by Tristan Vick
Nodding off a second time, she could feel darkness flood into every recess of her mind. As her thoughts fell apart in the blackness she prayed that Barnes would put a bullet between her eyes and just put her out of her misery.
Gradually, the blackness would nibble away at her consciousness until there was nothing left. She’d awaken to an entirely new kind of horror. Her mind’s eye would be taken over by the ruby lipped mouth of madness. A monster so horrible it wouldn’t even let death defeat it. All sense of herself would vanish and she’d become something soulless—something black. She’d be destined to suffer in an infinite purgatory—of living death.
Epilogue: Resurrection Virus
OPENING HER EYES, RADIANT WHITE light flooded her vision. Alyssa sat up in bed and rubbed her eyes. It didn’t do much good. Everything around her remained hot white. She would have mistaken it for heaven if it wasn’t for the horrendous headache sending excruciating pain down through her entire nervous system to act as a constant reminder that she was most definitely alive.
“Pain,” she laughed to herself. Glorious, horrible, pain! She was never so happy to feel so miserable in her life. It was her first sign that she hadn’t become a mindless monster. She had thoughts. Her mind was intact. She was still human.
“Hello?” Alyssa called out. “Is anybody there?” Alyssa sat up in bed. She had tubes hooked up to her arms and legs. Another one looped up through her nostrils. Wires were attached to various regions of her head. She scratched an itch on her head and to her shock found her head was completely shaved.
“Hello? Anyone?” Still, no answer greeted her.
Slowly her eyes adjusted to the intense lighting. She was hooked up to a life support machine. Alyssa grunted as she tore out the tubes and ripped off the censors from her temple. Then slowly she slid her heavy legs off the side of the bed and the balls of her feet slapped against the cold floor. Knees wobbling she struggled to stand up straight.
“Shit,” Alyssa cursed as her legs gave out and she crumpled to the floor. Using the wall for support, Alyssa slowly pushed herself back up and hobbled over to the window. Opening the blinds she looked out to see an amazing series of crystal clear green and blue waterfalls. Mists came up from the spray of the rushing water and it looked like the Iguazu Falls in Brazil. Except that it wasn’t.
Alyssa reached out and touched the window. It wasn’t even real. Just a digital high definition image on a video screen meant to simulate the outside world.
“What is this place?” Alyssa asked the empty room. Gaining some feeling back in her legs, she staggered to the door and stepped out into the hall. A cool breeze swept down the passageway and shot up her backside. Shivering, she realized that all she had on was a flimsy medical gown.
Straddling the railing, she helped herself along until she came to a reception desk. The lights above it flickered as a disarray of papers littered the countertops and floors. The light breeze kicked up little whirlwinds and caused random leaflets of paper to dance dizzily about.
Alyssa conveniently found a white lab coat hanging over the back of a chair behind the reception desk. She put it on and tied the white sash around her waist. Curious about where the breeze was coming from, she followed the direction of the wind.
Walking to the end of a large corridor she saw daylight. Approaching closer still, she saw that the light seeped in through a large gaping hole at the end of what used to be an entire wing of the hospital. Half of the hospital was missing—torn clean off.
Cautiously, Alyssa tiptoed up to the edge of the severed floor and looked down to see a vast thirty story drop span out across the devastated ruins of an urban landscape. Desolate buildings, much of them reduced to rubble, littered the valley below. Many of them were charred black, and coated with the gray crystallized dust of a nuclear fallout. Ash and sand swirled about in the gusts of wind which painted the sky monochromatic and bleak.
“Oh my God,” said Alyssa in disbelief.
“I’m afraid God had nothin’ to do with it,” a masculine voice rang out behind her.
Alyssa spun around in startled fright, but tripped over her own two feet and almost toppled over the ledge. With lighting quick speed a leather gloved hand grabbed her and snatched her back from the brink of certain death.
Looking up with surprised eyes, Alyssa instantly recognized the figure standing before her. “You?”
Tipping back the brim of his cowboy hat, the tall, dark, handsome cowboy said, “Welcome to the end of the world, Mrs. Briggs.”
“How do you know my name? And what do you mean by the end of the world?”
Pointing his gloved finger out across the barren landscape, he spoke in a grim tone of voice, “Just take another gander at them there ruins.”
Alyssa turned and looked back out across the copper tones smeared with black soot and sprinkled with white ash. “A last stand?”
“A desperate gamble played by fools, if you ask me. The prevailing nuclear winter has darn near wiped out half of the human race. On the other hand, the Decrepits, or zombies as you probably called them, aren’t even fazed by the radiation. Makes sense, considering they’ve already got both feet in the coffin.” Reaching into his duster jacket the cowboy took out a tray of tobacco and a square patch of aged paper and began rolling his own cigarette.
“Please, tell me. What happened?”
“Well, ma’am, it’s like this, see. Once the scourge spread across the whole godforsaken planet, the remaining world powers tried one last desperate attempt to eradicate the monsters once and for all. But in the end, their plan failed. The scorched earth policy only left humanity bent and broken and trying to fend of starvation in the wake of a nuclear fallout.”
He looked out over the bleak landscape with an immeasurable sadness in his eyes. “I know it’s hard, but please … I need to know.” Alyssa stood beside him and listened to the rest of his story.
“I’ll never forget the day the bombs fell. They filled the sky so thick that they blotted out the sun. Their shade blanketed the Earth, and all at once they ignited with flashes of white light so hot that if you dare looked at it your eyeballs would melt inside your own skull. Then the winds came—winds of fire and death. Anything downwind of the fallout was set ablaze. Most of the forests are gone now. Not much in the way of agriculture remains. Not ‘round these parts anyway.”
Alyssa turned back toward the cowboy who pulled out a match, struck it against the stubble of his chin, and lit his cigarette. “What year is it?” she asked.
“It’s 2016 according to the old calendar. To those of us still kickin’ it’s three Z.E., ma’am.”
“Z.E.?”
“The third year of the Zombie Era.”
“You mean to tell me that I’ve been asleep for over three years? How is that possible? How am I even alive? And why are you here?”
“Ya’see, Miss Briggs, I made a promise to a friend of yours, Ms. Ramirez. I’m supposed to check up on you every so often to make sure the machines are running and to keep the generators going as long as I possibly can.”
Alyssa’s eyes lit up. “Rachael is alive? But how? Do you know where she is?”
“Apologies, ma’am. I do not. She’ll contact me when the time is right. But I wouldn’t worry, since as you well know, she tends to have a bit of difficulty dying.”
“Yeah, that would be Rachael,” Alyssa answered with a grin. “So how on earth did I get to be in a coma? How am I even alive, for that matter? I’m afraid I don’t remember anything since getting bit. I mean, I remember that I was infected and then... Oh my God,” Alyssa put her hands over her mouth and looked at the cowboy in fearful recollection. “I was infected!”
Resting his cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, he tapped it with his middle finger and flicked the growing train of ash away. “It will take a bit of tellin’, but it’s like this. I followed you folks out to Lake Eerie. I was setting up my campsite when suddenly the whole earth below my feet shook with a tremendous tremor
. At first I thought it was a quake, but then bubbles boiled to the surface of the lake. An underground explosion, I reckon. A while later a burnt body washed up on shore. I fished it out to see who or what it was and discover that beneath the charcoal was a beautiful woman. At first she wasn’t breathing, but then she was. Back from the very brink of death.”
“That’d be Rachael then?”
“You reckon correctly. That evening, as we sat by the campfire, she told me everything that had occurred. At first daylight we set out to find you. Rachael held out hope that it wasn’t too late to save you. Well, ma’am, it looks like her instincts were right on the money.” The cowboy took a long drag on his cigarette then exhaled through his nostrils.
“But how? How come the infection didn’t consume me like the others? Why didn’t I turn?”
“The military boys had the sense to have you frozen in a meat locker once you got above ground. By the time we’d caught up to them they’d already fished up a doc. We had you thawed out and then you went under the knife for a long hard day. Something about a bone marrow transplant, if I recall.”
“You mean like the Berlin patient?”
“I’m sorry, but I do not know who that is.”
“It was the first person to effectively be cured of the AIDs virus. They gave him a complete bone marrow transplant from an HIV resistant donor, and he fully recovered.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said blowing out a smoke ring. “That sounds about right to me. But whatever they did to you, it took you to the brink of death and left you there.”
Tears boiled from Alyssa’s bloodshot eyes as she looked out over the monochromatic desolation. Rachael saved her life. And she was out there somewhere. Wiping her tears with the back of her hand, she turned to the cowboy and asked, “Will you help me find her?”
“Ah reckon so,” the cowboy said with a demure grin. “But I’ll have to water my plants first.”
“Plants?” Alyssa inquired.
“I grow tomato plants and—”
Ravenous moans echoed up from the depths of the hallway. Both of them spun back around in time to see the shadows crawling along the hospital walls as a horde of undead shambled up the corridor toward them. Crooked arms and rigor-mortised-fingers reached and clawed desperately to seize fresh meat.
“Damn Decrepits must have caught my scent and followed me up here.” The cowboy whipped out a handgun, spun it around on his finger with pizzazz, and handed it off to Alyssa. “Here, I reckon you’re gonna need this.”
“Thanks,” Alyssa said as she checked the clip. She slapped it back in and pulled back the slide, loading a round into the chamber. She could almost remember a time when she didn't know the first thing about shooting guns. Now it seemed second nature to her.
Down the hall a host of snarling zombies shambled toward them. Their gray rotting skin looked worse than Alyssa remembered. Many of them have boils and blisters which oozed a creamy white puss that smelled something terrible. Alyssa started to cough and gag at the repugnant stench, and quickly covered her mouth and nose with the sleeve of her jacket.
The cowboy slid out a self-reloading shotgun out of the gun sheath on his long duster jacket, cocked it, and brushed the rim of his hat back with his thumb so he could get a better eye on the monsters. “You ready for this?”
“Ready as I’ll ever be.”
With the short end of the cigarette hanging from his lips, the cowboy mumbled, “Don’t fergit, aim for their heads.”
Alyssa took aim and raised her gun. Just then a current of air swept under them and kicked up their coat tails, causing them to flap nimbly in the breeze.
Alyssa Briggs squeezed down on the trigger of her gun until the hammer was cocked all the way back. She never thought her life would end with something as inconsequential as a bite. But, whether fortune or fate, the universe had something else in store for her. Up from the ashes of ruin, like the legendary phoenix, she was reborn. Her new life started here and now. Not with a hollow scream fading into the listless night, but with a bang and a flash of light.
THE END
To Be Continued in:
BITTEN2
LAND OF THE RISING DEAD
(NOW AVAILABLE!)
About the Author
TRISTAN VICK GRADUATED FROM MONTANA State University with degrees in English Literature and Asian Cultural Studies. He speaks fluent Japanese and lives in Japan with his wife and daughter. When he’s not commuting on the train or teaching English he spends his time reading, writing, blogging, and eating sara-udon. He is the author of the Bitten zombie series, numerous short stories, and is editor of the non-fiction essay collections Beyond an Absence of Faith, Seasons of Freethough, and Reason Against Blasphemy. You can learn more about the author or contact him at: www.tristanvick.com
Table of Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue Survival Instinct
1 Outbreak
2 Disturbia
3 A Mother’s Worst Nightmare
4 Entanglement
5 A Bad Day
6 Extraction
7 Almost Road Kill
8 Debriefing
9 After Dark
10 Collision Course
12 Overrun
13 Caged
14 My Zombie Valentine
15 Dangerous Encounters
16 Blood Farm
17 No Escape But For Death
18 Blood Market
19 Mirror Mirror
20 The Dynamic Duo
21 Necrocracy
22 Judgment Day
23 Gunslinger
24 Devil’s Due
25 Awakened
26 Family Reunion
27 Death Camp
28 Painting the Town Red
29 The Third Coast
30 Some R & R
31 The White room
32 Fractured
33 Psychosis
34 Z Day
35 Escape
36 The Last Mile
Epilogue: Resurrection Virus
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