Hell Happened (Book 1)

by Terry Stenzelbarton

  Jerry wasn’t a survivalist, but he did know how to survive, and over the weeks as the hole became enlarged, Jerry would often ask himself why he was digging it. Sometimes he would spend the entire weekend just digging deeper into the hill and enlarging the hole he dug and think about what he was digging and how he could improve upon it. Every few feet he’d add rail road ties to shore it up and keep it from caving in on him and his tractor.

  Randy, his 22-year-old son and video game aficionado, would sometimes come out and check on his dad. He was no farmer and if the end of civilization had not encroached upon his life, he probably would have continued going to community college until he was forced to get a job at a local store in Moody, working as a stocker or cashier and hoping one day to rise to assistant manager. Randy was not a motivated young man, but he loved his dad and his dad loved him, even if they didn’t understand each other and had far different work ethics.

  Jerry’s daughter, two years younger than Randy, had gone off to the military the day she turned 18. The farm life was not for her. She needed adventure. She had been an athlete in high school, but not outstanding at anything. She’d inherited her dad’s independence and he’d applauded her choice, which was the final wedge that had driven his wife away.

  Jerry hadn’t heard from his daughter since the virus killed off nearly everyone in the world and the phone and internet had gone down, but he thought of her every day and hoped she’d inherited his and his son’s resistance to the virus and was still alive. Someday he hoped to find out one way or the other.

  The hole started becoming a survival shelter after Jerry watched some end-of-the-world documentary on late-night cable television. That was a year before the national news started warning people of a new flu being reported. It had interested him and for the next few months, Jerry slowly built a cramped nine-room shelter under the hill in the hole behind his house. As a farmer he had plenty of lumber around from an older barn he’d torn down which he used for walls and floors. There were still 50 bags of concrete left over from the new garage he’d built the previous spring to sturdy up the shelter. He also had the time on his hands which he had to put to work.

  He stocked the shelter’s cellar with hundreds of MREs he purchased off the internet, bulk vegetables and canned goods he bought wholesale, installed his own custom-built air filter and water purifier with parts bought off eBay and all L.E.D. lighting because he thought it looked nice. He wasn’t stocking it in case the world collapsed; he stocked it in case another hurricane shut everything down like Katrina had done.

  There was a bathroom and shower with a good drain field far from the shelter, an efficiency kitchen that had a freezer for the fish caught, and animals hunted, and a two-burner electric stove, stainless steel sink and a refrigerator Jerry had at one time filled with Budweiser beer, bar-be-cue sauce, mustard and assorted soft drinks.

  ~ ~ ~

  Once civilization started falling, he’d also moved in some furniture he had taken out of the farm house. He knew that place would draw attention while the entrance to the shelter was hidden behind the hill.

  After the government fell, he moved his weapon’s safe from the office in the old barn to his new office in the shelter for protection and because Jerry knew Alabama Power Company would not be able to provide power to his home and farm now that everyone who worked there was dead or a near-dead body still walking around just searching for human flesh to eat. The farm house without electricity was a liability.

  Electricity for his shelter was provided by a waterwheel generator he built out of parts from an old Massey Ferguson tractor and a generator he picked up from Sears in Birmingham. A tributary from the river that fed Lake Joyce ran through his property and was reliable for the generator. He also had two small wind generators on the peak of the hill. For a back up he also had a Honda 6500 watt gas generator.

  A year after he’d started the shelter, and just a week before the first victims started dying enough to be mentioned on the national news, Jerry had finished installing the 150-gallon water tank and a Keltech tankless water heater. The shelter was as complete as Jerry thought he’d carry the plan.

  He hadn’t set out to create an apocalypse shelter, it just evolved to become one because of boredom and something to keep him busy when he wasn’t working in the fields of his farm or tending the 22 Holsteins he and his boy milked twice a day.

  His son Randy told him one late night as he came into the farmhouse they shared that it seemed his dad had become obsessed with the shelter and suggested his dad get out and around people more. Randy was a good boy who cared deeply for his dad, but sometimes, Jerry thought, the little brat could be meddlesome.

  Jerry had taken his son’s advice and went to the Lions Club that weekend. He still had a lifetime membership at the club. There he met up with his long-time friend Remi and they ditched the club for a little bar hopping like in the days of old. Jerry hadn’t gone out to meet a woman, still stinging from his wife leaving him years earlier, but meet someone he did. Her name was Sissy, and like Jerry she was divorced and still a little bitter from her divorce. Remi had also introduced him to a woman named Mary and promptly took off for the dance floor with the woman leaving him and Sissy at the table.

  After too many uncomfortable silent seconds, Sissy and Jerry were able to start up a conversation. They talked most of the evening while Mary and Remi danced most of the night, which seemed to please everyone. At the end of the evening as the bar lights came up, Sissy and Jerry exchanged email addresses and phone numbers.

  Now she was probably, like most of the people of the United States and all over the world, dead or wishing she was dead. They’d exchanged a couple of emails and he’d called her the Wednesday following their first meeting to arrange a real date. That Friday, however, the government issued a statement about the death totals from the “virus” that had been hardly been given a more than passing mention in the news. The government spoke of world-wide numbers and warned that people should avoid public places. Schools, colleges, churches, football games, all public events and the like were all ordered closed or cancelled.

  Jerry and Sissy put off their date as they went about their own preparations for surviving the “virus.” Sissy, who lived in an apartment in a suburb of Birmingham and was living paycheck to paycheck, needed to get food in her apartment before the stores either closed or ran out. When he tried to call her that Friday night, he got her answering machine.

  Jerry, who tried to be self-sufficient as possible, also went into town for foods he didn’t have in stock already, but the stores were already being raided for everything and he was only able to get a few items he really needed like wheat flour and lard. Hoarding and vandalism was already starting. The internet went down the following Monday, followed by the electricity and telephone service and all of the public utilities that most people depended on. Public utilities were now a thing of the past.

  The government fell fast.

  Local television, now mostly just network feeds of dead bodies in the major cities, was hosted by anyone who wanted to be on camera. The local personalities were all dead or gone and the studios had been left running until the power went out.

  Using a diesel generator, civil defense and local Alabama National Guard units took over the stations to give the news that the end of the world had happened. Even that stopped as soldiers and civilian died en masses.

  That was when Jerry and Randy moved all their belongings out of the house and into the shelter. He moved the 300-gallon diesel fuel tank that he used to store fuel for his two tractors, the skid steer and his truck, and which was still about half full, back behind the hill and hid it in some brush. The 100-gallon gas tank he had for the generator which could run the barn lights he moved to a place near the diesel tank, but not so close as someone who found one, would find the other.

  The world died while Jerry and Randy prepared for what was to come. They both thought they too would die, but when they didn’t, when they hear
d some others were surviving, very damn few, but some, they put serious and thoughtful effort into making surviving on their own possible.

  On the radio, when they could pick up a station with someone talking and not a loop of the civil defense instructions, they heard that very few others survived.

  They also heard some of those who survived became the worst nightmare of humankind. Some people were mutated into a flesh eating, super strong and violently aggressive “zombies.” Even though they had never been dead, this label stuck.

  It was bad. Real bad.

  The world died around them and each night, after closing and locking the shelter, the two would talk about what was next for them. Neither had an idea.

  Eddie showed up soon after the fall. He never left.

  Unreliable, but still believable, stories on the radio told of small encampments being attacked in the night by the savage not-deads. It was a glimpse into the outside world for the shelter’s inhabitants.

  A mutated virus laid waste to the populations around the world. It might have come from some highly-organized terrorist cell, maybe some scientist who’d made a mistake, some nation that didn’t know what it was unleashing upon the world, or from the never-before-seen meteor shower that had peppered the earth for three days not long before the outbreak.

  The speed at which it infected the populations around the world was staggering, but the after effects were even worse.

  People died. Billions died.

  It started in different countries around the world at about the same time. Newscasts down played it at first, but when people by the tens of thousands began dying, people of every race, of every faith, on every continent, it couldn’t be down played any longer. Most of the population on earth was dead less than two weeks after the first reported death. There was no vaccine, no explanation, and no chance at isolating the virus.

  The word “Armageddon” and phrases like “The End of Time” were tossed around by television commentators. Church attendance was at an all-time high.

  None of it changed what was to come.

  More than 99 percent of the world’s population died within two days of becoming infected. There were stories of people lasting three days, but they too died so no one cared that someone survived a few hours longer than their loved one.

  From the first known and documented victim to the wholesale deaths of tens or hundreds of millions in a single day, less than a month had passed.

  The victims coughed and sweated for a day or so, said their good-byes then died. It wasn’t a painful or horrifying death like in the movies, just a few coughs, a body temperature of 100 degrees plus or minus, then the brain just shut off and the person dropped dead.

  Cats had also died, everything from the African Golden to the European Wildcat, from the wildest jungle cat to the most domesticated house cat, all had fallen to the virus. Other species that were known to have died were bats, horses and, much to everyone’s great relief, the common mosquito. These were just the known species to have died, others might have but all the scientists who could have looked into the death of a species were all dead. Some species of birds died, while others survived and the same went for some snakes, but not others. It was a mystery no one left alive was able to figure out.

  Of the fraction of a percent of humans who survived, someone figured about 50 percent of those became “zombies.” They were not really zombies because they were alive, and they were more intelligent than movie zombies. The not-dead hid from the light of day and avoided bright lights and flames.

  No one knew why.

  There was no one left to investigate why the zombies didn’t die.

  There was no one left to investigate why they would want to eat human flesh.

  There was no one left to do anything except survive as best they could.

  The not-dead humans did not eat cows or pigs or dogs that had survived their owner’s demise. The zombies only went after live humans, or, recently dead humans, which was pretty gross to watch. They feasted on the flesh with gusto, sometimes even before the victim was dead.

  Oddly, they also didn’t eat other not-dead humans. No one knew why and without scientists to explain their reasoning, it just remained a mystery.

  The not-deads didn’t use guns or bows and arrows or knives or any weapon. They used strength and speed and teeth to de-flesh a good human.

  The humans left alive found out early that killing a zombie was not as easy as just shooting them with a shotgun. The damn things seemed to have no feeling in their extremities. You could put a bullet in their arms and legs and the zombies would continue to attack.

  A shot in the torso of a zombie wasn’t a guaranteed kill as some found out too late. People had witnessed more than one zombie eating a fresh kill and the consumed flesh would just fall out the open hole in the gunshot zombie.

  Killing a zombie was only achieved with a good shot to the brain stem or by putting enough rounds into its body that blood loss or detached nerves put the zombie down. They were not an easy kill, but they weren’t a major issue if uninfected humans barricaded themselves in to a secure location before sunset and stayed out of buildings they were not sure were clear of the zombies.

  Something in the virus with which the zombies had been infected gave them superior visual ability in very low light and darkness, and a sense of smell that could pick up the scent of human miles away. They were super strong and while not stupid, they were not geniuses either. They would work together to break into strongholds to get at the humans inside.

  Jerry had come across one other stronghold that had been raided by the zombies not far from his own farm.

  It hadn’t been pretty. It hadn’t been clean. He hadn’t gone back.

  ~ ~ ~

  Now Jerry sat at the table with the other remaining six people who were living in his shelter. He didn’t demand to sit at the head of the table; it was just the way things had evolved. His son and Eddie sat to his right, followed by an empty chair where Tony usually sat. Kellie sat at the other end of the table with Monica and Terrill on her right with an empty chair beside him where Jeff usually sat and Mike filled the last chair.

  As usual, Monica dug in to the food before everyone had fully sat down and adjusted their chairs. It was a decent meal of large-mouth bass caught by Randy, Eddie and Tony early that morning, baked potatoes from the larder, some fresh asparagus Kellie had picked and a bundt cake with a sugar icing made by the former soldier Terrill. There was cold milk fresh from the 20 cows Jerry kept in the barn.

  They filled their plates in silence except for the clatter of serving utensils on the steel serving dishes.

  It was Jerry who eventually broke the silence as to why he was so angry.

  “Jeff and Tony went Odenville to scout out a place that was supposed to have more ammunition and some heavier weapons,” Jerry explained. They had nearly used up the ammunition for the AR-15 Jerry always carried with him. They had another 30 rounds for the Browning 12 gage and 50 for the Remington 700. Randy’s weapon of choice was a Ruger Model 77 .30/06 with a 3x8 low-light scope. “I didn’t want to send them, but they’ve been cooped up here for two weeks and they wanted to get away and do something beside work the gardens and build this place up.

  “I shouldn’t have let them go, but Jeff was becoming a pain in the ass and I thought he might do us some good,” Jerry said between mouthfuls. “I told them to take the quads and stay off the main roads, and I know I said to be back by six. Tony went along because I know I can trust him to be smart and he gets along better with Jeff than anyone else.”

  Kellie was the first to voice a positive spin. “Maybe they ran into some trouble and had to hide out. I’m sure they’ll show up. If not tonight, then in the morning. You know they are both smart enough to find shelter before dark.”

  “Dammit, I should have sent them with the truck with the radio in it so if they had trouble they could have called us,” Jerry said with recrimination.

  “Jerry, you don�
�t know that would have been safer. The next time we go foraging, we’ll see if we can’t find some of those long distance walkie-talkies,” Kellie said.

  “We’re not survivalists and we’re all doing the best we can in the worst possible situation.”

  “Yeah, well,” Jerry allowed, “like you said, we never had to do this kind of stuff before and the only reason I’m in charge is because I accidentally made this place.” He used his chin to point around the small dining area. “I was thinking of retiring here in 15 or 20 years and watch the sun set for the rest of my life.

  “I didn’t think I’d be making life and death decisions for other people and just hoping to make it through a day to make it to tomorrow.”

  “We’re all in the same boat, Jerry. I used to be a teacher of special needs children, and every day I asked myself if this was all they would become,” Kellie said. “And now all of them are dead and nothing I did in my life has meant anything.

  “I spent four days walking with Molly,” she said referring to her multi-breed little mutt, “and would have walked until I died or until someone killed me because I was ready to die. Everyone in my life was gone. Every mistake I made didn’t mean anything anymore. I was a clean slate when I came across your field,” Kellie went on, distracting Jerry from his sulking thoughts. “We’re all new at this and you’re doing the best job anyone could ask of you.”

  “Thanks,” he grumbled, not really mollified, but amendable to her words.

  “Yeah dad,” Randy added after a few seconds of silence. “What she said.”

  Randy had never been an articulate kid. He wasn’t the smartest kid in school and failed a few classes, forcing him to take summer school twice. He’d never been very talkative unless it was something to do with video games. He was a large boy, topping his six-foot-tall dad by two inches and 60 pounds.

  The seven of them ate in silence for a while longer. Usually there was some banter around the table, but tonight the joy of being alive was muted. Tony had fit in pretty well with the group, he played with electronics, and while Jeff was a pain in the ass with counter-views on seemingly everything, he was a good mechanic and now the two of them were missing.