by GJ Zukow
This was before we knew the parasite would drive the animals insane before it killed them. This was before we knew it would drive us insane before it killed, then unbelievably resurrect our cadavers.
When the "Animal Madness" reared its horrible head, my job turned into a search and destroy mission. Luckily we had a weeks' notice before it reached the U.S. and that gave us time to prepare. I'm sure that without that single week to prepare, the death rate would have been double or triple what it was. By the second week of September 2012 the animal madness had reached Florida.
I stayed in Ocala and directed and monitored the separate teams as they moved through the boondocks and backwoods. I ordered my teams to kill any warm-blooded animal on sight. Whether they actually had the infection or not, didn't matter at all. I had some men assigned to the cities but for the most part the major urban areas were patrolled by civilians, authorized and trained by their local police and county governments. For a lot of the guys the mission was more like an extended hunting expedition than anything else. That isn't to say I didn't lose any men to the little monsters. I lost a handful of men here and there, usually due to them making stupid mistakes or letting their guards down. The worst of it came in the Big Cypress National Preserve.
I lost a whole platoon to a single demon possessed cougar. I understood how we lost the first man to the bloodthirsty beast. The soldier was taken from behind while he was in the middle of taking a crap. By the time his fellow soldiers responded to his screams it was too late. The area was this cougars natural hunting grounds and the thing had fled before the dead man's comrades even got sight of it. The parasite crazed beast seemed to have an unnatural intelligence as it hunted down and picked off my men one by one. While they slept it attacked, silently. The next casualty happened with an armed watchman standing guard a mere ten yards away. One quick and violent moment was all it took for the cougar to rip out the man's throat and then it was gone, back into the black night a moment later, leaving behind a victim that would bleed out in less than twenty seconds. The damn thing never seemed to sleep and anytime one of my men were separated or distracted it never failed to take advantage of the situation. Within four days and nights the feral, crazed, fiend killed nine good men of mine.
That's what I remember the most about those terrible times. The loss of that team to a fuckin' overgrown house cat.
Turns out the animal madness was merely a precursor for what was to come. We finally got a handle on the devastation of the animal kingdom as the parasite started killing its blood frenzied hosts. Just as we thought we had turned the corner on this thing and could start getting back to some semblance of normality, new symptoms erupted in the human populace. We had barely secured the safety of the masses of civilians that had fled their homes for the concrete covered land of the cities when everybody, except for a few, started getting massive, continuous headaches.
I remember feeling as if the brain in my skull had been replaced with red-hot, liquid pain. The anguish was an almost physical thing and the agony seemed to lodge itself squarely behind my right eye. It was as if someone had hammered a burning railroad spike behind that orb and intense waves of pure torture radiated from it.
Not everyone who had been infested experienced the same pain as I did. Others suffered from mild headaches but reported a horrible full body itching sensation. The itch was nothing to me and thankfully I was able to get a hold of some fairly strong narcotics to mute my pain to a dull background roar.
I personally remember seeing one man scratch himself so furiously he had to be restrained. So deeply had he dug his nails into his flesh that whole patches of his skin had been dug away. Blood covered his hands, his arms and his legs as he grated his fingernails severely beyond the layers of his skin and into his horribly exposed muscles.
The CDC had finished its preliminary study of this new parasite and when my superiors released to us the findings they were nothing but bad. I almost lost all hope right then and there. Others weren't as strong as I was and they responded to the news by blowing their brains out with their service weapons. The outlook was so bleak (and so profoundly accurate) that it became a federal crime to speak to anyone about it. What info was released was a watered down version (one that still allowed a certain amount of hope) of what we knew.
Somebody had done a lot of work on the parasite. It was definitely an engineered little monstrosity, created in a state of the art lab somewhere. The technology that it took to bring this parasite to life could only have been the result of a project that must have taken years. It was so complex that there was no way a piss-ant country like North Korea could have produced it. We (the U.S.) couldn't even have done something like this. Maybe China could have possibly produced it. Maybe Russia. Whoever had created it was far ahead of the rest of the world in bioengineering, either that or they were very unlucky, creating a parasite that mutated / evolved faster than anyone thought possible. The chances of “Omni” having been the result of natural evolution were practically nil. While it is theoretically possible for it to have been the result of nature, it seems highly improbable.
No report at all stated that the parasite would actually take over the human corpses after death. I doubt even those who knew the most about this thing suspected that (at first anyways). We did know that the parasite would live on after the victim’s death, continuing to breed and spread its contamination. The brainstem seemed to be the command and control center of the insidious beast and tests showed that destroying that part of the brain stopped it in its tracks. Unfortunately, destroying that part of the brain to kill the colony also killed the human host.
Without a cure I knew for a fact that every single infected person on the face of the earth would soon go as mad as a hatter and then die. The knowledge of what would almost certainly soon happen to myself and the rest of humanity weighed heavily upon my mind and the minds of all of those who knew the truth. We desperately waited for news of a cure while we made preparations for what was to come. Ninety percent of mankind would be driven insane by the single celled bastard. Every single scientist and researcher in the whole earth was looking for a cure, cancer research and everything else stopped cold as people searched desperately for any kind of vaccine or poison to use against the inevitable. Their lives also hung in the balance and I knew they wanted to survive this just as badly as I did. I took some comfort in the fact that a million people around the world were trying as hard as they could as I located and distributed as much ammunition as I could get my hands on. Order and the rule of law would be maintained until the very end, if it came to that.
A call came out for volunteers for those of my men that were apparently immune. I knew, and they knew, what was going to happen to them. Their bravery still motivates me today. It was one thing to volunteer to go into hostile, enemy controlled territory with no back-up. It was another thing entirely to willingly allow yourself to become a test subject for scientists who would risk anything (especially if it were on another person) to find a cure. When they died in service to their country and all of humanity for that matter, I was the one who filed their death certificate as if they had died not in a sterile lab somewhere, but in the line of duty. I also recommended the Purple Heart and Bronze Star be awarded posthumously, they had definitely earned it.
By the time the "Scarlet" had started to spread amongst us there came word that some forms of amphetamines slowed down the parasite. This small bit of news was a great morale booster. I felt that there was hope again, that we would soon figure out how to beat this miniscule terror. The U.S. government hadn't stocked any "speed" for use by its soldiers for decades and supplies were low nationwide. A lot of the commercially available ephedrine and all the other 'drines were almost gone, having been depleted during the first wave of allergy like symptoms, stocks were almost nonexistent when these new symptoms hit. The government had decided to keep a lid on this news from the civilian population or face the prospect that there would be absolutely nothing left for the
soldiers. The soldiers would be needed to maintain control until this thing had been figured out. Nobody really knew how long it would take for the Omni to kill off the infected, let alone how deeply or widespread the insanity would become. If we would have had a week more, maybe two at the most, I am sure, someone, somewhere would have found a cure.
At this point bemoaning over what could have been is like crying over spilt milk. The world is as it is and nothing can be done about it now.
With the animal madness came the destruction of farms and livestock around the world. All around the globe the food supply was not only disrupted, it was ruined. The fertile farmlands had been abandoned when the farmers fled for their lives, leaving their defenseless domesticated livestock to suffer the ravages of a mother nature gone insane alone.
When the animal madness finally started to wane with the deaths of the infected animals, the government desperately tried to get those farmers back on the farms as quickly as possible. There was resistance as most of them were still scared as hell. Food riots started breaking out in all the major cities and we were actually mulling the idea of forcibly making people work the farmsteads and ranches.
Didn't matter though. Within a week the vast majority of the human race went completely and violently nuts before they started dropping like flies.
Miami, God what a problem that city gave me. Of all the cities of South Florida under my jurisdiction, Miami gave me the biggest headache. The food riots turned into general disorder and chaos quickly. Rioting, looting and mayhem overtook the city days before the parasite actually turned the populace into mindless, blood-thirsty murderers. We had a whole battalion under our command and we sent almost a third of our force down there. With all those men and their weapons you'd think we could put a lid on what was going on. Miami was a war zone. The fighting there was as intense and violent as any combat I had seen. The violence rivaled the taking of Baghdad and the clearing of Fallujah. By the time people were actually driven to violence by the Omni my superiors had decided to abandon the once thriving metropolis. Miami was lost, being nothing more than a burning shell of what it once was. Then we lost control of Tampa. One by one the cities fell and then even my own, well disciplined men, succumbed to the madness and deserted or became enraged murderers.
I am aware of some of the atrocities that many of my men committed upon the civilian populace. The stadiums had housed thousands of refugees, in fact every open area and public facility was crowded with people who had fled the violence that had overtaken the once timid creatures. Soon there came to be so many people arrested for breaking curfew, looting, rioting and any of a large assortment of crimes when martial law went down that finding a place to house them became difficult. Factories and any large buildings became makeshift detention facilities. When those parasite crazed people, confined in close quarters, started mauling, killing and cannibalizing each other I turned a blind eye to the mass executions. It didn't matter anyways. We were all marked for death in a matter of days.
Someone blew the interstate bridges that served as the single lifeline to the Keys. Whether a group of the immune had taken it upon themselves to try and secure the island chain or it was simply the result of a school teacher turned terrorist by the parasite I have no real clue. I hope it's the former and not the latter. If the Keys could be cleared of the infected and the undead it would be a good place to ride out the apocalypse. Isolated, tough to get to, with warm weather and plenty of fish to live off, a group could survive there indefinitely.
In and around the Ocala area, the immune had started seeking refuge in the Marion County jail. Whenever they came across someone who was free of the parasite they invariably took them there. I wanted so badly to join them but they would never let someone such as me anywhere near them. Even though I and a few others had found a way to greatly inhibit the parasite within us they refuse to help us. They not only refuse to help us they try to kill us whenever they so much as see us. Those selfish bastards will pay one day for turning their backs on us. They may control the jail and sheriff's complex, sitting behind their razor wire topped fences but we control the rest of the city. How dare they abandon and try to murder us simply because we're sick. If we could group together to find a permanent solution to the parasite, like we should, there wouldn't be this bad blood between us. Now it's an us or them mentality and they have no idea what they're dealing with. Enough of that subject for now.
Just as the dead started to rise from their all too brief slumber I ran out of Dex. In between avoiding or fighting off the risen dead I searched desperately for medicinal speed, diet pills, cold or allergy med or anything that contained what I needed to keep my body from becoming completely colonized by the Omni.
In the short time I was out of Dex and the time I ran across Joe and his friends the disease had advanced significantly. My triple and quadruple doses had kept the Scarlet from spreading to no more than ten percent of my body. In three short days without it, another ten percent of my skin turned that horrible deep red.
I had been taking the Dex for a week and in all of that time I hadn't slept once. When it wore off I fell into a bottomless slumber that lasted almost eighteen hours. I only remember dreaming once in that time. The dream wasn't outwardly violent or threatening but it terrified me. It still terrifies me.
I was in this dark, lightless void, trapped with no way out. After some time, my eyes adjusted to the blackness and I found I was in a room with no doors or windows. The small, confining room was littered with the wreckage and ruins of everyday life. Everything I saw had once been something nice but now everything was smashed, broken into unusable pieces. The floor was covered in debris and as I sorted through the trash, looking for anything usable to help get me out, I sensed another presence. A bottomless chill crept into the air and as I watched a concentrated, purple light practically crawled into existence. As I watched, a form took shape within that cloud of amethyst light. The most beautiful and delightful feet, legs and calf of the most gorgeous woman took shape in front of me. The woman materializing in front of me was the single most desirable thing I had ever gazed upon. Upwards my eyes went, following the curves of her body, lingering on her perfectly shaped ass and voluptuous hips. A lust was born within me greater than I had ever experienced in all my life and as I gazed upward upon her, past her navel and her well sculpted abdomen, my desire for her grew even greater. Her breasts were full and firm, her neck was fair and her lips were demanding my full attention. When I peered into her face, and her eyes, her true nature came to me. She was completely bald but that wasn't what frightened me. Where her hair should be, all around her skull, there were eyes. Hundreds of small, lidless eyes. Those eyes stared and rolled around and when they focused their terrible sight on me I lost all hope. When she spoke to me it was as if she had a thousand voices, her words were like hundreds of last breaths, thousands of them even, all rolled into one, forming the words she uttered to me.
She tempted me with her body, driving me mad with desire all over again. Then she kissed me and claimed me for her own. When she did I felt as if I had turned to stone. I could not break the gaze of her many dreadful eyes. They seemed to bore into me and the fear I felt then was the greatest fear I had ever, or will ever, feel in the whole of my life.
Without exception, every one of us here at this backwoods campsite we now call home has seen her. She is our new Goddess. We are forbidden to speak of what she has told us, her words are mysteries that only we are to know. In some part of my mind I know that this may be nothing more than a hallucination brought on by the single celled monsters inside of me. The shared dreams may not be a visitation from a God but merely a shared psychosis, made real in our minds by a shared fear and desire to draw together in some common ground. In the end it doesn't matter though. Most here feel God himself has abandoned us. Do men create the Gods or did the Gods create men? Chicken and the egg if you ask me.
All we can do now is try and live as long as we can, hopefully we will stum
ble upon a cure. We already have clues to defeating the Omni, but I'll write about that later.
I was rooting around in a CVS or a Walgreen's, I don't recall which chain store it was actually, frantically trying to find some meds that had the vital ingredient I so desperately needed. I had been popping a few of this and a little of that, cramming what I thought would help into my rucksack. While trying to read the infuriatingly small print of the list of ingredients the sound of a fast approaching vehicle drew closer. I dropped what I was doing and started making my way to the front of the store, hoping to spot the survivors before they drove past.
They didn't drive past though. Tires screeching they pulled directly in front of the store and two of them got out and came into the store whilst the third man got out and stood guard against the undead that would soon be making their way towards the sounds.
There was a standoff that ensued, consisting of myself trying to hold my ground against two armed and infected men.
I don't know the name of the first man that came inside the store that day. He never left it. He was a big burly guy with the clear signs of the parasite upon him. His skin was more red than white and his eyes and even his tongue had started to blacken. I estimated that he was over fifty percent overtaken and his actions showed it. The other man with him was more like I am, infected, but still less than a quarter of the way on the road to death.
I've come to know the second man, his name is Joe Russel. He's become a friend of mine. The driver / lookout that day disappeared a couple of weeks ago; I have no idea if he's alive or dead. There's a steady small core of people here, others come and go. Groups come to trade with us for what we have here. What we have here is a very large kitchen. The top dog here is the cook. We all call him "Master Chef". While we make our own runs for supplies to cook with, other groups also bring us the raw ingredients to trade for the life-extending drug.
