“So you could have fled into the mountains?”
“Sure,” Stacie gestured irritably, like the question was pointless. “We have tents, a gas operated generator and lots of candles and kerosene lanterns. But the food and water was all stockpiled in the basement. It made more sense to stay in a well-defended home than it was to head up into the mountains.”
“By well defended, you mean guns?”
“Of course.” Stacie looked at me like perhaps I was crazy. “We have several different rifles and a couple of shotguns as well as handguns with plenty of ammunition. We also have an axe and a chainsaw if you want to know.” There was an irritated edge coming into Stacie’s tone – perhaps driven by the naivety of my questions, or maybe she was stung by her own sense of frustration and despair. I sensed that at any moment, she might simply turn on her heel and walk away, ending the interview.
“Did you ever have to use the weapons to defend yourself?” I asked.
Stacie’s eyes turned cold as steel and a hectic rush of color flushed across her cheeks. Her mouth pressed into a thin line. “Once,” she said softly.
I said nothing. I sensed that there was more Stacie needed to say. I listened to the sound of the wind moaning and watched the shadows lengthen across the wrecked floor of the old bistro.
Her shoulders slumped a little and she seemed to deflate slowly. Her bitterness became a kind of melancholy. She shuffled her feet in the dust and scraped a tendril of hair from her face before she met my eyes.
“The Apocalypse largely swept past us unnoticed,” Stacie said in that far away voice I had become accustomed to. “We stayed inside the house for three and a half months – long enough we figured for the ‘Afflicted’ to move on, decompose… do whatever the undead did, and for the government to come into Wyoming and restore order. In that entire time only one of the ‘Afflicted’ came to our house.”
“And…?”
Stacie’s expression changed again, filling with grief. “It had once been a little girl,” she said ominously. “Before she was ‘Afflicted’. I knew her. She was one of Savannah’s school friends.”
“And she came from out of nowhere?”
“She must have sensed us inside the house,” Stacie’s voice quavered a little. “She began pounding on the door, shrieking like a demon. She was inhuman. Her strength was… was incredible. She was drenched in dry blood. It was down her chin and in her hair, and splashed across her dress. She saw me through one of the windows…”
I said nothing. I stayed perfectly still, my notebook forgotten, hanging in my hand.
“…Her eyes…” Stacie shook her head. “They were filled with savage hate and fury. The whites of her iris were bloodshot red, and the pupils were just black little pinpricks.”
“What happened?” my voice dropped to a whisper.
“She tried to break in through the windows. There were bloody streaks down the vinyl from where she ripped shreds of her flesh off her knuckles. Then she came back to the front of the house. She was screaming and kicking at the door. It was vibrating against the lock. She was just a kid but the ‘Affliction’ had turned her into a monster.”
“What did you do?”
“I had one of the shotguns…” Stacie said ominously, her voice becoming dark and filled with foreboding. “I unlocked the door and flung it open. The little girl was crouched on the ground, like some creature out of a nightmare. She was snarling at me. Her lips peeled back and I could see little scraps of flesh stuck between her teeth. There was blood in her mouth. She was crouched down in the dirt, but her body tensed like a wild dog about to pounce. She clawed in the dirt and then threw back her head. Her tongue hung from the corner of her mouth. It was hideous what the ‘Affliction’ had done to her.”
“You shot her?”
“Yes,” Stacie said at last in a long pained breath. “I fired both barrels of the shotgun at her. Afterwards, my husband Wade burned the body.”
The wind had begun to turn cold. Sunset was slowly turning to dusk. A rat scurried across the floor and disappeared through a crack in the crumbling brick wall. In those few quiet moments Stacie Morton composed herself, thrusting away the dark demons that haunted her – for the moment.
“Take me back to that time when you finally left the house,” I said, deliberately changing the topic to touch on hope. “What did you find?”
“Decomposed bodies,” Stacie said. “They were all along the road from our home, into town. Some were slumped by the roadside, the carcass still seething and heaving with maggots. Others were just withered skeletons propped against walls or laying in the gutter where they had fallen. The sky was black with crows and carrion birds, wheeling endlessly overhead for weeks.”
“But eventually…?”
Stacie shrugged a shoulder. “Eventually we met others,” she whispered and her eyes became shiny with welled tears. “Other people who had survived in their homes. Some folks came down from the mountains.”
“How many survived?”
“Maybe fifty of us, out of ten thousand,” Stacie said.
We stepped back out onto the street. With the approaching darkness, the wind seemed to have died away, as if even it was scared of the night. Stacie Morton hunched down into her coat and I slipped my notepad into my pocket, her story recorded.
We shook hands on the sidewalk and I watched her all the way to where her car was parked amidst the wrecked and burned out shells of other vehicles that still littered the street. She never turned back once – never stopped to wave, or to wish me well. She walked stiffly, as though her emotions were barely being restrained.
When I think about her now, I wonder, more than anything else, about what she did when she drove away from our meeting.
Did she sob? Did she let loose the shackles of everything that was pent up inside her and cry?
I don’t know. But if I had to guess, I’d bet she drove back to her family, her chin thrust out and defiant, her expression grim, and her gaze on the distant horizon that offered nothing more than an uncertain future.
* * *
Concordia University, Seward, Nebraska:
“Is this the place?” I looked up curiously.
“The place?”
“Yes,” I frowned. “Where you killed the first of the ‘Afflicted’?”
Zane Francescato stared at me and his friendly affable expression seemed to crumple with distress and dark memory. He was a young man – not yet twenty, with the kind of cheerful nature that would have made him popular amongst his classmates. It was only his eyes that gave his character more dimension. They were old eyes. Weary.
Eyes that had seen too much bloodshed and horror maybe to ever sparkle again.
Zane nodded his head and I saw him swallow hard and look up into the wide blue Nebraska sky. “It was over there,” he pointed. “I had stopped at my storage shed where I keep all my survival supplies. As I was loading my Jeep, it came towards me.”
I jotted a quick note into the pad I was holding and then went towards a line of small iron sheds, stretched out in a long line. I walked with my head bowed. The concrete was stained with oil and mud – and then a gruesome spatter of something that looked like brown paint.
But it wasn’t paint.
I looked back at where Zane waited. He was standing with his arms folded across his chest like he was reluctant to come closer. I pointed at the ground. “So this is the place?”
He nodded. His lips were pressed in a thin pale line. I walked slowly back to where he waited and drew a deep breath.
“Want to tell me what happened?”
Zane shrugged. “From the beginning… or about what happened here?”
“Tell me about this first,” I said, staring frankly into the clouded expression of his face. “Then we can backtrack to the first moments you found out about the Apocalypse.”
Zane unfolded his arms and thrust them deep into the pockets of his trousers. He looked at me, but not directly at me. His gaze focused on som
ething just beyond my shoulder and his eyes seemed to darken and then dilate. “I didn’t know the person,” he began, faltering a little with a trace of anxiety. “It was a girl. She had probably been one of the campus students. I don’t know. I’d never seen her before.”
“But she was ‘Afflicted’, right?”
“Yeah,” Zane scraped his hand across his mouth. “She was covered in blood. It was her blood. Something had bitten her face off. I mean actually ripped the nose and lips right off her face. Her whole head was just a bloody mask of gore. One of her ears was hanging by a piece of chewed gristle. She was hideous.”
“Where did she come from?”
“Around the corner,” Zane pointed to the end of the storage sheds. I didn’t see her until she was almost on me. She was standing in a puddle of her own blood, swaying like she was exhausted. There was blood and gore in her hair and her arms were scratched. A couple of her fingers were missing. I think she bit them off.”
“You saw her do that?”
“No,” Zane admitted. “But she spat a finger out when I turned around and saw her there. She was gnawing on it. She spat it on the ground and then shrieked.”
“What did you do?”
“I backed away,” Zane’s face was transforming, the color draining from his cheeks and his brow furrowing. He suddenly looked older. His mouth twisted. “I was loading a bag into the back of the Jeep. The bag was packed with tools and stuff – things I thought I might need.”
“Did she attack you?”
“She tried,” Zane said softly. “But she stumbled. She clawed at me, her fingernails hooked into the sleeve of my shirt. I reached into the bag and felt the handle of the hammer. That’s what I hit her with.”
I couldn’t help myself. “Jesus…” I breathed.
Zane let out a breath he had been holding. It sounded like a tremulous sigh – the sound someone makes after they have cried themselves out. He nodded his head slowly. “She wouldn’t go down,” he said – and at last his eyes slammed into mine. I could see the haunted pain there. “I hit her again… and again,” he whispered. “Blood splattered over my shirt. I was screaming. The ghoul was shrieking. The fourth time I hit her I turned the hammer around and buried the clawed end of the tool into the broad of her forehead. The weight of the blow knocked her off her feet, but this time she didn’t get up.”
“She was dead? I mean really dead?”
“I don’t know,” Zane confessed. “She wasn’t moving. I don’t know if that ended her or not. I threw myself behind the wheel of my car and reversed over her. Then I just drove, man. I drove as fast as I could and I didn’t ever look back.”
I stood back and shook my head slowly. Zane’s harrowing encounter with one of the ‘Afflicted’ was the kind of moment that could haunt a man for the rest of his life – especially a young man without a lifetime of experience to bulwark his emotions. I felt sorry for him. On the surface he was calm, composed. But the layers underneath were scared with the horrors that happened during the Apocalypse.
We walked back towards where our vehicles were parked. Somehow, away from the storage shed, the air seemed fresher, the space around us less claustrophobic. Zane leaned against the side of his Jeep like he needed to. I wrote three pages of frantic notes and then looked up circumspectly.
“Can we go to the University now?”
Zane looked up like it was the first time he had seen me. “Why?” his voice became guarded.
“So I can get a sense of the events that happened that day, Zane,” I said honestly. “I don’t want to just tell the world your story, I want to know where you were, what you lived through. To do that we need to go back to the campus.”
He thought about it for a long moment, his eyes narrowed. The friendly affable face was hidden behind a mask. “Sure,” he said slowly. “That makes sense.”
I followed Zane in my own car. It was a short drive. The lawns were overgrown and filled with weeds, the concrete paths that snaked their way through the maze of University buildings were cracked and crumbling.
“This was the Janzow Campus Center,” Zane looked over his shoulder at me as we went in through the doors. The interior was a wrecked abandoned shambles. The chairs and tables were overturned, painted in a coat of grey dust and there were the droppings of vermin and birds on the floor. A couple of pigeons were roosting in the rafters where the ceiling had collapsed, looking down at us. There were framed dusty photos still hanging askew on the walls, an overturned pool table and a couple of sofas, each with the stuffing gnawed out of them by rats… or something larger.
Zane looked around, reminiscing. “They were refurbishing and renovating this part of the university just before the Apocalypse broke out,” he said absently.
I looked around. The windows were smashed and there was glass everywhere. It crunched loudly under my feet. One of the walls was spattered in dried blood. It looked like an abstract artist’s mural.
I heard Zane sigh. His hands had bunched into fists, the flesh across his knuckles white with tension or tight restraint. He stared at me, maybe resentful now that I had brought him back here.
“This is the place,” he said tonelessly and pointed. “I was sitting right over there. By a window.”
“What were you doing?”
“Preparing for a test. Suddenly all the televisions around the walls started to sound the emergency broadcast alarm. Then the Governor of Nebraska came on the screen.”
“What did he say?”
“He said that Martial Law was immediately in effect and that the National Guard had been deployed to Omaha to deal with a situation involving a virus that had been spreading across from the east and west coasts.”
I nodded. “Did you know anything about the ‘Affliction’ before the announcement, Zane?”
His face remained impassive. “Yes,” he said. “I was a photojournalist for the University’s newspaper. I kept my eyes open because news and reporting fascinated me. I knew what the virus was. It had been all over the national news for a week before it hit here. I think everyone knew right away what the Governor was talking about. That’s why everything broke down into panic and chaos. We thought it was just a matter of time.”
I stood a dusty chair upright and set it at a table then sat down wearily. I reached for my notebook.
“What did you do?”
“I ran out of the building, back to my dorm and started packing.”
I looked up out of curiosity more than interest. “What did you pack?”
“Memories,” Zane said abstractly. “I had most of the practical gear I needed back at the storage shed, so I packed the kind of things that meant something to me. The things that had value.”
“Like?”
“A small folded American flag that was given to me by a friend who went into the service, a photo of my parents, my grandma’s Bible…”
I wrote a note about that because I felt it was an insight into the young man Zane had been before the spread of the ‘Affliction’.
“Anything else?”
He inclined his head. “A water purifier, a silver coin stash in case I needed money, and a couple of survival books by James Wesley Rawles.”
“What about everyone else?” I continued along the same line of questioning. “What were the other students doing at the time?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Some did what I did,” he said. “There were people everywhere talking on their cell phones, screaming, panicking. Others didn’t take the warning seriously – or were too tough to admit they were scared. They stayed, I guess… until the helicopters started to arrive. Then the real panic set in.”
I looked up from my notebook. “Helicopters?”
Zane nodded. “Three helicopters circled the university and then dropped to the ground. They landed on the football field, and a convoy of military vehicles pulled into the campus parking lot with a police escort.”
“To fight the ‘Afflicted’?” I was confused.
&nbs
p; Zane shook his head. “Apparently the National Guard was going to set up a safe zone on the Campus…”
I looked around me at all the wreckage, the dried blood. “I guess that didn’t work out too well. It was lucky you didn’t stay.”
Zane said nothing. I tried another question.
“Did you have a plan at that stage? I mean you had survival gear packed and ready in the storage shed. I assume you had thought about this kind of thing happening one day… so I’m guessing you also had a plan of action, right?”
“Yes,” Zane said. “I called my parents and explained the situation to them. I told them I was heading home. My parents told me Colorado was also under Martial Law, and that Denver had been overrun.”
“Where was ‘home’ for you?”
“Alamosa, Colorado,” he answered. “It’s a twelve hour drive from here… but my regular route takes me through four major population centers – Colorado Springs, Pueblo, Castle Rock and Denver…”
“Was Alamosa safe? What was the situation where your parents were?”
“It was ‘Affliction’ free,” Zane explained. “The entire San Luis Valley in Southern Colorado was shut down from the outside world. I knew that if I could get there, I would be safe.”
“The San Luis Valley?” I wrote that down in my notebook.
“Yes. There are only five ways to enter that valley and my parents told me that every route was guarded by a combination of local Colorado National Guard units and a local militia.”
I sat back, admittedly impressed. “It sounds like the folks around your hometown take preparation seriously,” I said in lighthearted banter. Zane didn’t laugh. “Yes,” his face was stony. “And it’s just as well, don’t you think? The ‘Affliction’ never reached that part of America thanks to those volunteer local militia units and the National Guard. Their preparedness saved thousands of lives.”
The Enduring: Stories of Surviving the Apocalypse Page 2
