by A. L. White
Z Chronicles: The Beginning
By A.L.White
To my wife Nancy, my mother Tressa, my grandmother Maria, my Aunts and the rest of my family for all of their love and support in everything I attempt to do.
Preface
The Z Chronicles: The Beginning is a story about two girls surviving the Zombie Apocalypse using skills that they learned at home and on the road. Surviving among a new world where all that they have come to know and love are just a memory. This is the first of their adventures with more to follow as my imagination runs wild. If you like zombie stories, come into my world for a story or two.
A.L. White
For then there will be great tribulation, such as has not been from the beginning of the world until now, no, and never will be.
~Matthew 24:21
"Z Chronicles: The Beginning" Copyright © 2014 A.L.White. All Rights Reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever, without written permission of the author.
Cover art: Copyright © 2014 Nancy White. All Rights Reserved
E-mail address: [email protected]
Twitter: @onewolf513
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 1
Jack Burrows looked at the label on the DVD; “Case No. 125631”. He had picked out about a dozen of the case files to study a week ago. This one would be about his one hundredth case file that he had been through. He wasn’t taking the time to read the notes from the doctors or nurses anymore. There wasn’t much of a point, was there; they all said the same thing. ‘The patient presented themselves with a flu-like illness, temps well over one hundred–three degrees, heartbeats unusually high. Within twenty-four to forty-eight hours temps had fallen to below seventy degrees, heartbeats slowed to nearly nothing and the skin began turning grey and translucent with the veins becoming black and prominent.’ To Jack, that was a very true assessment of what was happening, just not very helpful in the quest to solve the riddle. That was what it was to Jack, just another riddle that was hiding the answer better than most diseases. He was sure that the video files held that answer if he could only find it. Find that moment where death had occurred and this other altered state of being had began. Most thought he had lost it; even Dr. Johnson, the head of the lab, was leaning that way now but Jack knew it was here. If not here, it was out there in the real world among the dead.
He watched as subject 125631’s eyes flashed open. He studied the cold black eyes that peered into the room at anything, perhaps at nothing at all, another unknown part of the riddle. The eyes, Jack thought, are like the shark eyes you see on National Geographic or the Discovery Channel’s “Shark Week”. He rubbed his own eyes for what seemed like the thousandth time this evening and shoved his chair back from the viewer. He looked over at his white board and then went to it erasing all of his previous notes. On the board he wrote:
1) Subject enters hospital with unknown illness ALIVE.
2) Subject is clinically DEAD within 48 hrs.
3) Subject is REBORN…..
That was the clue to the riddle and Jack knew it in his soul. There was something that the video files weren’t telling him, something that the notes didn’t have. Something was there in front of him but was hidden inside of everything else and it was driving him insane not being able to see it.
“Sam!” he called out to Doctor Sam Houston, his research partner.
When there was no answer he yelled “Sam are you here?!” even louder.
There was a loud bang and the rustling of papers in the outer office.
“Christ Jack what is it?” Sam replied excitedly as he came into the lab.
“The answer isn’t here, not in this one and not in any of these! We are wasting our time with case files that are over six months old.”
“They are the same age as they were last night Jack, and the night before.” Sam said disgruntled at being woken from his sleep yet again for one of Jack’s late night fits.
Jack smiled a devilish grin and motioned Sam to sit. “Why not get some live subjects and study them here?”
“You’re mad you know that? Johnson will never let us bring a subject into the compound! The man won’t even let us go into the courtyard to get some fresh air and sun, let alone let us bring the disease into the lab. Really Jack, you need to step away from this for a day or two and get some much needed sleep.”
Jack laughed like a mad man; in truth he was starting to feel like a mad man.
“You laugh; it’s all funny until a dead thing eats your face off or you become one of them isn’t it?” Even Sam had to laugh at that when he thought about it. Then his mind went to work on the problem. That’s why Jack had always liked working with Sam. Jack solved puzzles and riddles but Sam was like a computer. He could find an answer to an issue facing them in an instant.
“He will never let us bring them in, but he might let us go on a field trip if we were going to another facility. That way we are not risking the lab by coming back in, possibly infected.”
“You’re brilliant!” Jack felt more alive than he had in months as he sprang from his chair and headed toward the door. Sam caught him just before he passed through the doorway.
“Now hold on Speedy! You get some sleep so that we get taken seriously and we will hit Johnson with this right after breakfast in the morning.”
Jack wanted his answer tonight, right now! Deep down he knew Sam was right though. Sam was always better at getting them what they needed or wanted than he was. Jack’s way was to hit it head on and charge through any obstacle. Sam on the other hand knew how to play the game with the higher-ups. He knew how to perform the delicate dance of making them think it was all their idea and what a great reward they would get if it all went as planned, and how easily they would take the fall if it did not. Jack had tried getting them funding a few times, “tried” being the key word. Jack knew he was smarter than the rest and did nothing to hide it. In fact, he could be more than a little condescending to Dr. Johnson. Everyone knew that Johnson put up with Jack because he solved puzzles. That brought in more funding and that was what made Johnson happiest.
********
Lori felt the warmth of the morning sun move across her body. The fall was bringing cool nights but keeping the house closed up kept the upstairs fairly hot. She listened for sounds that her younger brother and sister, Jay and Virginia, were up and moving around. The house seemed eerily silent for the morning. Usually she would awake to Jay driving the younger Virginia crazy about something or other. She forced herself from bed and pulled on her shorts and an old t-shirt and headed down to the family room. That was when she saw why it was so quiet. Jay and Virginia were studying the muddy handprints on the windows.
“Who did that?” she asked Jay. “This isn’t funny Jay, you shouldn’t keep doing stuff like that to her!”
“I didn’t do it Lori, honestly. They were there when we opened the curtains this morning,” he replied. Lori felt her mind race; subjects darted in and out of her head at a blinding speed. There had been no signs of life in the neighborhood for months - well no signs of life other than them. They had been pretty much hunkered down in the house since the day her father had been taken away and the national quarantine was issued. The last signs of candlelight inside the houses around them had been not long after their Father left. She didn’t really know for sure but that’s what she would gu
ess. The only thing she did know for a fact was that the zombies outside couldn’t walk up stairs and they couldn’t climb fences. So the muddy hand prints on all of the first floor windows could not have been made by a zombie. It was Jay or someone out there that was alive. Even if they had somehow knocked part of the fence down in the backyard, how did they climb the stairs to the front porch to get to the front windows?
She raced to the patio door to find the muddy handprints and smudges there as well. From what she could see the zombies were all gathered around the fence as usual, none in the backyard. Could someone be alive out there, she wondered? If they were out there, how were they staying alive? Whoever it was, could they help them or could the three of them help the strangers? That thought would have sent her father’s temper to a boil. He was a sort of novice prepper, which her mother said meant he planned for an imaginary doomsday and spent money that they did not have to spend. Sometimes Lori wished her mother could see how they had been living off that tremendous waste of money all these months. The basement had enough food and water to keep them going for quite some time. Probably longer if she could get Jay to stop eating like he needed to finish as much of the food as he could before it all ran out.
The basement………… fear exploded from deep in Lori's soul.
“Jay, have you been downstairs today?”
She could see in Jay’s eyes how it had hit him after hearing her words. His face went pale and he uttered “No”.
They both stared at the door as if it would burst open at any moment with zombies streaming into the room. Or worse, the marauders, who her father said were too lazy to plan and prepare for the day when the shit hit the fan but were good at stocking up on fire power and ammo. Jay grabbed one of the crossbows and placed an arrow into it slowly raising it toward the door. They both knew that one of them would have to check it out and make sure that their life line was still there. Lori put her hand on Jay’s shoulder and lowered the crossbow.
“I will go,” she said hardly audible.
He handed her the crossbow and stepped away from her. Deep down Jay acted like a man but he was only fourteen and still a boy. That part of him wanted nothing to do with the basement right now. Lori slowly made her way to the basement door and eased it open so as not to make any sound at all. As she took her first step she could feel her heart exploding in her chest and every following step caused an increase in tempo. The part of her that took after her mother wanted to drop the crossbow and run back up the stairs blocking the door to never return. The part that took after her father said to keep calm and use the fear to her advantage. She wanted to tell him that she couldn’t, that the fear was coming from deep within her soul and filling her with a deep dread of impending doom.
Five steps to go and she stared into the blackness trying to adjust her eyes. Lori had left the flashlight upstairs because she thought it might make her an easy target. Great idea she thought; they are down here accustomed to the dark and I can’t see a thing. Surprisingly, she could see when she reached the foot of the stairs. A quick look around and it was easy to see that no one had come in from the windows. There weren’t even any handprints on these windows. Then she remembered the heavy grates that her father had installed on the window wells. They were padlocked from the inside so there was really no way in down here.
She could hear Virginia and Jay scream upstairs. She spun around raising the crossbow and charged back up the stairs.
CHAPTER 2
Jack shifted in the van seat and wiped the sleep from his eyes. As the fog began to clear he was met by Sam’s “just a little too happy to be awake” smile and the Sergeant’s ever present disapproving gaze. The Sergeant and another soldier had been sent along for their protection. The private who Jack nicknamed “Willie” was intently concentrating on navigating around the abandoned cars in the road. Jack liked him because he didn’t seem like he judged and he rarely spoke. Willie had no opinion about the virus or the trip; he just seemed to be thankful for being out of the compound. Behind Jack was a woman who they were forced to bring with them. She had been in quarantine so he was sure that Johnson added that part to the trip to get rid of her. According to the Sergeant, she was a neurologist from another “secret lab” which he had failed to mention until around day two or three. Say what you will about Johnson, but his lab had no casualties throughout this whole outbreak.
Jack thought about it for a minute; he didn’t care if she was here or not. She didn’t speak, barely ate and stayed out of his way. If you were going to have a travel companion forced on you, she was the type Jack would take every time.
“There was a time,” Jack said he sat up straighter in his seat to make himself look larger to the Sergeant, “that I could have been in Florida having a beer on the beach in the amount of time it has taken us to get this far from the lab.”
He noticed that he had caused the stone-faced sergeant to smile.
“That is a fact Dr. Burrows, that is a fact” he replied. “Of course that was with great traffic and without being the end of the world.”
Sam broke out laughing so hard that Jack and the Sergeant both followed suit. For a brief moment the world was normal again. They were just a bunch of buddies on a road trip, not caring where they ended up. Sam wiped the tears from his eyes as his laughter died down and he motioned toward the woman. “What’s her story?”
The stone face returned to the Sergeant and both Sam and Jack expected to get another rebuke for asking about things that were “need to know” and them not needing to know.
“We have a squad - least I think we still have a squad that checks in on all the sites, brings messages and news to each while doing a sort of…. ‘Wellbeing check’.” The Sergeant motioned toward her with his eyes and lowered his voice. “When they checked on her site, they reported that it was like someone painted the compound with blood and that they were going to salvage what data they could and then torch it. Well, that was when they found her hiding in a cabinet barely big enough for her to fit into.”
“Infected?” Jack asked.
“Negative, well not as far as we could tell or the med staff back at your lab could find either. She hasn’t said a word since she was rescued so no one really knows what the hell happened there.”
“Does she have a name?”
“There were over thirty research techs, around thirty or forty medical staff of which nine doctors were female, so she could be any one of the nine. According to the squad the data was so degraded that they couldn’t pull anything useful and everything else was painted in dried blood.” He shook his head slowly in disbelief. “My thoughts are that our boys freaked out after they found her, set the place ablaze and got the hell out of there. Can’t say that I blame them if they did.”
“Nothing found on her?” Sam asked.
“That’s just it Doc - they found her covered in blood and only blood, naked as the day she was born. Report said that she looked like she had been in a pretty hairy fight. Probably found that cabinet and sought refuge from whatever was attacking her.”
Silence fell over all three as they stared at her. She was staring right back with what Jack had thought were the most beautiful blue eyes he had ever seen; beautiful, but definitely empty. If she was in there someplace he thought she was so far inside that she would probably never come back out. And after hearing that story, who could blame her checking out for good? Still, he wished she would speak now; she had seen this thing at its worst and could probably provide information on how to beat it. He started to say something to that affect and then thought better of it. Even Jack could have rare moments of humanity. Sam’s wife had always said that deep down inside of Jack there was a real person fighting to get out. He always replied “Nonsense, what you see is what you get”. He wondered why Sam never spoke of her - there was a chance that she made it to a FEMA camp and was doing fine. He had brought the subject up once. Sam was ever the optimist and vowed to start trying to contact the different camps. Jack had
never brought it up again and Sam fell into a deep depression and it took a lot to bring him out of it. He sometimes wished that he had loved someone the way Sam loved her. Just to feel that once in his life would have made everything worthwhile.
“Sarge, looks like a good spot up here to pull in and stretch our legs for a few minutes,” Willie stated from the front. The Sergeant made his way to the front passenger seat and agreed with Willie.
“Doctors, I think we may get to do a little site seeing here if you want to go in and check things out, find some supplies and maybe a specimen or two,” the Sergeant yelled back to them.
******
Bob Watson went over his inventory of supplies the same way he had every morning since the shit hit the fan. He had enough human food to last three months, enough dog food to last six months (a year if anything happened to one of the Lads), enough water to last them close to a year, enough ammo to fight a small war and enough gas to keep the generator going for a few weeks. He wasn’t too worried about the gas; there were plenty of abandoned vehicles out there with gas in the tanks just waiting for him. He had originally planned on having enough food to last thirty days for himself and his wife, but she had decided that there was something better out there for her just before the SHTF. That better thing was twenty years younger and over one hundred pounds lighter than he was. Probably hadn’t had a single joint replaced either, Bob mused. He had thought about going out and looking for her after this all happened. He knew the dogs missed her and in truth he did a little some days, a lot on other days. But he was safe here. He had his defenses all planned out and there was no reason to venture too far away from here at the moment. Part of him, against his better judgment, kept waiting for the cavalry to ride in and save the day. He knew that wasn’t going to happen. There had been no sight of local police or emergency services for months. Just him, the dogs and the zombies outside around the perimeter.
