by Clark, W. E.
“So what do we do?” Cassandra turned and looked deep into Michael’s eyes.
“We aren’t getting off this roof the way we came. In addition to the fact that the building in on fire...those things are everywhere. There are no other ways off this roof.” Michael drew Cassandra close. He slowly began to understand the eventuality of what was happening.
“Is it okay if we just stand here for a few minutes?” Cassandra spoke as she placed her head on his shoulder and looked out to the burning horizon.
“Wouldn’t have it any other way.” Michael grabbed her and squeezed her close.
They both watched as the world burned around them.
“What do you think our kids would have been like?” Cassandra asked after a few moments of silence.
“What? Kids?” Michael responded, surprised by the question.
“Sure. Kids. What would our kids have been like?”
Michael thought for a second. “They would have had my good looks and hopefully your brains.”
Cassandra laughed so hard she snorted. “Your good looks?”
“Sure. My good looks and your brains. I always wanted to have a little boy and a little girl. You know, older brother looking out for his little sister.”
Cassandra smiled at the thought. They sat in each other’s embrace for a long moment and both contemplated a life together that would never take place.
After a few moments Cassandra looked up at Michael. “My head is beginning to hurt and I feel really nauseous.”
Michael gently kissed her on the lips. “It’s okay. Everything is going to be alright.” Michael gently brushed her hair back over her ear.
Cassandra looked at Michael and embraced him. “Promise me that you won’t let go, okay?” The tears began to slowly trickle down her face as inevitable became apparent. Small black veins began forming on Cassandra’s cheeks.
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
Michael felt his own tears beginning to form. He wiped the tears from Cassandra’s face and gently kissed her cheek one last time. As Michael held her tight, Cassandra started convulsing and he tried to hold her tighter. Cassandra coughed into her hands and slick blood coated them. She looked up at Michael and he could see the black veins slowly inching their way across her face.
“I don’t want to turn into one of those things,” she said through wheezing breaths.
“I know.”
“You have to let me go now.”
“What? Why?” Michael asked as he loosened his grip on her and hopped off the wall. He felt the air evaporate from his lungs as he saw that Cassandra had taken the gun and was pressing the barrel against her temple.
“Michael, you have to understand. I can’t hurt anyone. I can’t hurt you. I have to go.”
“Where? Where are you going? Give me the gun, Cassandra,” Michael begged as she struggled to stand up on the half wall. “Let me help you.”
“Back away, Michael! Just back away!”
Cassandra took an uneasy step back on the uneven wall. Michael could see the infection taking hold.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
He watched as he curled her finger around the trigger and applied pressure. He heard a muted pop as blood and brain matter shot out of the opposite side of her head. She fell backwards off the wall as the momentum carried her off the roof towards the ground below.
“Cassandra!” Michael screamed, but she was gone. He heard glass breaking and steel bending as she smashed into a Ford Taurus three stories below.
Over the next few hours, as Michael sat on the roof and contemplated his life, something broke inside of him. Cassandra was dead. Mitch was dead. Chris was dead. His family was probably dead. For all he knew, everyone that he had ever known was dead.
Eventually the monsters down below lost interest and moved along to the next meal. Michael slowly climbed down a drain pipe to the ground below. He couldn’t bring himself to go over to Cassandra’s body and say one final goodbye; the thought of it nearly brought him to tears. He started to walk, not sure where he was going. He just knew he needed to walk away from this place and these memories.
He didn’t have any particular destination in mind as he started his walk.
Henry Marquis
If you are reading this, I am most likely dead. My name is Henry Marquis, and I lasted as long as I could. I lasted longer than was expected, I guess, given the circumstances. I was born in Waterloo, Iowa in 1976 and I will most likely die here in 2015. I hope and pray that my ex-wife and daughter in Arizona are safe.
Deep down, I know the ultimate truth about their safety though. No one is safe anymore. In my more upbeat moments, I rationalize that maybe it isn’t as bad there, out west in Arizona. Maybe, by some miracle, the virus didn’t make it that far. After seeing what I have seen, I know better. My only hope is that they died a painless and peaceful death. That is all anyone can hope for.
I am alone, isolated, and tired. The incessant moans and cries of the demons outside are slowly driving me insane. I am losing my grip on reality, piece by piece and day by day. All the demons ever do is moan…and scratch, claw, and pound the walls and doors for a way inside. I have tried to kill the ones that I can without putting myself at risk. For every one that I kill, three more seem to take its place.
I see their faces as I drop bricks and office furniture on them from the roof. Each face belongs to someone that I once knew. These are people that I would see at the grocery store or at the Jet Lounge having a beer on a random Friday night. People. I have to remind myself that they are not people anymore. They stopped being people once the virus took over. Seems like a strange thing to realize, but these are strange times. The thing I can’t figure out is where they keep coming from? There are so many. How many more can there be? Is everyone but me like them? Am I the last man standing?
I don’t sleep much as the nightmares have taken over. The exhaustion is slowly sapping any strength I have remaining. I long for the solitude and peace of death. Sweet peace and rest. Sleep seems like a dream right now. I will not become one of them. I won’t allow it. I will light myself on fire and die a painful death before I become one of them. I am sorry if I am striking too angry a tone, but those things—monsters or demons or whatever you call them—have taken everything away from me. Everyone is dead. Every person that I have ever known is dead! Yet, here I am! Living, if you can call it that, in this concrete office building that is going to double as my tomb.
I have not seen another live person for weeks. I am starting to hallucinate about talking with other people. I am having conversations with people that have long since died. My mind is at its breaking point. If I had any guts I would end this misery all with a bullet, but I have too much unfinished business… and not enough guts.
Our little group held out for as long as we could. We tried. One by one we have all fallen. Each loss has been tougher than the last. The grief from each death is slowly tearing away at my soul. I am all that is left. I feel it is my duty to document how far I have gone to try and survive. My story is the same story a lot of people are telling—if they are alive to tell it. Good people have died horrible, painful deaths; people that have lived a lifetime being kind and gentle to each other. No one should have to see people that they loved being ripped limb from limb right in front of them. I have seen babies snatched from mother’s arms and brutally killed by those things. The elderly, the young, the strong.
It doesn’t matter.
There is no stopping them.
There are too many demons, and they are relentless. A stronger man may have been able to help those people. I was not that man. Their ghosts haunt my dreams.
It started out as a few weird blog postings. Then the news reports began. The events were only mentioned in passing during the news. They had much more important things to report. We were in a “war” with Iran and North Korea that was being dubbed the “18 Hour War.”
In all fairness, even if the news reported it, no one would hav
e done anything differently. The only way things would have been different is if the reports were under thirty seconds long and contained a snappy sound bite. If there is one thing most Americans hate to do, it is thinking about anything longer than thirty seconds. We choose our leaders based on vitriol-filled ads that are thirty seconds long. Why would we want to know about a crisis if it takes longer than the average commercial selling auto insurance to explain? Tell me more about the latest celebrity baby and the ignorant name the parents came up with. What is the latest diet fad? Tell me more. What is the latest sex scandal? Sign me up. A new virus that causes people to die, takes about five minutes to explain, AND you have to understand basic high school level science? Not interested. We really were eighty-sixed before this all began, we just didn’t know it. Even having that reporter attacked on national television didn’t seem to snap us out of our perpetual daze.
The news media did a fantastic job of hiding the fact that most major cities were deserted of all living people within a week. NYC, Chicago, LA. Gone. The dead owned those cities now. Anyone that stayed, died. It was pretty simple. If you didn’t evacuate in the beginning, you never left. You died; most likely a horrible painful death. Then you came back to life.
It was worse for people caught while they were trying to evacuate. The news did show the San Francisco Bay Bridge full of cars in a massive traffic jam. The traffic just permanently stopped. It was reported as too many people trying to evacuate at once. We had no idea that those nice BMWs, SUVs, and Mercedes had become permanent resting places for their passengers; forever changed into demons that can’t even undo a seatbelt. It was just used as propaganda to tell everyone to stay safe at home.
No need to panic.
Safe.
What does that word even mean anymore? No one is safe. No one will be safe ever again. They assured us that everything was under control. We thought that the smaller cities would be spared. How could this virus reach a small town in Iowa? We were assured that we were safe. They gave us a false sense of security, and we all paid for it. We were wrong. We were all wrong. This is my story.
I was at work when the virus first appeared in Waterloo. I worked for the local power company, MidAmerican Energy. I was returning to the plant at the end of my shift and there were about a dozen police cars with the flashing red and blue lights on the scene. They had cordoned off about half of the parking lot and had two bodies under sheets. Two dead bodies? In the parking lot at my plant? It almost seems quaint how much the two dead bodies in the parking lot affected me.
As I drove by, I was shocked at the amount of police activity. The dead bodies were under white sheets that looked like they had been spray painted with blood. I recognized one of the officers at the crime scene, Bill Henderson. We had played high school baseball together. We were friendly in high school but had not spoken in years. Time just grabs ahold of you as you get older and the weeks turn into years.
I stopped and talked with Bill for a minute. His stress level was off the charts and he was very reluctant to talk to me. He kept staring off into the distance and barely acknowledged that I was there. His whole demeanor seemed odd. I just assumed it was some sort of workplace violence or something. The thing is, he knew. He knew what was happening, and he did nothing. He could have warned people. We could have evacuated or fortified our homes. They all knew and they did nothing.
The whole town was beginning to feel the stress of the supposed new super-virus that had decimated the major cities. FOX news was still reporting that the whole thing was an elaborate hoax by a terrorist organization. Everything was really murky at that point. We were hearing rumors and stories of every shape and design. In retrospect, Bill’s uneasiness and stress level seemed to tell me it was something more, but I chalked it up to two people being murdered in the MidAmerican parking lot. It’s not like that happened every day.
After heading home, I turned on the local news to see if they had any update about the plant. Nothing. I thought maybe I had missed the report earlier in the newscast and checked their website along with the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier website. No mention of the dead bodies at the plant on either. Maybe they were just waiting to report once they got all the details, I rationalized; although that had never stopped them in the past from sensationalizing a story. I convinced myself that next of kin needed to be notified and that the news agencies were just being compassionate.
The blogs were still on fire with the latest major cities that allegedly had been declared “lost”. Miami, Houston, Providence, and St. Louis. I was surprised to see St. Louis on the list. This was the first time a Midwestern city, other than Chicago, had been mentioned. I went to bed that night not realizing that my world would change forever by sunrise the next day.
If I had known what was going to happen I would have stayed up and watched a couple extra episodes of Seinfeld, had a couple double whiskeys, opened the front door, and waited for the end. Everything would have been much simpler that way. Instead, I went to bed at a sensible hour.
My alarm went off at 4:45, like it always did, and I got into the shower. When I got out of the shower and headed into the kitchen to start a pot of coffee I did a double take. There was a mob of people walking down my street. I lived in a quiet neighborhood that got very little foot traffic. Sure, the neighborhood kids would play football or whatever in the street from time to time, but no one did it at 5:15 in the morning on a Tuesday. I went to the window to see what the ruckus was about and my cell phone rang. I walked over to the other side of the room and picked it up.
“Little early to be calling me, Charlie.”
“Open the back door. Open the back door!” Charlie spoke with a hushed voice that was definitely under stress.
“Are you at my back door right now?” I asked Charlie. “What’s the deal with the people in the street?”
“Henry! Open the fucking back door. You gotta do it now!”
Charlie was definitely stressing out. I opened the back door and Charlie came barreling in.
“Close the fucking door!” he whispered, but it came out like an order.
I closed the back door, and before I could ask Charlie what the hell was going on, he killed all the lights in my house.
“Charlie? Umm…you okay there, buddy?” I asked into the darkness.
“Dude! Shhhhh!” Charlie turned on his cell phone for a minimal amount of light and motioned for me to meet him at the window in my living room. “Keep your head low and stay quiet!” he whispered in my ear.
“You are freaking me out, man! What’s going on?” I asked him.
He placed his finger over his lips and made a shushing gesture to try and keep me quiet. “Look out there. Keep your head down.” He pointed to the front window.
The sun wasn’t coming up yet, and I was having a hard time figuring out what he was talking about. I saw the people walking in the street, but I had no idea what they were doing. They didn’t appear to be doing anything other than walking around aimlessly and occasionally bumping into each other.
“Watch,” Charlie whispered.
I struggled to see my neighbor, Vivian White, sprint from her house to her car. Vivian was in her mid-thirties with an athletic build. She had some sort of work at home job and was always friendly enough. I could set my watch to her jogging by my house every morning at 5:45 am. I would always be at my kitchen table on my second cup of coffee and she would wave at me through the window. This was a different type of running. Vivian was in a full on sprint to her car.
“Why is she running?” I asked.
“Because she is smart,” Charlie answered. I watched her drop her keys and fumble to pick them up. “Oops, that might be trouble,” Charlie whispered.
Then I heard it. The incessant moaning that has since become the soundtrack to my life. Three people tackled Vivian to the ground.
“Vivian! We need to help her!” I shouted.
Charlie put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed hard to get my attention. “Y
ou have to be quiet!” he whispered as he loosened his grip on my shoulder. “It is already too late for her.”
I watched as the three men were joined by others in their assault on Vivian. I could hear her screams as they tore her apart. The darkness hid most of the brutality from my vision but did nothing to stop the sound of her screams from being permanently embossed on my soul.
“What are they doing?” I asked.
“Eating her.”
“Come on, Charlie. Is this some sort of elaborate prank?”
“No. This is the end, buddy. This is the end.”
I watched; helpless, as my neighbors were taken down one by one, only to rise up and help kill the next neighbor on the block. There really was nothing I or anyone else could do for any of them.
Helpless.
My body aches from the guilt that I feel for their deaths. I have a recurring nightmare where my fallen neighbors are all standing in front of me. They all look like those creatures and have various wounds and body parts missing. I can see bones protruding from arms and legs. Pieces of flesh are missing from faces and necks. Blood is everywhere. Vivian is right up front dressed in her jogging gear with her neat black ponytail. She is missing half her face and her left leg and ankle were broken. Her foot is at an odd angle and I notice that it was backwards. They all open their mouths in unison, and instead of the hideous moan that should percolate from their lips, they all ask the same question.
“Why?” they shout. “Why didn’t you help us?”
I turn to run and I am confronted by my dead wife and daughter. They both look at me with the same glazed over eyes of those things and ask the same question.
My daughter looks at her shredded arm, and with dirty broken fingers, feels where her cheek was savagely ripped from her face. As she speaks, I can see the inner muscles of her face pulling and contracting through her missing cheek.
