by Won, Mark
I crept toward the far door. Listening at it revealed nothing, but that was hardly a surprise considering how heavy the door was. There was no lock this time, so I slowly cracked it open. Another large room, this one filled with large machines covering the floor. Also, there were people.
All of the room’s inhabitants were littering the floor, most of them snoring. Many of them had sleeping bags, the rest used numerous blankets. The unpleasant aroma of unwashed bodies was prevalent. A vast improvement over where I’d just been, however.
I quietly stepped forward, drawing my combat knife. I couldn’t see how many of the human trash bags were laying about, due to all the machinery covering the floor. My nearest potential victim had no shortage of tattoos and looked like an unsavory sort. There was the grip of a pistol poking out from under his greasy pillow.
Quickly, I went down to one knee and stabbed downward, penetrating his throat. Then I quickly moved to the next sleeping figure. He had just about enough time to open his eyes before I rammed my knife through his sleeping bag and into his heart.
My plan was not so optimistic as to assume that I could knife all of them in their sleep, before the alarm was raised. There’s always a light sleeper in the mix somewhere. So after my second victim I backed off to the door I’d come in by, and waited for circumstances to develop.
That’s when things went sideways. My heart started acting up like it sometimes did, but that time was worse than ever before. I dropped my knife, clutched my chest and only just managed to keep from crying out in pain. As I slid to the floor I saw my two victims struggling to be free of their nighttime trappings. I wondered if I were about to join them as a dead shambling horror. I hoped that I’d transform into a ghoul or ogre. That way I could take more of them down with me.
Gasping for breath, fighting the pain, I got my bottle of pills out and promptly spilled them across the floor. I did manage to get one in my mouth. It didn’t seem to be helping. I decided to advance in another direction and crawled back the way I’d come. Through the doorway and between orderly rows of formed steel, I made my way. Behind me I heard shouts and gunfire. At least two shotguns.
I found a nice gap in the shelving and crawled in. Then darkness.
The first thing I remember, afterwards, were gunshots. When I next opened my eyes all was darkness. At first I thought that I’d gone blind. Putting my hand up to my face I found my night vision goggles right where I’d left them, but the batteries were dead.
I put the goggles up and saw that all was chaos and fire. I saw and heard a couple of my home made grenades go off. Someone started shouting. Others began screaming. Through the smoke I saw the tall figure of a man striding forward, armed with a flamethrower. Behind him there were two women. They were armed with automatic rifles, firing at targets of opportunity.
Right away I could tell that beanpole was Luke. He was laying down a wave of flame fit to burn down the gates of heaven. I saw that the two behind him were the girls, doing their part. I had to guess this was some kind of rescue/revenge type of thing. They must have been paying attention to all my hen scratching on the maps last night, in order to find the place.
Anna shot a man in the leg. He happened to fall just in front of Luke. That poor wretch began begging for mercy, but none was to be had. With a mad laugh and a scream of hate, Luke poured the fire on him way longer than was tactically necessary. I made a point to talk to him about that later.
Those three kids walked past my position without noticing me or slowing down. They were an intense little group on a deadly warpath. I would have to be extra careful to not draw friendly fire. Once they got to the open door leading into the machine shop, Sue chucked three grenades in, one after another. They exploded, adding more screams to the cacophony.
Then I noticed someone was playing Handel’s Messiah. The music was pouring through the open door the kids had come through. I also heard gunfire coming from outside. Somebody was using a shotgun. By the sound of the delay between shots my guess was a pump action. That would be John, then. I had to worry about his stitches. Those intestinal wounds were no joke.
By that time the fire had set off the sprinklers and rancid water came pouring down, spreading the gelled gasoline, spreading the fire. Choking clouds of smoke were limiting my vision and threatening to overcome me. Off somewhere in the depths of the building there were more gunshots. Luke was yelling and carrying on like a man possessed.
I dimly heard a voice I didn’t recognize shout “Stop, or else I’ll...” cut off by a hale of gunfire. Then silence.
With the smoke thickening I knew that if I didn’t get my act together soon I’d never get out of there alive. I managed to climb up on what looked like disassembled shelving to stay ahead of the fire. Once the door to the outside had closed, the only thing alleviating the Stygian darkness were all the burning bodies.
By the light of that fire I made my way over to the door and stumbled through, dragging Emma by her strap. It was early morning outside and a joy to behold. I took in a sweet double lungful of the fresh air and cast my eyes on what those beautiful orient beams chose to reveal.
Right off, I saw John driving my armored four door vehicle over to me. Behind him, he’d left a bunch of shattered corpses at the main entrance, some beginning to regain their feet. He had his antique shotgun over his lap and sticking out the window. Doctor Smith was riding shotgun. It looked like John had managed to kill a bunch of fleeing bandits. As soon as I saw a few more of the former bandits begin to rise, Luke and the girls came out of the same door the bandits must have fled through. They finished off the newly made zombies by using the last of Luke’s homemade flamethrower fuel.
After them came a bunch of women wearing mostly rags, skinny looking, and malnourished. I guessed those were the ‘prisoners’ I’d heard mention of when I’d been listening in on the CB. I recognized some of them from around town.
There still weren’t any zombies about, at least none we hadn’t made, but I just knew that they’d show up sooner or later. We needed to get those people out of there ASAP, before trouble found us.
I called out to John, “How many cars did you bring?” He seemed surprised by the question.
“Just this one.”
“Well, that just won’t do, son. Call out to Luke and the girls. Have them grab whatever car keys they can. We need to exfiltrate immediately. You might as well drive around and try to lead any encroaching enemy forces away. Be careful!”
It took a minute for everyone to get organized, but eventually, we made it back home with ten more cars to add to my burgeoning junkyard.
The doctor pronounced me to be as fit as one could hope for, under the circumstances. I always knew my heart would be the death of me, but that was a worry for another day. I had to call up Haven and get ahold of Mark.
After the usual pleasantries I said, “I could use another bus out this way to pick up my new house guests.”
He said “Just one bus? Where did you pick up this latest bunch?”
Remembering The doctor’s desire for specific information about the who, where, and when of the Change, I had asked Sue and Anna to question the former prisoners, to find out where they came from.
I told Mark, “This bunch came from my town. A mob of gangsters invaded shortly after the Change, and started looking around for any easy prey. Most people they just killed, but I have the survivors they took prisoner.”
Mark asked, “Do you know where the gangsters came from?”
“From the northeast side of that city you’ve been plundering, almost due south of here. It seems their neighborhood was left largely unscathed. They moved north from there when they first discovered how numerous the zombies were. There were about one hundred to one hundred-ten gangsters, originally.”
We got on like that for a while before he said that he send another transport around, and we called it a night.
-
When Mark showed up personally, I was surprised. I thought he would be t
aller. The man was only about five foot six, making him the shortest person under my roof. He had a bit of a paunch on him as well. Nothing wrong with his mind, though. He was all about logistics, scouting efforts, rescue missions, projected crop yields, labor assignment, and anything else you could imagine. Obviously, the man had a vision for the advancement of the human race.
He said that he wanted a few chronicles to be written for posterity. He asked Luke, John, and I to contribute. Mark seemed to think that our survivor stories would be useful to all those who came after us. Grandchildren and such. He also couldn’t afford to have everyone back at Haven taking off work for the project.
Most of the stories Mark had from the denizens of Haven were repetitious. All about fleeing to the lakes and getting on boats, before being contacted by Mark on his shortwave. Some of those folks I’d talked to weeks ago, and arranged for them to receive transport from the folks with the boats. Anyway, Mark thought the stories could use some variety.
I said we’d be happy to write down our stories if he’d tell me his own.
How could he say no to that?
Part 4: The Change of the Proletarian
Chapter 1: A Short Series of True Stories, Going to Jail, and an Idiot Who Won’t Change
The day of the Change began as any other. I’d been scheduled to work on my day off. Again. That probably doesn’t sound like such a big deal to you, but it sure was to me.
You see, I got paid low wages for long hours. That’s why we were so short staffed. Which in turn was why I had to keep coming in on my day off.
The main problem was my boss, of course. He was living, breathing proof that you don’t have to be smart in order to inherit something. The simpleton was too poorly educated to understand how the laws of supply and demand related to a work force, and he was too arrogant to ever learn. I was pretty sure his imbecilic idea of a work schedule involved a dart board.
My boss was the kind of fool who surrounded himself with yes men, then he blamed the lowest paid employees he could find whenever something went wrong. Once, he bought hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of scanning equipment, all defective. But because his pride was involved that’s what we were stuck with. The customers hated those things, but he didn’t care. He literally drove paying customers away with his incompetence.
If he were only arrogant and stupid things wouldn’t have been so bad. He was petty and cruel as well. Any employee scoring six full demerits got fired. One guy I worked with, named Berry, had a heart attack and had to be hauled out in an ambulance. He lived. With a demerit on his record.
Once a customer collapsed in a check out lane. So my boss stepped over his prone body and opened the next lane over. He had to keep the line moving, you see.
My boss was the kind of guy who would cancel a worker’s privilege to trade hours but never tell him about it. The only way the worker would ever learn about it was by having a constant stream of self cover slips denied. The boss would never tell him why, or what he could do to make it right, either.
Then there was that time I got in a car accident en route to work. Totally not my fault, according to the police report (not that that should matter). I received one point for being late, and another for leaving work early to get checked out at Emergency Care.
That’s the way it was. Can’t find a sitter: get a point. Got a doctor appointment: get a point. Want to get married: get a point. Having a baby: get a point. You get the idea.
So, why stay there? Why not get an education? I really should have tried. The trouble was, I saw a lot of people with letters after their names working off student debt right next to me. We had linguists, chemists, architects, nurses, pharmacists and so many more. All way over educated and all doing the same work as me, for the same crappy pay.
Advancement inside the corporation was a nepotistic joke. The nephew of a ranking drone came in off the street with no higher learning. In eight months he was managing his own store. In five years he was a regional manager. I’m not saying he couldn’t do the job. But if he could do it, than so could anyone. The day he stepped through the doors there were over two hundred people working there who were more qualified than him.
Half the supervisors stole from the corporation every time they received a direct deposit paycheck. They’d stand around talking to each other about the price of condominiums in the country with no idea how to handle a shift. The store manager was a literal thief. He was caught pushing an overflowing cart full of holiday cheer out an emergency exit (the idiot forgot about the automatic alarm). The boss called it an ‘indiscretion’. A hungry utility clerk got caught eating a mini candy bar from out of the garbage and got fired for theft, on the spot.
So anyway, there I was doing my mindless work: processing customers, pretending that I wasn’t looking for work elsewhere, in a state of self induced mental fugue, when everyone around me just stopped talking. That caused me to look up. The machines had stopped beeping. Everybody around me was just standing still, eyes rolled up in their heads, drooling just a bit. I saw my boss, off a ways, looking as confused as I was. The manager he’d been talking to was just as unresponsive as everyone around me.
Then things Changed.
I was just beginning to come to my senses when a customer reached for me. I automatically drew away. More started to come for me so I backed away, more by instinct than through any thoughtful consideration. I heard screaming from somewhere both near and far. By the time my heels came up against a pallet of salt, I had my first post-Change plan.
I turned my back on the horde of customers, employees, and management and climbed the shelving, straight to the top. Once there I punched open the ceiling tile and lifted myself into the exposed area. I had plenty of head room, the hung ceiling was at least fifteen feet below the roof. The space was full of mold and mouse droppings, but for once that kind of thing didn’t bother me.
I heard a strange sound behind me. Looking back down below, I saw my boss had somehow managed to climb the shelving four rows down, and had crawled over to where I was. He was making weird gibbering noises. I got the sense that he wanted to climb up after me, and wanted my help. Why the hell he didn’t punch open his own hole and climb up, was beyond me. I guessed some people were so stupid that they would starve to death staring at a sack of potatoes. I reached down to give the fool a hand.
No sooner had I pulled his bacon out of the fire then he had some orders for me.
“Get down there and do something!” That seemed like an unreasonable request. But, to be fair, he was panicking. And idiotic.
I said, “Don’t worry! Just wait here, I’ll go get help.” Then I began walk-climbing around and over various cables and struts toward the warehouse section.
I didn’t have a phone on me. Having a phone on one’s person was grounds for immediate termination. I was sure that my boss would figure out how to use his own phone shortly. Meanwhile, I didn’t see any reason to stay close to his frothing stupidity.
Making my way along the struts and wires that held the tiles up wasn’t difficult. I moved to where the hung ceiling gave way to the top of a cooler for the meat department. From there I could survey all around that section of the warehouse.
Whatever had happened out front had happened in the warehouse too. I saw a woman stumbling around who was responsible for dealing with all the truck drivers. There was a couple others, in the same state, down there with her. One used to be a truck driver, another handled a forklift. There were a couple of bodies down there as well. They each had a limb or two torn off. One was missing her head. It took me a moment, but then I realized that’s what one could expect to happen to anyone who got caught by one of the Changed.
I had known all of them but the truck driver. The decapitated woman’s name was Beth. I knew she had a phone on her. Given the amount of time she spent on it, she had probably been in the middle of a call when all this went down (she hadn’t cared about being fired). All I had to do was get to her headless body and check h
er blood soaked corpse.
I jumped over the isle and onto more shelving and made my way over to where she lay. Then I climbed down, grabbed the phone out of her pocket, and scampered back up the shelving. Time to make some calls.
911 was a bust. The phone just rang. I didn’t expect that. I had been far more afraid of a busy signal. A bunch of rings argued for not too many calls, but no one there to answer any of them. That had to be bad. Next I called some friends. I used the phone’s search engine to find their numbers. Again, no answers. Finally, I tried my relatives. Aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, even my sister. Nothing.
I was getting desperate. I did an online search for what the hell was happening. I think that was actually how I typed the query. Then the phone started vibrating from an incoming call. It was Beth’s mom.
“Beth! Beth! Are you alright?”
“I’m not Beth. I just picked up her phone. Is this thing happening everywhere?”
“Where’s Beth! Where’s my Beth!?”
I told her, “I’m sorry. Beth is dead.”
“No she isn’t! Put her on the phone! Put her on right now!” This was getting me nowhere, and the Changed people down below had noticed me having a chat. They were all shambling over for a closer look. It was good for me that they couldn’t climb.
I took a quick picture of Beth’s torn head and sent it to her mom. I did the same with the drooling horrors just below me. I threw in a selfie while I was at it. I know it was cruel but I needed answers, not meaningless mouth noises from a grieving mother.
I reiterated, “Beth is dead. I’m really, really, really, really sorry. The changed people got her. Is this happening everywhere?”
