No one was in agreement with me. They all saw the roof and this town as a layover. Where I saw an end to running, they saw a fill up station on our way to the true destination. Every day that passed I felt more compelled to push the issue. With each scouting trip we found ourselves faced with the problem of too much. There were too many things for us to take, and not enough room for us to take them. How’s that for a problem? My solution was to stay, and keep all the stuff. Too bad I was the only one to think this was a good idea.
Hannah had found a room in one of the houses that had been owned by a girl who could have been her best friend. The clothes, toys, books were perfect for her. I allowed her a few hours to replace all of the worn out, oversized things we had found on the road along the way. They never had a chance to pack, or take anything of their own when I grabbed them from their home. This bedroom was a blessing for the morale of a road weary little girl.
I sent Mick, Garett, and Zoe off to find more practical items. I wanted some time to spend with my niece, the only innocent person left on the planet for all I knew. Her sister and brother had begun the process of growing cynical and tired. Hannah was the exception. She was still a child at heart, and wanted to find magic in this broken world.
“Aunt Amy?”
“Yes peanut?”
“May I try on some of the clothes before we go?”
Looking into her eyes I saw she was afraid that I would deny this request. How could I though? This child had been positive through the hardest conditions. She kept a brave face and a smile even as we were chased by the monsters that used to only occur in the nightmares of children. Sighing, I put on my best smile and began picking clothes from the closet. I did my best to take out the frilliest and pinkest items I could find.
Hannah twirled around the room as she sported each new ensemble. As luck would have it, there was a wooden jewelry box with a wind up ballerina that spun as music played. The moment I showed it to Hannah, she stared at the small treasure and giggled joyfully. There we were, in the middle of the end of the world, and I was holding hands and spinning with the last ballerina left on the planet. It was like a dream I never wanted to end.
Tears rolled down her tiny cheeks. “What’s wrong Hannah? Did I do something wrong?”
“No Aunt Amy. Nothing is wrong. For the first time since you got us I feel like everything is right.”
I pulled her into a tight hug. Laughing and crying at the same time I assured her that I knew exactly how she felt. With one big turn, I turned the hug into a whirling dance. Her tears dried up and the cheerfulness rose and swelled until it was a wave of happiness that was better than any high ever experienced. Simple joy is hard to come by in humanities last days.
When we finally emerged, Hannah was a dressed in a fairy costume. Prior to leaving Hannah awarded me the title of fairy god aunt. Ribbons hung down from a poorly constructed bun, but my shoddy hair work was gratefully hidden beneath the most beautiful crown of flowers I had ever seen. It seemed the little girl who lived in this abandoned home had the same love of dress up that Hannah had. I loaded up all the items Hannah had picked in a wagon I had found in the back yard. She skipped merrily down the street a few feet ahead of me as we made our way back to the roof.
Three trucks came barreling down the street towards us. Dropping the wagon handle I ran towards Hannah. She froze in the middle of the street. Time slowed to a crawl, but I couldn’t force my muscles to move any faster. They must have believed we were zombies, no one would run a child over on purpose otherwise. My mouth was open, but no scream would come. I couldn’t warn her to move out of the way.
A small breeze blew and Hannah’s ribbons danced around her head. Surely they would see she wasn’t shuffling and moaning. At the last second Hannah found her voice and let out a shriek. But it was too late. They had sped up, aimed right at her and crushed my darling niece under the front of the first truck. I screamed in agony as I watched my little girl, my innocent fairy angel destroyed in a heartbeat. The windows opened, and the men inside began to shoot at me.
I took cover behind a car, praying that they would drive away. Maybe I could still save her I thought to myself. As the engines roared off in the distance I scrambled to her side. She was already gone. Clutching her body close to mine I rocked and cried in the middle of the road. I don’t know how long I sat there with her broken body pressed against my chest. The next thing I knew Mick was pulling me up. He was asking questions that I couldn’t hear or understand.
Garett just stared down at his sister. Zoe collapsed into a heap a good thirty feet away. I gathered what strength I had left and made my way over to her. As I hugged her all I could say was I’m sorry over and over again. Her crying echoed my own. We would never be the same. Hannah was the light of our group, and without her we were going to be like a body without its heart. We had lost our soul.
Garett kicked the wagon’s contents in the middle of the street. Anger bubbled inside of him, and without the culprits to take it out on he began to convulse. Her body was so light from the lack of true nutrition on the road that she weighed nothing as I cuddled her in my arms and walked towards the unknown destination where we would entomb our smallest family member. Mick and Garett buried her small body in a field under a tree. I nailed the fairy wings to the trunk. This way anyone who came across her grave would know someone magical was laid to rest there.
When we crawled back up on the roof that night I knew staying was no longer an option. In fact I needed to get out of the town, off the roof as quickly as possible. We spent the next few days going through the motions. Zoe was not to be left behind anymore, after losing her sister she was no longer a child. We added a trailer to the back of our SUV and filled it with as many supplies as we could. Looking out the rearview mirror as we pulled away from the cursed town I felt I finally knew why it was empty. Even the zombies knew to stay away from this place. It was a wolf wrapped in sheep’s clothing. A town that from the outside looked like paradise, but really was hell on earth.
Test Subject 63-04
This whole thing started with a report from some hick cop out of Bentonville, Virginia of all places. A random attack on a random individual by another random individual. According to the report, cannibalism was involved. So why would two platoons of regular infantry and a unit of Rangers out of Benning be sent to some two-street-light, back-water hole outside Bentonville you ask? Beats the shit out of me, but I’ll tell you this: I think somebody high up knew what that report meant. I’ve never been a conspiracy nut. We heard a lot of that crap at the barracks, especially after 9/11. The Government knows this or that, They caused this epidemic or that disease. We were a bunch of grunts just killing time waiting to be sent over to some desert somewhere. I never put much stock in that horseshit. Especially because nobody could ever tell me who They were, or how They managed to control all this shit when from where I stood They couldn’t even manage to get my paycheck right.
So there we were one afternoon, shooting the shit on a Friday waiting for our leave passes to kick in, when we got the call.
“Grab gear and haul ass to the cattle cars boys!” my sergeant shouted. He was a decent guy, it was our Captain who was the dick, but from what I hear that was pretty much SOP for the US Military.
I got my team together and we loaded in. We were kind of excited just to be doing something other than guarding the ammo dump or the water tower all day, every day.
“Where are we going?” a few of the new guys asked.
“You’ll know when we get there shitheel!” barked the sergeant, “You’ll get orders when you get them, until then shut the fuck up.”
The bluster was for show, I’d known him long enough to know that he didn’t have a fucking clue where we were going either. I caught site of the rest of the convoy as we loaded, looked like two platoons of straight-legs, a handful of tanks, three Bradleys, and one big transport with the unmistakable markings of the Rangers on the side. That and all the trimmings loaded in
to five or six support vehicles. A decent sized group, but nothing too major. I’d seen a bigger force dispatched to do parade duty. I realized later that this was as big a force as they were willing to send out without raising a lot of suspicion. All conspiracy theories aside, I firmly believe that it was leadership’s intent on keeping a low profile that allowed this thing to get out of hand. Had we sent a larger force, we would have crushed this thing in Virginia and the world may not have collapsed into a bunch of walking corpses.
Our orders were relayed en route. We were told a state of civil unrest had broken out in a small Virginia town and our role was to act as support for local law enforcement. They neglected to mention that the “civil unrest” involved a bunch of cannibalistic nutjobs shambling through the street attacking any living thing they came across. They also neglected to mention that local law enforcement had given up the ghost a while back.
By the time we neared Bentonville, you could see smoke on the horizon and the dim, red glow of a big-assed fire. We pulled right into the center of town and unloaded from the trucks. The CO immediately started barking orders for us to set up base camp right there in the street. None of the buildings looked occupied; we hadn’t seen anybody on the way in either. It looked like a ghost town, made all the more eerie by the fading daylight. I wish it had stayed that way.
We made a lot of racket setting up. Some of the guys started to question where the law enforcement we were supposed to be supporting was, and why they hadn’t bothered to come and brief us as to the situation, or at least say hi. The Rangers headed out to recon the area. About an hour later four of them came back in big, big hurry. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Ranger move that way. They almost looked scared. These guys were trained to dig trenches with their dicks. I saw one in a barfight once, one guy against six linebacker looking frat boys. He took them apart. These guys didn’t get scared, so what the fuck were they running from? They made straight for the command center in the general store. About five minutes later my sergeant came out yelling for us to get ready. So we got ready. Not ready for what we saw though. We set up a firing line at the edge of a baseball field; the woods on the far side were where the Rangers came from.
First, we heard the moan. It sounded like the wind blowing through a haunted house, or like coffin boards dragging across the floor. Plainly put, it sounded like every one of your nightmares had gotten together and were dragging their way toward you from out of the spookiest woods imaginable.
Next came the stench. My father grew up downwind from a pig farm, a fact he would throw out every time we complained about anything as kids. I imagine this is what it must have smelled like. If you covered it in manure, set it on fire, and pissed out the flames. A lot of guys started puking, it was that bad.
On our first visual contact, everybody froze. Everybody. Three of them came out of the woods. These were the most mangled, deformed bodies any of us had ever seen, and most of the guys here had done time in Iraq and Afghanistan. A roadside bomb does a number on anybody close enough to see it, but these things made that kind of damage look tame. They looked chewed on. Their guts were hanging from their bellies. One of them had a broken arm, the bones poking out all over the place. How in the hell were they still on their feet?!
My asshole Captain called for them to halt. Good luck with that one chief. They just slouched forward, covering the distance between us and them. Three bodies, I couldn’t tell you if they were male or female, against a hundred men and six tanks. They never stopped moving. Even after we opened fire.
Chunks of them started flying. One of them was completely cut in half, but the torso kept crawling toward us. We had been trained from day one of BRM to aim center-mass, dead center on the target, so nobody was going for a headshot. One lucky grunt landed one though. Dropped the fucker on the spot. The victory celebration was short lived though as we soon noticed the rest of them emerging from the tree line. There had to be at least a hundred of them and there were more still coming out.
“Hell vomited up its dead…” I heard some guy on my right start to puke. The whole company opened fire, a lot of guys went full-auto. I barked at my team as best I could over the din. “One shot!” I yelled out. “One kill!”, came the reply. They were good bunch of guys. Too bad none of them made it out of there. Technically, nobody made it out of there, not even me.
These things just kept coming. Fucking relentless. That’s the only way to describe them. We took down fifteen or twenty before they got close enough to start grabbing guys. Twenty out of God-knows-how-many. Best count I could give would be three hundred altogether. Gunfire petered out and was replaced by screams and that godforsaken moan. I don’t think the tanks even fired a shot. Not that they would have done a lot of good. We were overwhelmed in minutes. I saw guys on my left and right disappear under a wave of decayed flesh. A couple of brave fucks fixed bayonets and tried a little CQB. They were eaten alive. Literally. I noticed the brass trying to beat feet back to the transports. They didn’t make it. I stayed with my men until every last one went down. After that I figure my responsibility was done so I got the fuck out. At least that’s what I tried to do. By then it was a sea of moaning, rotted bodies, biting and clawing and tearing. I tried to fall back to my vehicle but I got tripped up when a hand shot out from under a pile of bodies and grabbed my ankle. It was my sergeant. I thought he needed help so I reached over to pull him out. That’s when he bit me on the wrist. I howled in pain and kicked at him with my free foot. I just kept kicking and kicking. I was pretty freaked out. I watched the center of his face collapse until it was nothing but a bloody mangle of skin and tiny bones. He just kept trying to pull me closer and bite me again. I pulled my sidearm and shot him in the center of the forehead. Very lucky shot, I wasn’t aiming just acting out of instinct. As soon as the back of his head sprayed out behind him he let go of my leg and I took off. It was there that it clicked. You have to hit them in the head. Otherwise they keep coming. Then I heard jets. Not planes mind you, anyone with half a brain can tell the difference. These were big fuckers. Bombers most likely. Coming fast and low. I knew what that meant. They were coming to glass the area. Outstanding. I scanned for a place to run. No dice. I wouldn’t get out in time. I could hide under a vehicle but that would only mean I wouldn’t see the fireball coming. Buildings wouldn’t matter either, I knew what kind of firepower these guys were toting. I dropped to my knees and waited. They passed about half a mile to south and ten seconds after they were gone it looked like the sky itself was on fire.
“Nice going guys. You missed!” I yelled out to no one in particular. The people from the woods noticed the fireglow and started walking toward it. I saw some of the guys that had gone down in the fight get up and follow them. This last part I couldn’t believe myself. I thought it was maybe early onset PTSD.
Then the trucks came from the north. I don’t know how many of them there were but the first dozen or so didn’t even stop to check the scene here, they just kept going south toward the fire. I could hear shots from that direction as they made contact with the enemy.
A couple did finally stop and some seriously heavy dudes piled out of the back in full MOPP 4 gear. I stood up with my hands up, palms out in the universal don’t shoot me in the face gesture. As soon as they saw me they started firing questions at me. “What’s your name? Who’s your CO? Who’s the president?” I understood immediately that they were trying to figure out if I was going to leap on one them and try to rip his throat out. I gave my name, rank, and ID number, I told them where I grew up and where I went to basic, I told them what I thought was funny anecdote about growing up in Columbus just outside of Fort Benning. They seemed satisfied that I wasn’t going to attack anybody and lowered their weapons. Then one of them noticed the bite on my wrist and the guns came up again. One of them took off toward a carrier.
“We’ve got a bite! Get the Doc!” Two kept rifles on me while another strapped my hands behind my back with those little plastic restraint strips.
I didn’t resist. Even when the strap cut into the already burning bite wound. I asked repeatedly what the fuck was going on. They tied my wrists, then tied my arms down, and finally put about a mile of tape around my ankles. I just kept asking what the fuck was going on. I knew I wasn’t going to get an answer. These guys had no rank, no insignia, no identification on their suits. I’m smart enough to know that those are the guys we aren’t supposed to know about.
Some scrawny guy a lab coat and respirator climbed out of the back of a Bradley and came over brandishing a huge needle.
“I’m going to sleep now, huh?” I asked.
“Yes son. But don’t worry, we’re going to take care of you,” came the reply.
“Yeah. Right.” I was out before he even pulled out the needle.
I woke up in this place. I haven’t seen the rest of the building but I’m guessing it’s a hospital somewhere. Could be two miles underground for all I know. I haven’t seen the outside of this room since I came here. I’ll tell you what I have noticed. One by one, the people that used to come around, to bring me food or take blood, have stopped coming by. The first few days, or weeks, or whatever the hell it was, this was Grand Central Fucking Station. I had guards at the door, meals four times a day, a train of doctors and nurses asking questions and taking blood. They were always taking blood... I’d answer the same questions over and over. Most of the people were okay I guess, nobody beat me or badgered me too bad. Except one guy I named Dr. Knowitall. I hate that guy. Just something about him creeped me the fuck out. I still couldn’t get anybody to answer my questions. They’d talk about sports and the weather, one of the guards and I played dominos a few times, but as soon as I’d ask about what happened in Virginia, or what was going on outside. They’d leave the room.
Aftershock Zombie Series (Book 1): Aftershock (A Collection of Survivors Tales) Page 9
