Living With the Dead: Year One

by Joshua Guess

  As he climbed into the driver's seat of the truck, the man silently thanked his son. When the violence in Cincinnati had begun, his son had called from Kentucky, warning what to look for. Telling his father what to do if those signs should come.

  As much as he wanted to go to Kentucky, there were things that kept him from joining his son. Other family in Illinois that needed to be found, looked after. A sense of duty that had driven him to volunteer for service pushed him on then, throwing the truck into gear and making a promise.

  After all was said and done, the kids and grandkids made safe, he would make a trip to Frankfort. He would find his son.

  Until then, he had work to do.

  Pontiac, Michigan:

  Dozens of people huddled together in the darkness of the factory. They had begun to hear the clanking sounds of something trying to get in a few minutes before. Most of them were terrified, but a few welcomed the end. When the dead had started to come back to life, they had run.

  They hadn't brought much with them to live on, however. After a few days, the food had run out. There was water, but for how long? The building had to be surrounded by the dead at that point, so why bother? It was hopeless, they thought.

  With a sudden rattle of moving steel, the bay door flew up. The dim light of dusk outlined the shapes of several men. Men who held...guns?

  One of the shadowy forms stepped forward. He was middle-aged, but looked strong. He took in the terrified crowd, and knelt down in front of them.

  “My name is Jack. I want you to listen to me. I have a place to the south, a few hours away. We can feed you there, keep you safe. If you come, though, you have to do what you're told. We're trying to save as many of you as we can, and that means working with us, OK?”

  Tired and starving, there was no disagreement. Jack pointed to the back of the box truck sitting almost against the docking bay, and the group moved with tired muscles to climb in the back.

  Jack smiled. A few more kept safe...

  In Manhattan, the chaos was unbelievable. Bodies piled in the streets, blood so thick on the roads that it was impossible not to walk on it. Few made it out. There were survivors who stayed...

  In Beijing, the youth used the confusion to stage a revolt. What resulted was the wholesale slaughter of tens of thousands on both sides, creating a tidal wave of undead that moved across the country. Growing ever larger as it moved...

  In India, sheer population density caused a chain reaction that made the one in China look insignificant. Where most places in the world had some chance, some narrow hope that sheer land mass would provide a haven, India had none. Within two days of the first reported corpse rising from death, India had seen its population reduced by seventy percent. Within a week, that number was closer to ninety. By the end of two weeks, the Ganges was packed with the dead so thickly that you could walk across the river on them.

  It seemed there was no one left to try.

  It was the same all over the world. The disease spread through means unknown, cropping up in many places simultaneously. Airborne, transferred by bites, or carried in blood, it did not matter. Russia became a massive battlefield for survivors warring over resources. Iran and many other middle-eastern countries took swift and brutal measures to curtail the spread of the plague, giving them a higher percentage of survivors than most places. Cut off from the rest of the world, it also left them with more mouths to feed with far less in resources.

  The globe became a silent place, but for a few determined to bring others together with them and start again. From their perch in the heavens, the crew of the international space station watched in silence as the lights of civilization slowly faded away. Communications failed shortly after, and none of them needed to be told the awful truth: there was no going home again.