of the undead. Did they avoid them? I know the undead have little or no interest in the wildlife; I had seen several watching animals and birds with no interest at all. As soon as they saw a live human, that lifeless uninterested stare turned into something far more hungry and dangerous.
“What do you think we’ll find up here?” Chris asked.
“Zombies, man,” Eric said, “and maybe some looted stores. Last team that went through here didn’t find anything more than that.”
“What about survivors? I mean, there are lots of places here to hide, and people up here in the north know how to live off the land, right?”
“It’s possible. There were far fewer people up here to begin with, and I imagine once they saw what was happening in the cities a lot of them took off to hunting cabins and shit like that.” Eric took off his sunglasses and placed them on the dash, and reached for a bottle of water.
I said, “We’ll look around, but we’ll be cautious. If we run into any survivors, obviously we’ll tell them about Cold Lake, and hopefully they can make it there if they want to. But I think anyon
e who’s survived up until now out here is probably pretty good at taking care of themselves.”
We talked about this a little more as we drove, and then came upon a highway sign that read ‘Slave Lake 5km’. We shut up and concentrated on our weapons for a few minutes, as Eric slowed us to about 30 kph. We climbed a hill, and on the other side was the turnoff north for the town. The road passed along south of the row of hotels, truck stops, and gas stations. I could see houses north of that, between the highway and the lake itself. We stopped both vehicles on the crest and looked down at the town below us. There was a seven vehicle accident at the intersection of the turnoff and highway, and I could see several walking corpses lurching around the area. One of them saw us and started towards us. The accident involved a semi with a trailer, three cars, a minivan and two trucks. I could see two skeletons from here without the aid of binoculars, and a pile of something that might have been another rotted corpse. The wind carried the stench of decay to us as we stared out over the silent wreckage, and rustled the leaves and grass that had piled up around the vehicles.
More of the undead had seen us now, and we had quite a large group moving towards us, thirteen or fourteen of them at least. The blackened skin was broken in places, showing the white of bone beneath. There were a few that looked bloated, but most looked almost normal. Another mystery we had no explanation for. The normal dead went through all the processes of decay, but the zombies didn’t. Hardly any bloating, and aside from some cosmetic damage, they were usually remarkably well preserved. They stank, the flesh tore and peeled away, they turned black and oozed, but they didn’t fall apart. Some of them had stopped functioning, but we had no explanation for that either.
I ran into one last year that I called ‘Stan’. He just stood there and looked at us when we approached, and never made a hostile move. He seemed incapable of movement except for the eyes, which followed us everywhere. And then one day he just stopped, fell over and ceased to be. We didn’t stay long enough to see if he rotted away after that.
Eric looked at Chris and smirked as he said, “What did I tell you? Zombies.”
I got out my binoculars and scanned the area, looking north into the town while the others watched the undead approaching. The walking corpses were still about a hundred and fifty meters away when I lowered the binoculars and motioned everyone back to the vehicles.
“Let’s go.”
What I had seen wasn’t promising. I couldn’t see too much of the town from this point, but what I did see was mostly in ruins. A hotel slightly west of us was a burned out wreck, and the gas stations along the highway had been looted and one had burned as well. Houses were visible behind a wall (the kind realtors love and fire departments hate) surrounding the community, and at least half of them had burned. Everywhere I could see there was evidence of a massive fire, and I spotted numerous shuffling undead between buildings and in streets. There was a faint miasma of both decay and burned wood in the air, and I was glad the wind was towards the lake.
We retreated to the Explorers and I told the others what I could see of the town. It was actually worse than we had been told, and I was doubtful we’d find any supplies or survivors here. With a feeling of mild despair we turned around, drove back a few kilometres, and consulted the maps. In the end we decided to skirt the town and drive through the main streets to see what we could discern. We turned slowly into Main Street, staying at speed, weaving through wreckage and abandoned vehicles, and avoiding the undead that lurched about. We turned west again at 6th Street, following it past more vehicles, skeletal remains, burned buildings, and the more or less intact school building. The undead were thick here, and I was worried that we might have to turn around. This convinced me that there were no survivors here, and I was happy to see our last turn, another right onto Caribou Trail, which we followed south until we could see the highway again. We drove over a divider, through some tall grass that the town employees had neglected to mow, and back onto the main road into the Peace Country. We left the devastated town of Slave Lake behind with its hundreds of walking dead, and I felt another sliver of hope die in me.
* * *
With each passing day my certainty of our eventual doom grows. Despite the evidence that we are hanging on, the slow attrition is taking its toll. Every day we manage to survive is another victory, but how many victories can we manage? The amount of luck that we have had is staggering. In my own case, I was very lucky to have survived the initial outbreak in Calgary. I managed to get both myself and Sarah out of the city before the nightmare took over, and I have had a string of lucky events since then. I cannot imagine that it will go on forever. Eventually I’ll be injured or bitten or trapped without hope of rescue, and then I’ll die. If I am very lucky indeed I’ll have the means available to insure that I don’t end up wandering around after my death as a shambling rotten husk with cannibalistic tendencies. If that means shooting myself in the head with my own gun, so be it. I am prepared for this eventuality, and will take that step if it comes to it.
Thinking about it, each of us who is alive today has had a long string of luck to have made it this far. With the odds so stacked against us is it any wonder that we have had so many casualties since the initial outbreaks? Millions and millions have died in the year since this started, and billions died in the first few weeks. The chaos of this age, the amount and scale of the death, has changed each one of us so that we are not the same as we were, and never will be again. The old world has died, and this new one is harsh and without much hope. We live off the carcass of the world that perished, and we stagger along in the grim shadow of death, waiting for death to touch each one of us. For some, that day will come sooner than for others.
* * *
The zombie came out of nowhere. We had stopped our vehicles at the intersection of Highways #2 and #33, directly south of Lesser Slave Lake, which stretched east to west for over one hundred kilometres. The road south, Highway #33, wound through the Swan Hills to the town of the same name, and then off southeast towards Edmonton. The #2 Highway passed westwards along the south shore of the lake on its way into the Peace River region of northern Alberta, a vast landscape of hills, forest and farmland dotted with small cities and towns. We had stopped to stretch and have some dinner at this intersection, within walking distance of several farmsteads and houses. The road behind us wound up a hill and disappeared, and the road south was clear for a few kilometres before it turned into the trees. Westward the road ran along for a few kilometres before vanishing around a corner, and there were fields overgrown with old hay on all sides if the intersection. The air here was clean and fresh, with almost no hint of the all-pervading decay that was present in the towns and cities.
I was on watch with Chris and Jess while the others made us some supper. They had a camp stove set up on the tailgate of one of the trucks, and I could smell bacon and dehydrated soup cooking. The bacon was a treat, coming from one of the pigs slaughtered earlier in the year back in Cold Lake. We had some other fresh foods too, like carrots and bread and potatoes, but we carried mostly dried foods for trips like this. I was walking a slow circle around the camp, my rifle cradled in my arms, when I spotted something shiny and metallic in a ditch. I had a quick look around, and called to Jess that I was going to look at something, and climbed down into the ditch to see what I had spotted. I pushed aside some weeds and found a motorcycle helmet. It was the faceplate that had caught the sun and reflected at me. The helmet was lying on its side, thankfully empty. It was filthy, and some small animal had built a nest inside it. It had probably rolled here from the road, but since there was no motorcycle nearby the owner had missed it or not been concerned about it. As I stood up again the zombie came out of the hay nearby and grabbed me.
It was so sudden that I froze. Suddenly I was being pushed down by two hundred pounds of rotted mobile corpse, and as I drew a breath to shout for help I got a lungful of rotten meat stench. I gagged, and I was glad I hadn’t eaten supper yet, or I wou
ld have thrown it all up again. I hit the ground with my back and rolled, and the dead man landed almost on top of me. He squished when he landed, and reached for me again. I had rolled just out of reach though, and managed to get another breath of air, enough to call out, “Help! Zombie!” and grab for my Browning. I gave that up because the thing was too close, and I could see the hole where his left eye was missing. His lips had curled back and blackened, and his perpetual grin had left his filthy teeth bare. There were bloody bits of meat caught in his teeth. This one had been feeding on something live recently. I scuttled backwards, glad for my tough gloves in the ditch, and he grabbed at my feet. I kicked him in the face, and felt the nose break. It slowed him not one bit. He just kept coming, crawling on hands and knees for me as I crabbed backwards. Where was the help I called for? I got a few feet between us and turned over and stood, and he grabbed my ankle with his filthy hands. His mouth drew close to my leg, and I stamped on the back of his head with my other foot, and drove his face into the ground. I heard gunshots from above the ditch! Were there more zombies?
I lost my balance again, but I managed to tuck myself so I landed on top of the zombie with my knees, and I reached down with my left hand and pushed on the back of his head again, keeping him pinned with his teeth down into the dirt. My right hand grabbed the Browning, and I pulled it out and placed it on the back of the creatures head, and screamed “Fuck you, asshole!” as I pulled the trigger twice. The head shattered, and my left hand was up to my palm in gooey grey matter and congealed blood. I was so happy I was wearing gloves. A hideous odour erupted from the body, which had twitched twice when I shot it, but was now still. I got up, and stepped a few feet to the side. I was shaking from adrenalin, and my stomach rebelled. I threw up into the weeds, and spat out the taste as I climbed the ditch back to the road. I heard gunshots again, and looking back to the group I could see half a dozen shambling horrors lying on the ground, and another seven zombies amidst my friends, who were fighting hand to hand for their lives.
