by GJ Zukow
When the Scarlet hit, so closely on the heels of the animal attacks, things were no better in Ocala than they were in Orlando. As the small red spots spread amongst the population, everybody she knew was affected. Nobody thought the Scarlet would prove so deadly, those that did speak of a coming mass die off were quickly drowned out. Everybody, the government included, pointed out that only the smaller animals had died from the parasite, humans would get sick but then they would quickly recover. To Nancy, the dark cloud of the parasitic infection had a silver lining (or so it seemed at the time). As one of the few teachers in the district who was immune to the single celled menace, she was asked to fill in for those teachers (and there was a lot of them) that used their sick days. Grateful for the work and the extra money in her paycheck she happily took every chance she was offered. Within days of the rapid spread of the contagion, she started to worry, seriously worry about what was happening. There was a madness that came with the parasite, the same madness that overcame the animals. She saw for herself the changes in the students. From sullen, quiet and slightly depressed, those once happy and rambunctious thirteen and fourteen year old boys and girls turned into mean, violent and homicidal criminals. The government was obviously lying about what was going on, still maintaining that the parasite was harmless. When fights broke out they were no longer the simple affairs where one student would hit another until the loser fell to the ground crying. Instead the fights turned into life and death struggles with cheering onlookers sometimes joining in the fray. Murder, arson, rape and all manner of horrible things went on. Students weren’t the only ones committing the atrocities, the faculty was also falling prey to the insane compulsions. The last day she went to work the middle school had turned into a blood soaked hell. Two former students (no more than fourteen years old) and one of the Spanish teachers tried to corner her in the teachers’ lounge. To say she was flabbergasted by their behavior is an understatement. Nancy barely escaped their depredations, sure they were intent on raping her at the least. When she came home, unsure as to whether or not she would be fired for fleeing her job, her husband had disappeared. Her husband Sean never returned. Her child sickened and died from the ravages of the parasite, breaking her heart completely. No ambulance came, no police responded in those last days. She buried her child in the backyard as deeply as she could manage. I told her how I had done the same to my sister, not realizing the parasite wasn’t done with its victim yet. My little sister (I still miss her so much) clawed her way from the grave, not being as deeply buried. Nancy knows the reanimated body of her little child slowly rots in its dark grave, unable to muster the strength to dig its way out.
After speaking briefly about her lost child, Nancy went into a crying jag again, the tears rolling down her cheeks anew and lasting for hours. I felt sad myself, talking about the loved ones I lost forced me to have to control myself lest I ended up a weeping wreck like Nancy had become.
When dawn broke again I made an excuse and left the house, telling Nancy that I was going to try and scout a nearby location where we could safely hole up. The constant sniffling and crying bothers me, it’s kinda aggravating. She’s not the only one that lost everyone they loved. Every day since then, the same thing happens. I would get her to open up, to start talking, then after every conversation she breaks down and cries for hours before falling asleep. Allan may not have been the best person to be around all the time but at least he wasn’t lost in a wallow of self pity.
I didn’t actually go and search for another safehouse. I had already scouted the area previously and hadn’t found anything that didn’t need a lot of prep work to completely secure. What I did want was that stainless steel canister. The body of the Red I killed the other night still lay where he fell. The flies and insects were thick in the area, feasting and laying their eggs in the dozens of corpses. Crows had also found the human remains and were busy pecking and pulling pieces off of their grisly meal. The undead were still thick in the vicinity of the shop, some had wandered off in search of other prey but there was way too many of the things hanging around for me to do a thorough search amongst the foul smelling cadavers.
The only things of worth that I found that day was some food, which is always in short supply, and some prenatal vitamins for Nancy. They were out of date but I figured something was better than nothing. The vitamins would surely provide some benefit for the yet unborn child of hers and the Gods know the child will need all the help it can get if it’s to have a fighting chance in this madhouse of a world.
After I returned Thursday night, Nancy seemed to be in better spirits. She was grateful for the vitamins, expired as they were. It was over supper that we really got to talking again, it was then that I heard about Matt and how they ended up trapped in the heating and cooling repair shop.
There really isn’t a whole lot to tell, so I won’t go into too much detail. Matt had worked at the shop and had taken refuge there just before the dead started to rise from their all too brief slumber. From what Nancy tells me, Matt’s trailer was shot up and basically made unlivable in the madness that turned neighbor against neighbor. He still had the keys to the shop, when the owner and all the other employee’s never appeared again he decided that the building was as good as any other place to stay until normality (and sanity) returned. When the first of the corpses started to rise, Matt managed to steal a semi-trailer filled with MRE’s (Meals, Ready to Eat, another military acronym) from the Army after finding it abandoned. I found it almost funny that Nancy ran across Matt at a small corner store, she was looking for something to eat and he was loading up on toilet paper.
Nancy is a good looking girl and I’m sure Matt jumped at the chance to “cohabitate” with her. Things ran their course, with the close quarters, boredom, and fear driving them into each other’s arms. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be preggers right now. Kinda irresponsible if you ask me.
I think she recognized the disapproval on my face. That’s when she started to cry again. I apologized and she said I was right, that it was all her fault. With the conversation over, Nancy retreated back into the bedroom and she cried herself to sleep again. What I want is for her to get over this crap and start acting in her own interests, she needs to help me out soon. If it weren’t for her being with child I might not have cared about her welfare as much. I have to admit though, she gets better, more stable, day by day.
Friday, after waiting uselessly for Allan to show again, I returned to the ruins of the shop. Finally, the walking, rotting abominations had dispersed, leaving me the opportunity to look for that canister and its mysterious contents. I had to physically drag and dig through the corpses, the scent of death still clots my nose. I had to stop more than once, gagging from the reek. Once the undead are returned to death’s cold embrace they seem to enter an advanced period of deterioration, rapidly decomposing. It appears that the parasite secretes some kind of chemical that holds the unnatural things together, when the parasitic colony is destroyed the body of the host quickly rots. Every time I got a firm hold on one of the horrid cadavers, dragging them out of the way, the dead flesh came off in my hands, like well cooked meat just falls off the bone. It was disgusting but in the end I found what I was looking for. Finding it didn’t shed any light on what the canister had once held, unfortunately. The once shiny, silver, stainless steel cylinder had been crushed under the weight of the Humvee. Whatever it had held must have leaked out. There was a large rupture and the container held not a drop of what I so desperately sought. I had asked Nancy if she remembered smelling anything when she escaped, but she was too terrified at the time to notice anything but the smell of her own fear. It was vaguely familiar, that smell, sooner or later I would figure it out.
I saw that dog pack again, at least I think it was the same pack. One of the dogs, a big German Shepherd with a red tint to its unkempt hair, started making its way towards me. When I raised my weapon towards it, not knowing its intentions, it lowered its head and meekly wagged
its tail. Slowly, timidly, it came towards me and I saw the faded, dirty collar around its neck. It obviously knew the difference between a living, breathing person and the abhorrences that should never be. It crouched low and whined, appearing to want nothing more than to have someone reassure it. Once the dog was close enough I could see that it had suffered old wounds where the fur was missing, leaving patches of scar tissue. This dog, as I’m sure were most of the dogs in the pack, were once loving and loyal pets. As I spent a few minutes petting the matted and dirty reddish hair I saw her collar still had a tag attached. “Laelaps”, it was an unusual name and when I said it aloud, the dog whined and nuzzled my hand, grateful for the human contact it so clearly missed. A few moments later, the other members of the pack ran by, barking, the hunt was on again. Laelaps seemed torn between following her pack and wanting to stay with me. In the end, the dog ran off a few steps and turned back around and looked me in the eyes. It gave a bark at me, as if it was happy it had found me, and then bounded off excitedly to rejoin her friends. Even though the dogs have reverted to their wild states in their struggle to survive, some of them remember their old lives.
Once again back at the house with Nancy, I found she had actually made herself useful. Not only had she spent the day making some security improvements she had actually cooked dinner for me. When our conversation once again turned to what she had done before the world turned into a living nightmare, she said something that startled me. She had been relating how it would now be time for the annual school fund drive to maintain and stock the church’s hurricane shelter. My ears picked up at that. Every year the students of the private school sold chocolates and handmade crafts, spending the proceeds on the emergency hurricane shelter located under the boiler room that provided the institutions hot water. It was fully stocked and had both food and water enough for a weeks’ worth of supplies for the whole of the staff and student body. That part of the school was old, having been built in the sixties and as the school expanded, it grew around the central maintenance building. A couple of times a year the students were given classes in safety and they toured the old shelter. It had actually seen use when Andrew and other hurricanes struck, so it was a working shelter, not some quickly thrown together and glorified supply room. When she told me that the hurricane shelter had actually once been a fallout shelter built during the cold war, I knew I had to find the place and check it out for myself. After hearing my intentions, Nancy said it was a bad idea, the last time she had been near the grounds it was crawling with the undead. Be that as it may, it wouldn’t stop me. My arrows prove to deal a swift silent death, my sword is sharp and my aim is true. I just hope it hasn’t been raided for its supplies, or worse yet, burned down in the insanity that razed half the city.
On Saturday it took me most of the morning to reach the school grounds. The distance wouldn’t normally have taken so long if it weren’t for all the undead I had to detour around. I’m starting to get low on arrows, with a handful of them being lost every time I go out. Sometimes when I miss completely I can’t find or safely recover the razor tipped shafts. Sometimes the arrows hit my target, burying themselves so deeply into a skull that it takes too much time and effort to dig them back out. Every once in a blue moon the undead themselves break them, having been pierced, with the shaft snapping from the nasty cannibals unnatural movements.
The grounds of the private academy are in a state of ruin and chaos. Windows are smashed, doors are off their hinges and desks that once been neatly ordered inside the classrooms have been tossed and thrown into hallways and through the windows. The buildings are one story rows of classrooms with covered walkways in an almost open air design. Some of the classrooms I passed are covered in old blood and gore with the decomposed remains of a few corpses turned skeletons lying scattered amongst the mess of overturned furniture. Scattered here and there vile graffiti covers walls and the few remaining windows.
There were actually very few of the walking dead on the grounds, at least until I came to the administrative buildings, that is. The main offices were once residential houses, having been converted as the needs of the Baptist church run school grew. Once I caught sight of the small mob of undead, crowding around one specific house turned office, it reminded me immediately of behavior I had witnessed before. For whatever reason, I believe that the Omni controlled corpses are drawn to seek out those that are carriers. All around the administrative buildings were pale, fleshless skeletons and decaying cadavers, all headless, all in varying degrees of corruption and rot.
Needless to say I became a lot more cautious. I had turned around and started to go back the way I came from, thinking I’d give this area a wide berth. I was here to check on the existence of a shelter, not to get into a gun battle or a life and death struggle. That’s not how it turned out though, I was already being followed.
As soon as I came within five feet of the corner of the building, out of nowhere, this naked, filthy and wild haired kid of no more than fourteen or fifteen years old, popped from around the corner. The scarlet covered, former middle school student, loosed a primal scream as he swung the barrel of a revolver towards me and fired. I heard the bullet’s deadly whine and felt the slug tug at my hair. With the smell of singed and burnt hair in my nostrils I instinctively brought up the bayonet affixed to my M16 to block and push the deadly barrel’s aim away from my body. I saw his trigger finger twitch just as the sharp blade sliced off the end of his thumb, sending the blackened nail covered digit flying through the air just as the barrel exploded once more. The second shot proved to be no threat, missing by a country mile as the howling and insane carrier swung the rusty machete at my head that he was holding in his left hand. As I shifted my grip on the rifle to block the unexpected secondary attack, the teenager found out just how important thumbs were for maintaining any kind of grip. The blood slick thirty-eight he had been trying to keep his hold on slipped from his grasp and tumbled to the ground. It turned into a wrestling match, with him trying to slice me with his blade while at the same time trying to keep my bayonet from slicing him. He grabbed my rifle with his bloody hand and I then grabbed him and we struggled there, each of us straining to kill the other. I was finally able to use my legs to trip him up and I leaned into him until he buckled. We were entangled but when he fell I was on top. The poor kid had some strength to him, he fought with all of his madness driven hostility against what he knew was going to happen. He just wasn’t as strong as me. My body has been fine tuned since the parasite raised its horrible specter upon the earth. With all the walking, running, and carrying heavy packs giving me an athletic body that I would have only obtained before by going to marine boot camp. I leaned into him, bringing the point of my blade ever nearer to his reddened, sweat and dirt covered chest. He couldn’t force his long blade to threaten me, if he did he risked being immediately impaled. All he could do was try to push back as I applied all my force and weight, he was slowly losing ground millimeter by millimeter. Once started I drawing blood, his foul breath bellowed from his nasty mouth in one of the most chilling screams I have ever heard. Then he gave up, he went completely slack and my bayonet dug deep into his chest in one massive thrust. I watched the light go out of his black eyes and when I was sure he was dead I stood up and drove my blade into his face, directly into his crazed brains.
I wasn’t out of danger yet, I heard the distinct dragging footsteps of what could only be the walking dead. I spun around, adrenalin flowing and quickly, violently, dispatched the half dozen monsters that were drawn to the sound of the combat. I never even had to draw my sword. The bayonet, forced through a mouth, eye socket, ear, temple or under the chin easily kills or disables the abominations. Severing the spinal cord causes the repugnant puppets to collapse, leaving them to uselessly snap and bite at my steel toed and shanked boots. The trick is to not let them grab you with their unnatural strength and tangle you up while you do it.
Since I was there and the scarlet covered carrier had been neutraliz
ed, I decided I might as well check out where he had been living. The depth of madness that the infected ones sink into is unimaginable. I found out where all the heads from the scattered bodies had gone. He had piled them up, one upon the other, stacked like gruesome bricks along the back wall of his makeshift lair. Flies, maggots and insects crawled and flew in such numbers in that room, that they were like a dark cloud. As soon as I entered the reeking and disgusting room, the pile of heads started squirming and chomping their rotted jaws at the sight of me. The whole wall of heads, stacked like bricks, started to quiver and shake. Dead eyes rolled, foul tongues lolled and teeth forcefully clacked shut, threatening to topple over the delicately balanced pile. Gagging at the smell, I retreated from the disgusting sight. I searched as well as my stomach could handle, only finding a few boxes of shells for a thirty-eight. He had accumulated a small stock of weapons, including a couple of Chinese made AK’s but there was no ammo for them. I left them there, I already had enough weapons, ammo was what I really needed. Without bullets the automatic weapons were worthless.
I found the hurricane shelter. It was exactly as Nancy had described it. A ramp (handicap accessible, no doubt) slanted down to a metal covered, sturdy door. The metal door leading to the shelter was locked with one of those cheap brass locks that served only to keep honest people honest. The lock was on the outside of the door and that was good news. If someone had been inside it would be an impossible task to place the lock on the outside of the door. One heavy blow from the butt of my gun broke it. It was unusual to find a basement in Florida, the ground is too wet and too sandy in most places. The walls of the shelter seeped and slowly dripped moisture, pooling in algae covered puddles. I thought it would be bigger, Nancy had said that it was for the faculty and students. Obviously, the only way a hundred or more people could fit in here is if they stood or sat in the space. All along the walls, from the floor to the ceiling, in orderly stacks were canned and freeze dried food, water, blankets and everything else it would take for a hundred people to survive for days, if need be. I felt like I had hit the jackpot. Before I excitedly returned to Nancy, I had a good meal. Not worrying about having to ration, I ate until I was full for once.
