What was left of Carl Spencer Dennis stood at the bitter edge of the Black Rock Research Center. The guard in the security shack was then well and truly eaten and the thick security gate was slowly sliding open. What used to be Carl stood there looking at the wide open road that lead back to the suburbs of Gallup. Deep in the dead mind of the thing, where the brain had not completely died, a memory arose. Carl began to shuffle his feet along the asphalt highway heading north. Carl was going home.
Signal Lost
Patient Zero One Whisky
(New York Proving Ground)
Test Subject PZ-1W Identification: (Redacted)
Time of injection: (Redacted)
Time of release: (Redacted)
Incubation Time: (Redacted)
Time of first confirmed infection: Injection time +36 hours
Subject lost: Injection time +72 hours
Confirmed by: (Redacted)
Initiate antiviral procedures: (Y/N)?
Initiate antiviral procedures: (Y/N)?
Initiate antiviral procedures: (Y/N)?
Signal lost.
The First Days
I was sitting the in parking lot of the local supermarket when they came. I had been hearing about them for weeks: marauding bands of people with some sort of disease, something like rabies the news folks said. They’d get together in groups and riot or start getting up the Dickens as my mom used to say, rushing around, biting others. Stories on the internet spoke of cannibalism but I didn’t believe that. The police had a curfew and these riots or outbreaks or whatever they were seemed far away. And we needed toilet paper.
So I sat in my old, beat up ‘92 ford pickup truck waiting form my sixteen year old daughter, Georgiana, who of course we all called Georgie, to get the TP, water, food, and whatnot watching the weird people drift in and out of the parking lot or the other people in their cars next to me waiting, like me for their partner to finish up getting the groceries so we could all get the hell out of town and back to our homes. No one was getting up the Dickens here as far as I could see.
It was warm and my truck didn’t have any air conditioning so I had both windows open. An irritable hot breeze blew in from the west doing absolutely nothing to cool me down. The fancy young lady in the car next to me had her engine running and the windows rolled up. I could almost imagine the cool air blasting from her dashboard keeping her as cool as a cucumber. My truck was a good deal higher than her little sports coup, so I got a serious eyeful looking down into her driver’s seat. She was a real looker: short, black hair pulled back into a pert ponytail, tight white tank top that clung to her body it was like a second skin, and cutoff shorts that would surely violate some local morality ordinance if they were any shorter. She had pretty blue eyes and a small button nose and was a good twenty years younger than me. Somebody’s young wife, girlfriend, or such waiting in her pretty little car without a care in the world. She looked up and saw me gawking. I tried to smile and play it off: just looking around, ya’ see, and you happened to look up at me at the right time kinda thing, yuck yuck, but she was having none of it. She gave me a little sneer while cocking her head up and pulled her tiny shorts down a bit. They wouldn’t go any further down and immediately rode back up the top of her legs but the message was clear: quit your perving out at me, grandpa. I blushed and looked the other way at some homeless guy working his way down the line of cars to my right.
This guy was a real wreck, not one of your nicely dressed bums you see standing on every corner nowadays. His cloths were filthy, torn, and threadbare draped in layer upon layer of mismatched and ragged shirts and jackets covered by some type of robe or poncho that must have been in continuous use for decades. I could imagine what he must have smelled like. Something like a mixture of gasoline, old sweat, and rancid grease. He was tapping on the window of any vehicle that was occupied. I calculated he’d reach my truck in about five minutes. I’d start up the old girl and move before he came into my orbit and get around behind him until he was gone. I don’t have anything against the homeless and I’d try to help them out if I have a few bucks in my pocket, but this one was clearly crazy, a burnout that had dragged in from the desert drifting through the parking lot as he sang some hymn to the Good Lord Jesus stopping every few feet to hold his arms up to the sky, thanking God for something or another then shuffling on. And I didn’t have a dime on me anyway.
With his heavy overcoat and ratty knit beanie perched on the back of his sunburned and peeling face he scanned the cars looking for anyone who might be trapped waiting. His teeth had parted ways with a brush many years before and the sandals he wore were held together by wire.
He’d smile and tap. Usually the driver would ignore him. He’d smile and tap again and if the driver cracked their window, launch into some crazy-ass story. Sometimes this yielded some change from the driver, sometime a few bucks. Most of the time, the driver did as I planned to do: put their car in gear and move away from the oncoming social wreck of an animal stumbling in their direction. Poor fucker.
Then I heard a scream. It split the hot air like a razor through flesh. It rose high into the hot, metallic air bouncing off the store walls and asphalt drilling into my ears like madness. It was joined then by a dozen more, then a hundred more. Every single person’s head in the parking lot, drunk crazy dude included did a hard snap towards the location of that terrifying sound. For a second, everything was still. Even the hot, pissed off breeze died down, waiting to see what would happen next.
And what happened next I would never be able to get out of my mind. What happened next was seared into my memory with a blow torch and would wake me screaming from my sleep every night until the day I died. Around the right side of the supermarket, they came. Hundreds of them, bloody, torn, gaping, mad with whatever disease had infected them, and screaming like banshees at the top of their lungs. A few people had been exiting the market and were immediately swarmed by the mass of people. I could not comprehend what I was seeing. Three badly mutilated people dived onto a small girl holding a shopping bag and began to…well, to feed. They smashed into her so hard they knocked her out of her shoes, like three tight ends making the tackle. They bit, and tore, and ripped in such a fury that the girl never had time to scream. More of the others descended on the girl’s now torn corpse and in a few minutes, the body of the girl was gone. Two others who had been near the little girl suffered the same fate. It was like watching human piranha at work.
That was enough for most of us watching from our cars. In an instant, nearly everyone tried to move at once. The crazy bum suddenly found alacrity and focus running in the opposite direction of the screaming horde but he had only taken two steps before someone in a Cadillac ran him down first crushing his pelvis, then his head in their haste to escape the oncoming rush of death. A few of us, like myself and the pretty young lady next to me, were frozen in terror. Not trying to escape the parking lot probably saved my life by avoiding all the cars making a mad dash towards the street. Too many of those fleeing smashed into other cars and the swarm of infected descended on them jamming themselves into the now shattered windows of the wrecked cars and devouring those within. The screams were overwhelming and reached the magnitude of a jet engine.
Not moving may have saved my life but it surely did not save the life of the girl parked next to me. The horde began to flow around the cars trying to break into any that had occupants. A group spotted the girl in the coup next to me and zeroed in. She screamed as she saw one of the infected peel off and race towards her. It crashed against the passenger side her car and she instinctively tried to pushed away, rotating her legs away from me preparing to kick the thing away if it breached her car. The thing smashed against the door again and again, then against the window to no effect. Had he door been locked she might have survived, she might have gotten control of her fear, started her car, and bagged ass out of that parking lot. But her doors were unlocked and the thing’s thrashing hand finally found a purchase. The passenger
side door popped open and the thing was on her in a flash. It didn’t even pause, but scrambled in and tore after her in a blink of an eye.
She screamed even louder, a high pitched, piercing sound that drove deep into my lizard brain. She tried to kick the thing away, but it was strong and was on top of her in a second its hands tearing madly at her. Its torn and bloody fingers found a purchase at the top of her tank top. Her white tank top, so tight and alluring was ripped from her body. I could see her pure white skin as her tits burst out of her bra as the thing tore at her and tried to get its teeth into her skin. She must have known, deep in her subconscious that the gig was up but she fought like the devil, her screams replaced by a determined grunting. She twisted away from the thing somehow dodging its bite and managed to open the driver’s side door. She slide halfway out, got her hands around the edge of the car frame, and nearly escaped but the thing gripped her by the hem of her shorts and pulled her back with such strength that it blew out the button and zipper and tore her shorts down around her hips. She kicked and kicked the thing repeatedly in the head but to no avail. The thing grabbed again and tore her white, blameless panties down. Her ass shook violently back and forth as she tried to break the thing’s grip. Then it landed its first bite on the back of her upper thigh. She screamed so loud that she must have ruptured her vocal cords. The blood shot out so fast and so violently that the thing must have bit down deep into an artery. In a flash she had twisted back around and broke the things mouth from her thigh. Now nearly nude with only the tatters of her cloths handing off of her, the thing, mouth full of her flesh moved deep between her legs pinning her for good this time. I watched in horror as its teeth bite into her again and again, rocking her back and forth. It was like watching the most violent sex I had ever seen. Her head and shoulders hung out of the driver’s side of the car arching her back up and forcing her hips against the thing’s mouth as it jackhammered its teeth into her over and over again. She screamed as she tried to force it off of her and grab something that she could use to pull herself away but the thing was rapidly removing chunks of her flesh in great gaping bites and she was bleeding out fast. By now, her screams had attracted the attention of others close by and they descended like legion to the driver’s side of the car. In a second, three were on top of her, eating and eating. Her body was arched out of the driver’s side of the car, her eyes looking at me with such horror that I puked all over my dashboard. She was still screaming with great gouts of blood running out of the car and onto the parking lot until finally, mercifully, she bled out and was gone.
I sat there stunned as the things ripped what was left of her body to pieces and scatted her broken bones around in a fury to eat every last scrape of tissue she had. Then one spotted me. My doors were locked, but my windows were open. It let loose with one of those ripping screams and I broke from my paralysis. I cranked on my old truck that miraculously started on the first try, slammed it into reverse, and peeled away just as the thing impacted with my side door. By piss blind luck I didn’t smash into another car as I peeled backwards. As soon as I was clear, I slammed the old girl into drive and mowed down a dozen more of the things as they descended on my truck knocking them away like rag dolls. I speed towards the front of the store and saw my little girl step out in to the madness and carnage. She was standing there holding a bunch of plastic shopping bags, looking around in total shock as these things whizzed around her. Three of the things spotted her at once and began their mad dash towards her. She stood rooted to the ground as I gunned it. I smashed the back ends of cars, crushed another clump of infected as they ate some other unfortunate soul, and smashed into the three infected just before they reached my little girl. She threw the bags of groceries in the back, yanked the door open, and jumped in as another wave of dead, for that was surely what they were, poured around the corner.
“Seatbelt!” I screamed as she rolled up the window on her side and I looked into my rear mirror just in time to see two cars smash into each other and block out exit, “Fuck!”
“Daddy!” she screamed as the things rounded the back of our truck and reached for my open window. I nearly threw out my shoulder working the handle to my window and got it up just as the first thing reached my side. I looked around frantically for a way out as the things began to climb into the bed of the truck and bang against the back window. Ahead of me was a small plaza between the supermarket and a row of shops. It was tight but clear of cars or any other major obstacle. I gunned the truck sending the infected flying out the back or under the monster tires I had on the old girl. We smashed our way across the plaza and out on the street which had filled with the infected, smashed cars, and dead bodies. I twisted and skidded all over the road trying to keep control of the truck and not smash into something immovable. Stopping now would mean a very quick but brutally painful death. By some miracle of statistics, I managed not to ram into anything and we found ourselves racing down the onramp to I-40 East. Here the traffic was still rolling smoothly as though the horror that had swamped the supermarket had never happened. I switched on the radio and slowed down a bit not wanting to get into an accident now that we had escaped the immediate threat.
I looked into the truck’s rear view mirror and saw a semi-truck come crashing down from the overpass we had just left blocking all the traffic behind it. Another car spilled off of the overpass and cars already on the highway veered left and right creating a pileup that completely blocked the eastbound lanes behind them. We had made it without a second to spare.
“What the fuck were those things!?” Georgie cried looking out the back window at the carnage piling up behind them.
“Language,” I said in a daze as I bucked up and focused on getting us back home, “Infected or something. The thing that’s going around. I didn’t think it would be this bad, not this far from the city center,” I said watching the side roads for anything that might indicate that things were falling apart. I saw cop cars and fire trucks racing across the overpasses as we zoomed under them heading east to the foothills of the Sandia mountains where, far back up in the hills, our little ranch was. Soon I spotted smoke rising up on both our left and right, then behind us. Whatever was happening, it was spreading and getting out of control fast.
Near the turnoff for our ranch, I pulled into a gas station looking around for anything that might tell me the things were close by. It all seemed quiet. People getting their gas, picking up a snack and a soda, getting on with their lives with no idea of the horror spreading across the Rio Grande valley, “Listen, Georgie,” I said putting my hands on her shoulders and turning her towards me, “Go inside and get as much water as you can while I fill up, OK? Just water. Then get back in here as fast as you can.” Georgie nodded as I handed her one of my credit cards and bolted from the truck. I took the other card out, the one I only used for emergencies and topped the old girl off, then filled the four spare cans in the back. It came to nearly two hundred dollars, normally an astronomical sum, but I had a feeling I wouldn’t have to pay it back. As I topped off the last can, Georgie came out pushing a small cart nearly overflowing with cases of water.
“The man asked me if we expected a drought,” she said as she threw the cases in the cases, “I told him a flood was coming and he looked at me like I was crazy.”
We jumped in the car and looked around: still no sign of the infected, then pulled out on to the quiet rode and headed up to our farm.
We pulled of the highway at the next exit onto the frontage road, then down a few miles and turned left onto Matisse Road. Matisse ran for just under a mile then turned into a dirt road that would take us up to our ranch. Georgie got out as we pulled up to the gate and opened it to let us in. I drove through the gate and watched her in the rear view mirror lock the gate shut then jog back to the truck. It won’t hold them if they get this far, I thought, they’d get over or push through it if enough of them came up this way. I could tell Georgie was thinking the same thing as we made our way up to the main hou
se nearly a mile from the fence.
We got out and loaded our supplies into the house without a word. Inside I began pulling out tools from cabinets and said to Georgie, “Go get all the guns and ammo. Bring them up and lay them out on the kitchen table. If anything happens, you scream, OK?” Georgie nodded and disappeared down into the basement where we kept our stock of firearms. Then I went out the back of the house to the old barn there.
When the ranch was doing good business, we had bred and sold horses, Georgie, her mother Arli, and me. But the market crashed and Ali died a few years back leaving Georgie and me with a mound of debt and a hole that just couldn’t be filled. We sold off all the horses, most of our gear, and all of the surrounding land except the main ranch house to keep up with the endless medical bills that had piled up and eaten everything we had just as the cancer had ate my wife and Georgia’s mother.
I rolled open the old barn doors. It smelled of hot hay and old animals in the heavy heat. To the left was piles of lumber I kept for fixing the few fences that I hadn’t replaced with wire, grabbed a small cart, and began loading it up with two by fours. I then grabbed the nail gun, tossed a few boxes of nails on top of the wood, grabbed my hand drill and more boxes of screws, then headed for the house. Inside I called out to Georgie who promptly answered from the kitchen. We’d do this for the next few hours just to make sure nothing was going on, that everything was all right. Or at least as right as they could be with what was going on in the city.
I boarded up every window of the single level ranch house starting on the outside. I shot nails and drilled screws until my hands, arms, and shoulders shook from exhaustion and still I kept pounding. When I had finished the outside, I moved inside and did the same thing leaving just enough space on each window to peek out but not enough space for those things to get a finger hold on. Then I closed up the doors sealing Georgie and I in. It was well after midnight when I was done. Georgie had fallen asleep in front of the television a few houses earlier. I plopped my trembling body down next to her and watched the destruction unrolling on the television before I too fell asleep on the couch next to her.
The Great Wreck Page 2
