In Hiding: A Survivors Journal of the Great Outbreak

by Michael Elliott

  My first instinct was that Kerri had gone to the roof to tell Cody what had happened and hadn’t gotten around to turning on the lanterns. But I just had a bad feeling. I didn’t know what it was other then just something that didn’t sit right with me. I moved a little slower and confirmed that not one of the lanterns had been turned on. I shined my flashlight into every corner as I made my way down the hallway trying my best not to make a sound. I can’t remember why I didn’t yell out for her or anyone else for that matter but I do remember being scared that one of those things might have found a way inside.

  I knew that wasn’t likely but again my overactive imagination in the dark had me at least concerned about the possibility. Then as I made my way closer to the end of the hallway I heard it.

  At first it was faint but as I kept moving closer to one of the office doors it became more apparent as to what I was hearing. It sounded like a struggle of some kind. I could hear objects being knocked around and then what sounded like a person trying to say something. I stood outside the door and I can admit that I hesitated for a second before I opened the door. I thought about ignoring what ever it was. Especially if there was a Zed trapped inside of there. But my distrust of everything and my concern for what might have happened to Kerri forced me to take action. So I pushed the door open.

  At first I saw nothing. The room was dark. Only thing I saw was a flashlight illuminating a portion of the floor as it rolled back and forth on the ground. That was until I panned my flashlight over to where the desk should have been and found the cause of all the noise. It was Kerri.

  My flashlight caught her eyes just enough to see the terror in them. She had a cut across her forehead and even though she was still conscious I could tell that she was hurt. That was when she managed to whimper out an almost inaudible plea for help. That was when my eyes focused on what was attacking her.

  Trevor had her pinned to the top of the desk, fighting her, trying to subdue her. He looked up at me and I could see the malice and the hate in his eyes. He wasn’t infected, he wasn’t a Zed, he was something much worse.

  I don’t remember who moved first but I do remember feeling all the rage, all the anger inside of me boil over and I could feel my face getting warmer and focus getting sharper. I felt the adrenaline rushing through me as all of those feelings that I had been holding inside of me exploded in one single moment. I charged at Trevor and swung my flashlight at his face. It was one of those heavy-duty metal flashlights, not one of the cheap plastic ones so I knew it had to hurt when I hit him. Not that it mattered. I would have used anything at that point to do what was necessary.

  My first swing caught him in the cheek and he fell to the ground while holding his face. I moved quickly to get on top of him and hit him again, but that time I got him in the nose and judging by the way it exploded I knew it was broken. Blood was all over his face and he kept reaching his hands out to either protect himself or to beg me to stop. But I swung again before he had any chance to regroup and fight back. He had one hand trying to block my attack, while the other was reaching up and holding the front of my shirt. I struck him again without hesitation.

  The last thing I remember was sitting on top of his chest, pinning him to the ground while he desperately tried to fight me off. He was still dazed and struggling as I brought the flashlight down for a fourth time. Then things go black and I can’t remember what happened between then and when I snapped out of it and found myself still sitting on top of him, his face destroyed, and Kerri with her hands on my shoulders telling me that it was over. She was telling me that he was dead.

  I had killed him. I don’t regret it and I am not sure if I am supposed too. As unsure of the way I was supposed to feel now I was even more confused then. I just sat there on his lifeless body looking down at what was left of Trevor’s face and trying to understand what had just happened and what would happen next. Kerri was crying uncontrollably as she tried to tell me what had happened. She only managed to fit a few select words in between breaths but I was able to piece it together from what I had seen and what she was able to tell me. He had tried to rape her.

  We stayed inside the room for a while after that giving Kerri and I both a chance to gather ourselves. She explained to me how he had managed to get her into the office and how he pushed her in there and slammed her head off the desk. She kept fighting. She never stopped fighting and thankfully I had intervened before he was able to hurt her any further. Despite having just seen me brutally murder him right in front of her, she thanked me. I think that what I had done to Trevor may have been brutal, but in her mind I guess it was justifiable. Maybe in her eyes I wasn’t the worst monster in that room that day.

  We just stayed in that room, both of us on our knees holding each other as I tried to console her. I was covered in blood and barely able to speak. She still cried and I never tried to stop her. It must have been a terrifying experience for her. So I let her get it all out and waited for the others who would eventually come looking for us. Thing was I wasn’t sure what to tell them or how to explain it.

  That was when we both made a decision that seemed to make sense at the time but to this day I can’t fully understand. We decided to lie. Maybe it was because Kerri was worried that the others would think less of her for getting caught in such a position, maybe I did it because most of the others were already concerned that I was loosing it and had followed that up by murdering Trevor. I don’t know our reasons exactly, but we chose to tell them that Trevor must had been bitten or exposed to the virus in the garage and had turned while Kerri and him were upstairs.

  She would tell them that he passed out once they were upstairs and that she couldn’t revive him and when he woke up he was a Zed. She would say that she cut her head on the desk when she tried to get away and that I arrived just in time to save her. That was the only part of the story that was actually true.

  Eventually it was Paul who found us. He came looking when he realized that Kerri and Trevor had been gone far too long and started to worry that something had gone wrong. I don’t think he ever expected to find what he did when he opened that office door. He looked at me first and then over to Kerri and I could tell that he was trying to process what he was looking at. He looked down at what was left of Trevor and then surprised me by asking if we were okay.

  We told our lie. We told him every little detail that we had worked out and I think that he believed us or at least realized that we weren’t the bad guys in that room. He called for Anne and Shannon to come upstairs to help Kerri and clean up the cut on her forehead. She sold them on the story as well and made me out to be more of a hero then I deserved to be. They all thanked me and told me how great of a thing I had done and I hated to hear it. But I went along with it and played the part.

  The three women walked downstairs and Paul and I followed. He wanted me to go and clean myself up especially since he thought it was zombie blood that I was covered in. So I did. I went and grabbed some new clothes and washed myself off. But instead of meeting up with the others I went back up to the roof and relieved Cody from his turn on watch. I didn’t tell him anything I would let the others do that for me. I just needed a minute or two alone before I had to deal with what I knew would inevitably come.

  At least I managed to smoke a cigarette before the rest of the group arrived on the roof wanting to thank me, wanting to praise me. I couldn’t be angry with them, they were just looking for heroes at that point, they were just looking for something good to hold onto. A part of me wanted to call them all out. I felt they were just being fake, polite and positive to my face yet they were willing to leave me behind as they made their escape. I mean if they thought I was so great then why was I just a pawn in one of their games? But I didn’t. I just smiled and told them all that Kerri was the real hero.

  Truth is that she was. She fought so hard even in the worst of circumstances and despite all of the terrible things she had seen and been through she still found the will to keep fighting.
Whether it was self-preservation, determination or just a will that refused to break, she had shown more bravery in that then anything that I had ever done.

  Once the initial celebratory thanks and praise finished the questions came and I knew that they eventually would. Amy was interested in a couple of details but it didn’t matter. Maybe the only good thing about our lie was just how simple it was. Really it was just the truth with only one major alteration. Instead of an attempted rape we just turned that into a Zed attack. So no matter what detail people seemed interested in Kerri had an answer for them, and if I didn’t know how to answer a particular question I just blamed it on blacking out during the struggle. I still don’t know why we lied, but we both knew that there would be no turning back at that point.

  After what felt like hours of conversation the others called it a night and left me to be alone on the roof. Well I thought I would be alone until Kerri turned around once she reached the ladder and walked back over to me. She didn’t want to go to bed she didn’t think that she would be able to sleep after what had happened. I think her trust in everyone had faded just a little and perhaps she thought if she could trust anyone fully that person would be me. So we stayed on the roof for hours talking and trying to forget. Then she decided that she needed some rest and headed for the ladder. She turned around and thanked me again and then went downstairs to try and sleep.

  As soon as she left I grabbed the binoculars and found Hal. Quietly I asked him if I had gone too far or if I had done the right thing. I asked if there had been another way or something else that I could have done to stop him without killing him. I never actually expected a response but I guess at that point in time I just needed to ask somebody.

  I watched him work away on those boards and he seemed to be getting closer to pushing through. I knew soon enough he would make his way through the barrier and get inside that store. I would have stayed up all night watching him if Ray hadn’t arrived and told me that he would take a turn on watch and that I needed to get some rest. He put his hand on my shoulder and told me that I had done well. He told me that the world needed people like me and that humanity was going to make it through this. He told me that in the end that we would prevail.

  Little did I know that those would be the last words that Ray and I would ever share.

  DAY TWELVE

  As you make your way through life it is inevitable that you will lose some of those closest to you. It’s just the way it is. Friends and family members will disappear from our lives as the clock continues to move forward, faster and faster until we inevitably expire. Since the outbreak entire families had been lost. Some unfortunate people had lost every person they had ever known in an incredibly short period of time. It’s never easy and with all the changes we had seen in the world that was one thing that remained the same.

  Some people hang onto a hope that there is an afterlife and that the people they loved are safe somewhere, that eventually they will meet them again in a place that they can’t possibly comprehend. Maybe it brings them comfort. But I always believed that people believed in such things not for themselves, but for the people they lost. It may just be the one thing that is truly unselfish in people or something that is entirely selfish. I don’t claim to have any answers because I don’t think that anybody does. I just know that as a person that had never really had any faith or had ever been overly religious, I was starting to search for some kind of comfort, some glimmer of hope, as I tried to cope with the losses that I continued to suffer.

  When I woke up that morning nothing had changed. I was still tired, still not sleeping and I am sure any one who reads this is getting tired of hearing about it. It was the first morning since we had lost power entirely and that meant that the coffee maker wouldn’t work. I am not sure why, but I found that incredibly depressing. Without coffee I figured I would follow my routine anyway and head to the roof for a cigarette and check on Hal. Besides Ray had been on watch since he took over for me and I figured I would let him go and catch up on some rest.

  When I got up there I found it a little surprising that Ray was nowhere to be found. I was surprised but I didn’t think it was to out of the ordinary. For all I knew he had left his watch early and went to get some sleep. At the very least I assumed he was downstairs listening to the radio. So I went to see if I could find him. I checked all the usual places, then the washrooms, and then walked around the sales floor searching for him. After a few minutes of looking and coming up empty I decided to bring his absence to the attention of the others.

  So we set out and searched the entire store from top to bottom and the longer it went on the more concerned I became. I was puzzled. I knew he had to be in the store somewhere. I couldn’t imagine any possible scenario where he managed to leave the building by himself. We searched for about forty-five minutes to an hour before we finally found him.

  Anne called us all up to the roof and brought us over to the ledge at the western side of the building. That was when she pointed down to the pavement. There were about twenty Zeds gathered together, fighting and pushing their way past one another to get to something that was on the ground. If they were feeding that meant that it had to be a fresh body, and if we couldn’t find Ray anywhere in the store, well we made the connection.

  We watched the Zeds for a while until we were finally able to see through the crowd and make out what it was that they were feasting on. First we saw what was left of the clothes and then we finally got a look at the person’s face and with that it was no longer just an assumption. Of course that would only be the beginning. There were so may questions that needed answering. But judging from where the body was located and the position of his legs and his left arm we believed that he had jumped at some point in the middle of the night.

  If Ray had decided to take his own life and we would never now that for sure, I still couldn’t understand why he chose to jump. The building wasn’t that high and there was no way that it would guarantee death on impact. If he survived the jump it would mean something that I just didn’t want to imagine for Ray. Aside from why he chose to do what we all believed he did, there was the other question of why? I know that there was a part of me that wondered if someone here would eventually do something like that. With things as bad as they were I actually thought it would only be a matter of time before somebody tried something like that.

  I just never thought it would be Ray. Losing him hurt. It hurt me more then the others and I would later realize just how important of a person he was to the group and more specifically to me. Sometimes you don’t realize that a person is the glue that holds everything together until their gone and then you see it all start to fall apart. Your world changes and there’s no going back to the way things were and sometimes that hurts more then the loss itself.

  I had seen the changes in Ray. I had witnessed his declining mental state and the shift in his demeanor but I still never believed that he would take his own life. I hoped that it wasn’t something that I had said or something that I had done that was responsible for his decision. I was horrified at the idea that when I asked him about planning to leave and not taking me with him that it hurt him deeply or that he believed that he was being left out as well and couldn’t take it. I could never be sure but I really hope that our conversation didn’t have anything to do with his decision. I regretted not doing more. I should have tried something, anything, to help him get through whatever it was that he was going through. It was more guilt to add to the growing pile.

  I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t believe that Ray would do such a thing. To Anne it didn’t make sense either and I could see her point. But to be honest, nothing made sense anymore. She started throwing around accusations and of course she started with Paul. When he didn’t respond, she moved onto Derrick who wasn’t even on the roof with us because he was still tied up downstairs. That was when I knew she wasn’t making sense.

  She accused Jacob and Amy next and then she looked at Kerri and I and
asked if Ray had turned as well and if we had to kill him just like Trevor. My response was only two words but Kerri needed to be held back from punching her in the face. Anne was breaking down and somewhere in between her wild accusations she collapsed to her knees and started to cry.

  We had lost so many people in such a short period of time and at first I thought that was responsible for Anne’s breakdown. But as I listened to her cry I was quick to learn that Anne had finally realized that if we couldn’t make it in what I would consider a pretty safe environment, that her family that was still out there was most likely dead. Ray’s death was apparently the trigger that caused her breakdown. We let her cry and although I forgave her, I couldn’t speak for some of the others.

  What followed was a quick funeral service for both Ray and Trevor. Kerri and I both had a hard time when Anne chose to say a few nice words about Trevor. But I couldn’t blame her, for all she knew Trevor had turned into a Zed after heroically fighting to protect the garage. So neither one of us said a word, we just let it go and tried to focus on remembering Ray.

  The rest of that day was difficult for me. I tried to remember all of the conversations that Ray and I had shared about politics and history and his opinions on the greatest disaster that the human race had ever known. He was my friend. I knew that the group would miss his logic and his common sense approach to solving our problems. But I knew I would miss him most because I always trusted him.