by A. R. Wise
She darted through the tunnel, her rifle's flashlight beam bobbing wildly in front of her. She turned and fired the weapon toward where she feared the guard would soon be. Hopefully the random blast would prevent him from chasing her.
Her gunfire rattled her senses and the ringing in her ears changed from an obnoxious hum to a deafening roar. Her own footsteps on the metal floor were silent behind the severe ringing.
She fired again as she moved backward, and then again, continuing a series of short bursts to scare the guard into hiding. Her hearing was devastated and the ringing in her ears became so painful that she couldn't help but cry and cringe after every shot.
Then the rifle stopped working. She pulled the trigger over and over, but the tumultuous explosions had stopped. The rifle no longer worked, and she had no idea why.
Echo turned and prepared to run, desperate to stay alive, but she stopped dead in her tracks as her rifle's beam illuminated the corridor beyond. She'd been moving backward for so long that the gruesome contents of the ventilation shaft were a shock when she turned around and saw them.
There were men in there with her. The first was almost at her feet, and his tortured limbs caused her to quiver in terror. He was on his belly and pulled himself forward with what used to be his arms but were now just shattered sticks of flesh and splintered bone. His skin was devoid of pink luster and his wounds didn't bleed red, but instead seeped a sticky black fluid. He had sunken cheeks and wrinkled skin that seemed to have shrunk, revealing his yellow and black teeth in a demonic visage. His eyes were similarly exposed, bulbous and protruding from his face as he stared up at her, his mouth opening and closing as if desperate for food or water. The creature had no legs and what trailed behind him instead were strands of rotted intestine that slid through his black trail of blood like a limp tail. He snapped his jaws at her as he drew closer.
Beyond the eviscerated creature were more of the living dead, all of them with tremendous wounds that would've killed a normal man. They reached out to her as they staggered forward and clawed at the space between, as if hoping to hasten their advance any way they could.
Echo Dawn turned away in time to be blinded by the muzzle flash of the guard that chased her. There was no pain before the darkness.
CHAPTER 1 – Surviving in a Dead World
BEN WATANABE
Twenty years had passed since the outbreak of the zombie virus decimated the world's population. I survived while six and a half billion others died. I didn't survive on luck.
My father prepared me for this. He trained me to fight and survive in a post apocalyptic world. While my friends were watching television or playing videogames, I was in the wild, learning to kill animals with deadfall traps. He taught me how to filter water through a sock filled with gravel before boiling it to ensure safety. He scolded me as I used my knife too often, insisting that it should be a tool of last resort when all other possibilities failed, to help keep the blade sharp for when I really needed it. Our vacations were never to Disney World, or Six Flags - instead, he would blindfold me and drop me off in the middle of a forest preserve with the promise that he would return in a week to see if I survived. My birthday presents were blowguns, bows and arrows, and guns.
My father saved my life, but he did it with the intention of turning me into an assassin.
The apocalypse had been planned, but the men holding the reins lost their grip. I was only thirteen and living in Georgia when it began, but was captured and brought to a facility where they ran tests on me and several other children, most of them much younger than I was. My capture wasn't an accident, and got me close to my first target, a general that was involved in the development of the virus. Unfortunately, by the time I found him he was already dead. A shard of glass had been pushed into his throat.
My father was supposed to meet me in a safe house several miles away from the city, but he was gone when I got there. He left behind twelve files labeled with a name that contained all of the information he'd been able to gather about the people responsible for the apocalypse, including where they were scheduled to go after the virus spread and what land they owned. The first file, labeled 'Covington', concerned the general I'd found dead in the facility where they were running tests on me. I burned that file and moved on to the next target.
The next two targets were easy to find and convinced me that my mission would be easier than it ended up being. Nineteen years have passed since then, and in that time I've only managed to find two more of the initial twelve, leaving me with seven files unburned. I'd nearly resigned myself to failure when I was tipped off about a caravan traveling north of Colorado that was being run by a man named Jerald Scott.
Jerald Scott's file was the thinnest of them all. He was a member of the military, but all details about his service were missing. I had a picture of him, staring at the camera with a hateful scowl and a pock marked face, that had my father's writing on it.
"Kill on sight. Don't let him speak."
It was the only file my father had scrawled something on, and that made Jerald Scott feel somehow more important than the others. For that reason, I abandoned my other leads when I heard someone mention that a man named J. Scott had taken control of a nearby group of traders. That's how I ended up laying on the second floor of a ravaged home in a forgotten town near the Colorado border of Wyoming.
There was a scuffling noise from outside. I slid forward and peered off the edge of the dilapidated house. The two-story home sat alongside a cleared road and I had been staying in it for four days, far longer than I usually camped. The area showed signs of frequent travel. Abandoned cars had been pushed off the road outside of this house, a sign that humans were using it to traverse the flat land of Wyoming's eastern plains. This wasn't uncommon, as many of the roads had been cleared over the past two decades, but this one was cared for. Most of the roads that crisscrossed the country had succumbed to the elements, cracking and shifting until they were nearly impossible to drive over in anything but the sturdiest of vehicles, but this one was repaired. Someone used sand to fill in the potholes and had cut down trees that were encroaching on the road to prevent their roots from breaking apart the concrete. This wasn't simply a road used for temporary passage; this was a trade route.
The north wall of the house I was camped in had been torn off, probably by a tornado or perhaps just from termites. The façade lay in the weeds below, broken into several pieces with vegetation growing through the cracks. Most squatters would avoid a structure in this condition, but as the years went by there were fewer and fewer homes that hadn’t fallen apart in some way or another, and the roof on this one was still sound. It was late summer and cold weather wasn't an issue. The breeze from the missing wall was a luxury rather than a burden.
I stayed on my belly as I moved to the edge overlooking the yard that sat between the house and the cleared road. The sound I'd heard could've been caused by a myriad of creatures, most of which I'd eat given the chance, but there was always the possibility it was something that would eat me too.
I'd heard moaning from somewhere in the neighborhood a couple days ago. It was the unmistakable sound of zombies, crying out in hunger as they wandered the streets. Zombies had mutated since the start of the apocalypse. Originally the virus killed its host, then reanimated it and turned the corpse into a ravenous monster intent on devouring human flesh in a seemingly chaotic, cannibalistic fervor. Corpses that were infected early on were ravaged by the bacteria in their bodies, ballooning up with gas until their stomachs burst and they fell to the ground, useless masses of flesh that withered in the sun. The disease actually seemed to hasten their decay, and most of the zombies that were created at the outset were dead in under a week. Then the mutants arrived, and with them came the assurance that humanity's time had come to an end.
Mutated zombies are immune to bacterial growth, and live on for years. While the original virus drove the creatures to attack only humans, the new mutated ones survived on
both human and animal flesh, giving them the opportunity to feed much more readily. Now, after the virus had thrived for two decades, it was only a matter of time before it mutated further and allowed for transmission into animal corpses. Once that happened there would be no chance of survival.
I stared out across the yard in search of what made the sound. I'd done my best to secure the home by destroying the staircase and stringing cans near the entrances to alert me to someone's approach, so I wasn't worried about my safety. However, if a pack of dogs had caught my scent and tracked me here, they would circle the home for as long as it took, waiting for me to wander out so they could attack. Easy meals were hard to come by these days.
Man's best friend had become one of his worst enemies after the apocalypse. It took less than a month for house pets to begin roaming the streets in packs, and within the first year, dogs had overtaken massive areas. There were no more shih tzus, dachshunds, or other small breeds anymore, all of them were quickly devoured by their larger brethren. Now, the dogs that survived were mixed breeds that stalked anything they could devour. They were vicious, efficient hunters that wasted no time in murdering any human that showed weakness. I'd seen hundreds of corpses that were torn to shreds by dogs, and I'd learned to respect and fear the canines.
Weeds moved in the distance. I was fifty yards from the road, and the movement was halfway between there and my camp. I grabbed the binoculars that I'd set near the edge of the wall and spied the movement for any sign of what it could be.
Birds took flight from a nearby tree, excited by something on the other side of the road. Their mass turned the sky black as they swarmed above, cawing and spinning as they debated which way to flee. The new world, the one we were left with after the apocalypse, was overrun with birds. Their constant chatter was a burden on the senses, but a good indicator of danger. Any humans that survived this far past the end of days had learned to listen to the birds, because when you couldn't hear them it meant something was terribly wrong. The flock of birds that nested across my yard had suddenly decided to fly away, their chatter growing more distant as they sought a safer roost. That meant there was something moving out in the weeds near the tree - something bad.
The weeds continued to shake, the movement getting closer by the second. I tried to see through them, but they stood a full four feet in most places and were nearly as thick as bundled wheat. I kept focused on the movement as it approached, spinning the dial on the top of the binoculars to adjust the focus.
I glanced up at the road, waiting for whatever had scared the birds to reveal itself. Something yipped closer to me, an animal in pain, and I focused again on the rustling weeds in front of the house. The hidden creature revealed itself at last as it pushed its way through the thick overgrowth and into the lower weeds that covered my yard. It was a dog, but unlike any that I'd seen in well over a decade.
It was a pug, and its back leg dragged uselessly behind it as the dog whimpered and tried to move forward.
I stayed silent and stared down at it in disbelief. This was not a breed that could survive in the wild. Survival of the fittest had wiped out small dogs like this long ago. This was a human's pet, which meant I was near a homestead.
I'd been watching the road for days, waiting for the caravan that used it to pass so I could follow them. This animal didn't wander here from a broken down vehicle, at least not one that I had seen on my trip here, and it couldn't survive without a human's protection for more than a few days at best.
The injury on its hind was severe. His brown fur was still wet with blood, as if he'd suffered it a day earlier at most.
Was someone using this creature to flush me out?
A dog barked from far away, near the road, and I brought the binoculars back up to look for the source. It wasn't long before I saw them. A pack of ragged creatures, mottled grey and black, thin with rib cages that were revealed with each exhalation, traipsed onto the road, sniffing in search of their prey. The sight of a feral dog pack assured me that it wasn't a raider trying to flush me out - while several people I'd encountered still used dogs for hunting, this pack was clearly not domesticated.
The pug whimpered as it staggered along below me, his wet eyes glancing around in search of an escape. He was terrified, wounded, and minutes from a painful death.
The pack caught his scent and darted into the weeds.
I was safe up in my roost, and slunk away, prepared to let the massacre play out below me. I'd made sure to carry buckets of my waste away from the house to avoid alerting any predators that I was here, and if I stayed quiet they might never notice me. A dog like this pug had no reason to be allowed to live. It was weak, helpless, and would be a burden to anyone that cared for it. This new world and I had no pity for the weak.
Cans clattered under me as the pug moved into the house, past my rudimentary alarm system. He whimpered and I could hear his leg dragging slowly over the debris in the foyer. His cries echoed through the barren halls.
The pack drew nearer and I cursed as I watched them. The smart thing to do would be to wait and let the little dog die. It would be quick. The pack would tear him to pieces and fight over his scraps. There wouldn't be more than a second of his pained screams to endure. I'd listened to thousands of creatures die, and killed a fair amount of them myself, in the twenty years since society had collapsed. This was no different.
Where did he come from? How did he survive?
I crawled through the bedroom where I'd been camped. I moved to the hallway and hurried to the wooden staircase that I'd torn down. I could hear the pug below me, crawling through the splintered wood and nails from the demolished stairs. I couldn't recall the last time I'd seen a small breed of dog.
I saw the pathetic thing scrambling over a broken board, clawing at the side as it whimpered and tried to climb onto the pile of wood. He was so small, and I struggled to remember what size this breed usually grew to. I thought they were larger than cats, but this one was miniscule. Was he a puppy?
The puppy cried out as it fell backward and rolled off the first step. When I broke the staircase, I'd left the first three steps intact and lowered a knotted rope to use for climbing. The only predator that could reach me would be a fellow human. No zombie, or dog, could climb the rope and get up to where I slept.
The pug whimpered as it rolled over and tried to climb again. I hung my head down through the gaping hole in the floor and looked out through the front door toward the wiggling weeds that separated the road from the house. Any second now the feral dogs would burst through the weeds and charge into the house.
The smart thing to do would be to hide and let this pitiful dog die. Even if I wanted to save it, I'd waited too long. If I jumped down to get it, the pack would be on me before I had the chance to climb back up again. I was a survivor, and every decision I made was based on how best to ensure my own safety. Rescuing a puppy was low on my list of priorities, yet I found myself yearning to save him.
"This is stupid," I said to myself as if simply thinking it wouldn't be convincing enough.
The pug looked up at me. Its eyes were massive, and the right one drifted to the side as if it were looking at two separate things at the same time. Its snout was nonexistent, a characteristic of the breed that I hadn't seen in the wild for a long time. This pathetic little thing wasn't built for survival in any way.
"You're being a fucking idiot, Ben." I chastised myself as I grabbed the rope and took a deep breath. The only weapon I had on me was the knife. My guns were in the other room along with my axe. If I was going to save this dog, I'd have to do it with my coveted combat knife, something my father would never forgive me for if he were here.
I swung down, landing with the puppy between my feet, and quickly swept it up into my left arm. It squealed in pain as I held it. I had my knife clenched between my teeth as I stared out the short hall, past the foyer, to the missing front door where the pack would soon charge through.
There wasn't an option of
being gentle. I tossed the dog up through the hole above me and heard its fragile body thump on the floor. It yelped in pain, but it would live - which wasn't something I could guarantee for myself.
I held the knife out in front of me with my right hand and gripped the rope with my left. It was a nylon rope, the type used for mountain climbing, and was knotted in segments separated by a foot each. The knots helped provide grips that made it easier to climb, but the pack of dogs that were about to tear me to pieces would have no problem jumping high enough to catch me before I could climb out of reach. I was about to let the rope go and face off with the inevitable, deadly fight when I heard a string of cans set up at the entrance behind me start to clang together.
"Oh fuck me!" I screamed out as I saw a zombie at the back door. It must've been attracted to the noise the dogs were making and come to investigate. The hallway led right to the doorway, with the kitchen on the right and the living room off to the opposite side. The hallway connected the back and front door, with the staircase in the center that I hung down from. Three dogs, snarling and snapping their jaws, burst through the weeds in the front yard while the moaning corpse staggered in from behind.
"All this for a God damned puppy."
I let go of the rope and stood on the broken stairs. The pack was approaching, fearless and voracious, their paws kicking up fresh dirt as they scrambled to reach me. Two of them collided at the threshold of the house and the larger one forced his way in first. It was black, tall, and had short hair. His muscles were defined by a lack of fat, and his rib cage heaved as he lunged at me.
Dogs are vicious hunters, but hunger makes them careless, and they tend to be too impetuous in their attacks. The secret to their success is their tenacity. You might be able to fend off their first few strikes, but eventually they'll catch you off guard. Luckily I wouldn't have to worry about this one getting a second chance. I stepped backward, off the third and last step, and fell a couple feet to the floor below. I knelt when I landed, and the dog's trajectory sent it flying over my head. I wasn't content with just letting him land behind me though, and caught his underside as he flew, pushing him onward like a dog missile into the zombie at the back door.
