by Will Lemen
Others quickly locked their doors, hoping that would bring them safety, but in the end, they would find that they had trapped themselves, and through the glass windows of their four-wheeled metal coffins, watched the end of world as they knew it unfold before their eyes.
These people, that had chosen to trap themselves inside their vehicles, found themselves surrounded and waiting for help that never came. They never left their cars again, and died of thirst or met their doom through starvation, or in some cases, self-termination was the chosen method to end their torment. Their cause of death no matter how it occurred, would later prove to be irrelevant, as shortly after their demise (provided that no brain trauma had occurred) they would reanimate. Ultimately joining the innumerable forces of our undead arch-enemies, and become one of our greatest nemesis as we attempted to commandeer transportation among the abandon vehicles that were strung out along our countries highway system.
Others tried to plow through the impassable mass of automobiles, turning the road into a no rules demolition derby.
The sound of crunching metal and smashing glass filtered through the high-pitched human screams of terror, as people were being crushed between the wrecking cars, some were being ran over, others were pinned under vehicles.
In their panic to save themselves, some people were backing up and spinning their tires on the pedestrians they had just trapped under their cars, jetting blood onto cars and people alike, like a crimson waterspout, causing even more panic.
I could feel my heart thumping rapidly in my chest as my foot slid slowly off the brake pedal, and as my vehicle began to inch forward, I could see several bloody bodies on and around other stopped cars.
Now one of newly sighted victims, who was knocked down and flattened by a panicked driver, who looked as though she should not have been moving, was dragging her mutilated body out from under the vehicle that had rolled over her.
Her jaw was crushed and broken off from her skull; it was hanging down passed her collarbone like a grotesque necklace, held on only by her scratched and torn facial skin. Flesh and muscle looked as if it had been peeled from her right forearm and hand by a jagged piece of metal, leaving several inches of shredded skin dangling from the exposed veins and bone.
Some of her skin was left hanging from the underside of the car that had ravaged her body, and was dripping blood onto the road.
As I watched the crimson drops hit the puddle of blood beneath them, the noise from the chaos around me disappeared, and it seemed I could hear each drop making a splash into the pool of blood below, as if I were hearing a leaky faucet dripping in the middle of the night.
The woman somehow had managed to stand up and move; and she was moving toward me.
Her wobbling motion snapped me back from what I can only describe as a daydream in the middle of this nightmare I was experiencing.
She too, was unwieldy and clumsy. Walking as if she was intoxicated, yet her head seemed balanced like it wasn't attached to her swaying body.
The look in her overly blood shot eyes was not one of pain, but one of anger and rage, it was the look of a crazed maniac bent on destroying something, and that something was me.
After seeing what had just happened to some of my fellow freeway travelers, and the growing number of what seemed to be reanimated dead people on the scene, the feeling that my life was now in serious jeopardy overwhelmed me. I felt that my escape was now paramount to my survival, and like many of the other people, I also panicked.
I hit the accelerator pedal hard and my spinning tires squealed loudly as the concrete road stripped the rubber from them. I swerved around the car in front of me, narrowly missing another vehicle and a panicked woman who was screaming and flailing her arms about like a scarecrow on a windy day.
As I passed the hysterical woman, I had a momentary thought.
"I should stop and pick her up!"
That thought quickly passed as another thought pushed it out of my mind.
"Hell with her, the bitch wouldn't stop for me."
No more thoughts of helping anybody (but myself) seeped into my brain after that, as I sped between a truck and the car the Good Samaritan had abandoned and raced up the exit ramp, now only able to see the gruesome fracas in my rearview mirror.
With the mayhem far behind me now, my heart was still pounding hard in my chest, and my breathing was labored as if I had just ran a mile in under four minutes.
I had sped onto the surface streets where the traffic was sparse, and in my endeavor to traverse the area, I meandered through the unacquainted streets, my mind still reeling from what I'd just witnessed, trying to digest the horrific scene and rationalize some semblance of sense to it.
My momentary panic subsided, and I told myself that what I had just experienced was just an isolated incident, probably people using PCP, or Bath Salts, or some other synthetic drug that caused them to act in such a horrific way.
I continued on my journey homeward, and while driving through an oak-shaded residential area, I caught a glimpse of what I thought was an aircraft flying overhead, but I never got a good look at it.
"News helicopters most likely," I thought, figuring I would turn on the local news when I got home, and they would have the whole story of what really had happened back on the freeway.
Moments later and long before I would arrive to what I thought would be the safety and security of my home. An emergency broadcast blasted across the radio waves, alerting everyone listening, that there seemed to be some kind of outbreak, and many random and extremely violent acts were taking place all across the region and more incidents were being chronicled even as the report aired.
That's when I began to fear for my families wellbeing.
I began to run stop signs and stop lights if I could see no other vehicles were in the immediate area.
Rolling stops became the norm for me, and every other driver on the road that was aware of the so-called outbreak, and I narrowly avoided several accidents along the way.
Trying to call family members was of no use, the cell phone carriers were deluged with an avalanche of calls, and the result was that nobody was getting through.
As the miles fell behind me, I made my way closer to my home. I couldn’t help wondering if my family was there, and if so, were they safe?
By now, things had gotten so bad that most of the radio stations had stopped airing their regular formats and were giving constant updates on the upheaval that was gripping the area, and as I would come to find out, the whole nation, and the world.
Along the way, I began to see more and more of the violent acts, like the ones that I had witnessed during the life and death struggles on the highway, and that the radio was now reporting on. Not all of which were confined to the streets and roads.
While passing an old Victorian house, I watched a woman run out onto her front porch screaming, only to be pulled back inside by two teenage girls with what were becoming the all too prevalent crimson stains on the front of their clothes, and the same color liquid dripping from their mouths and hair.
They both had a chilling glare in their eyes that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. It was the same look that the woman who had climbed out from under the car and lumbered toward me on the freeway had had.
It was witnessing scenes like that which made me more resolute than ever to make it back to my home and my family at any cost.
When I did finally make it to the subdivision where I lived, I approached my house, and with my goal in sight, a sense of relief fell over me.
I could see my wife Gin, and my two sons, Billy and Jacob huddled together in the driveway. When my wife saw me coming down the street, she started to wave her hands over her head to get my attention, a gesture that was unnecessary considering the dire circumstances.
When I pulled into my driveway, the three of them hurriedly approached my van.
"I thought you'd never get here!" Gin said, as the panicked look on her face was replaced wi
th one of concerned joy.
"Have you heard? It's all over the television."
"You mean about the attacks? Yes, it's all over the radio. I saw it close up too; there were multiple homicides on the freeway right in front of me. People were screaming and running everywhere, cars were wrecking into each other and running over people, and I just barely got away myself."
I could see the look of fear growing in her eyes again.
"What are we going to do?" she asked, now shaking with fear as tears welled up in her eyes.
"The first thing we're going to do is get into the house. Now! Let’s go boys, everyone in the house," I ordered sternly, leading the way into our home.
Back to Contents
WELCOMING THE NEIGHBORS
Locking the door behind us, I asked my family.
"Have any of you seen anyone being attacked?"
"No, but a lot of cars have been speeding in and out of the subdivision," Gin answered, still shaking.
"Probable people like me trying to get home or leaving to find their family members. You're lucky you haven't seen an attack, it's not a pretty sight," I said, issuing them a warning.
Suddenly we heard the sound of glass breaking in the kitchen.
"What's that?" Gin asked, as she grabbed my arm.
Without hesitation, Billy ran toward the kitchen, and seconds later we heard him shout.
"Dad, Dad!"
At that moment I knew what had happened. Someone was trying to get into the house, and from the sound of it, they probably had succeeded in their endeavor.
I jerked my arm from Gin's grasp.
"Stay here honey, I'll be right back!" I said, as I quickly followed Billy into the kitchen.
Upon joining Billy in the kitchen, we stood there, momentarily stunned by what we saw.
A person had made it halfway through the patio's glass door; his clothes were saturated with blood, and his intestines were draped on each side of his twitching body as he sat there eerily straddled on the remaining pillar of broken glass that was still attached to the doorframe.
During his attempt to enter our home, he had hit the door at the top, breaking out the glass down to several inches past the door handle.
The shattering glass falling on his body had cut him in numerous places causing massive hemorrhaging, which in turn resulted in puddles of blood outside the patio door, and on our kitchen floor.
When he attempted to step through the opening, he had slipped in his own blood and fell on the remaining glass that was still in the door.
That glass was broken at about a forty-five degree angle, and as he fell, the glass had acted like a serrated knife-edge cutting him in half vertically from his crotch to his sternum as he slid along its razor sharp periphery, spilling his perforated and severed guts onto our kitchen floor.
"That's Jon from down the street, Julie's husband! That's him all right," Billy announced.
Just then, Jacob bolted into the kitchen from an adjoining room, leaving his mother alone in the hallway still waiting by the front door.
"He's split in two!" Jacob yelled.
"But he's not dead!" Billy said excitedly glancing back and forth, as he began to show signs of a person who was about to go into full panic mode.
"But he's split in two!" Jacob repeated, again yelling.
"He's almost in two separate pieces, he should be dead," Billy said, shaking his head in disbelief.
"What's the problem in there, is everyone all right?" Gin yelled, as her curiosity was starting to get the better of her.
"Don't come in here honey; you don't want to see this." I yelled back, fighting back a sickening feeling in my stomach.
I had seen combat in two different theaters of operation while in the Marine Corps, I had watched as men kicked and screamed as they were handed their own limbs to hold as they were transported onto a helicopter to be medivaced out of the LZ (landing zone, for you non-military types). I had seen young boys with both of their legs blown completely off, and their intestines hanging out of their shirts. I had seen many horrendous things, but I had never seen anything that even came close to this.
There in front of us was a man that I had seen many times at a distance; however, I had never talked to him. This man was hanging on my patio door almost cut in two, he should have been dead. Instead, he was snarling and growling, spitting up blood, mucus, and some pinkish whitish foam. The look in his eyes was the same as I'd seen before, first on the women's face who was going to attack me on the freeway, then on the two girl's faces as I made my way home that day, it was the look of fury.
"Don't come in here, honey!" I called out again to my wife.
Of course, telling someone not to look at something is always an open invitation for him or her to want to look even more. So of course, into the kitchen Gin came.
It would have been bad enough for her to enter the kitchen and see our neighbor's body cut in half and suspended on what was left of our patio door. It would have been bad enough, just to see his intestines bulging out of his stomach and draped over his legs, with the balk of them in a pile under one of our kitchen chairs.
But neighbor Jon was still alive, or so we thought at the time, and he was snarling and growling, and spitting, and as his head lurched as he snapped at us, his upper torso bobbed up and down, sawing ever so slightly on the front of his rib cage.
Pain did not seem to be a factor in Jon's world; only anger and ferocity were displayed as we watched his teeth slowly turn to a deep dark-yellow color, which then quickly began to exhibit a putrid brown hue with a tinge of baby-shit green as his gums transformed from a normal pink hue, to a sickening bluish-green tint.
Pinkish-red tears began to flow down Jon's cheeks, as we watched his eyes become more and more bloodshot while his head twisted and jerked on his compressed and bent rotating neck.
As soon as Gin got a glimpse of the horrible sight, she stopped for a moment staring in disbelief, and then let out a blood-curdling scream so loud, that the boys and I had to put our hands over our ears to block the pain from the overload of decibels it caused.
Before I had a chance to think, I blurted out.
“Calm down honey, it's Jon from down the street."
She screamed again, this time not as loud as before, more like a high-pitched moan. It was almost like she was confused, and now trying to decide if this were real or not, and if Jon was all right or not.
My tone now became somber.
"Don't worry, we'll help him," I said, knowing that there was nothing we could do, and my experience in the Marine Corps told me that Jon would be dead very soon. After all, he was in far worse shape than many men that I had seen die before they could get help.
Moreover, I knew that help wasn't coming, at least not in the normal time frame that we were accustomed to.
Jon is dead meat, I thought to myself. Little did I know at the time, just how right I was?
By now, Gin was crying and shaking uncontrollably, I put my arms around her as she turned to me and buried her face into my shoulder sobbing.
The sight of our neighbor split in half and dangling on the broken glass door was just too much for her to take, hell, it was too much for all of us to take.
"It's going to be all right honey," I said, trying not to show her how frantic I felt too.
We could hear the television, which was on in the living room, and like the radio, all regular broadcasting had been preempted and the emergency broadcasting system was now issuing all of the warnings, and live video feeds from numerous violent occurrences around the area were being shown.
"What did the television just say," Jacob inquired.
"They said, don't do something?" Billy said, glaring at him. "Go find out!"
"Right," Jacob said agreeably, finding this to be a good excuse to leave the horror that was being played out in our kitchen.
We turned our attention back to our neighbor Jon, who was still jiggling his head around and snarling at us.
Many of Jon's muscles, tendons, and nerves had been severed, so he was unable to move anything below his neck, but his shoulders swayed a little from the momentum of his head movement as he tried in vain to bite us.
To add to the gruesome chain of events, Jon had begun to gurgle and spit up small chunks of his intestines and pieces of his lungs as he continued to growl and snap at us like a mad dog.
Gin then asked sadly.
"What are we going to do?"
"We could try to get him off the door, and maybe lay him down," I said reluctantly.
"Don't do that dad, stay away from him," Jacob muttered in a low tone as he returned from the living room.
"The television says if you get bit or he scratches you, or maybe even gets his blood or any of his bodily fluids on you, or in your eyes or mouth, you could get infected with whatever it is he has, and turn into what Jon is now."
I quickly yelled. "Stay away from him, everybody get back."
We all stepped back a few feet and watched as our neighbor spewed blood and thrashed his head around violently, all the time staring at us with that murderous look in his eyes that was becoming all too familiar to me.
Then, as quickly as it had started, it was over.
The constant vibration of Jon's head lurching back and forth in his futile effort to get to us had inadvertently loosened a large shard of glass that was still clinging to the top of the doorframe.
When it fell, it buried itself deep into the top of Jon's skull like a dagger, and suddenly all of his movement ceased, and his head slumped to the side at a ninety-degree angle.
"We need to do something," Gin whimpered, still in tears and shaking.
I could see it in my wife's eyes that she was scared. Hell, we were all scared. But Gin in particular was having very hard time watching the chain of events that were taking place in our home.
"Well there's nothing we can do for him," I said. "We need to lookout for ourselves now."
In the chaos caused by our neighbor's untimely visit and subsequent unwelcome stay, we had failed to hear the crackle of the surrounding gunfire outside.
