That was one of the last things we reported. The President had done his best to assure the people that everything would be okay, but the tone of his voice and the look on his face suggested otherwise. After the speech, Johnston got word that we would be switching to the emergency broadcasting system. We were off the air.
After finishing the final broadcast, I sat at the desk, staring at the camera. I did so until Julia asked me, “Mr. Helms, are you okay?”
I didn’t respond until she asked me again. Then, I said, “It’s Andrew. Please call me Andrew.” She was always very punctual and aware of maintaining a professional attitude, but I felt that we had been through something more than your typical workday. In my opinion, we were on a first name basis now. After a moment of both of us remaining in our positions, Johnston came into the studio and looked at each of us.
Without saying a word, he just looked around the studio. He’d lost the ability to do his job and I believe he really didn’t know anything else at this point in his life.
“You’re both free to leave,” he said to us.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
He shook his head and walked slowly through the studio and into his office. He closed the door behind him. Julia stared at the door for a moment and then gazed back to me. “Is he all right?”
“How could he be?” I asked in response.
She nodded. “Are you going to leave?”
“Not sure. This is the longest shift I’ve ever worked.” I didn’t know what we were going to do. We really had no idea what it was like out there. Of course we’d received reports, but considering we were arguably the most informed people in the world, we had maintained a serious ignorance about the world around us.
Yes, we knew how to deal with coming in contact with infected people. Yes, we knew the signs, symptoms and causes of infection, but what it was like coming across an infected person was something we had yet to see.
It made me wonder if we should even attempt to leave. So many people have succumbed to infection. We had gone the entire time without having to worry about our safety.
This place was locked down and other than eventually running out of resources to live, we were completely safe from infection.
As I was thinking about this, I looked up and noticed Julia—she was crying. She tried to hide this fact, but it was evident. I got up and walked over to her. “Are you okay?”
She nodded and wiped her face. “I’ve dreamt of being involved in events like this, but now… Now, I just don’t know how I feel.”
She was a spitting image of me. I crossed all sorts of professional boundaries and hugged her. She hugged me back and really broke down. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just feel like none of it matters anymore. We’re done and now we’re just stuck here.”
“It matters,” I said.
She wiped her face again and stared at me, awaiting an explanation.
“We stayed,” I said. “We stayed and we helped anyone watching by giving them the necessary information they would need to survive. Everyone who left, they were the ones who didn’t matter in the end. You and me and Johnston, we stuck it out. It’s because of us that tons of people will make it through this.”
She let out a small smile.
“If it were up to me,” I said. “I would definitely give you a promotion.”
She laughed. “Thanks… Andrew.”
I nodded and looked to Johnston’s door. After a moment, we both decided to go see if he was all right. I knocked on his door—something no one ever did. If Johnston was in his office with his door closed, you would simply have to wait.
He didn’t answer, but something told me it was okay to enter. I slowly turned the knob and peeked inside. He sat at his desk, typing something relentlessly. As I entered the office with Julia behind me, he didn’t acknowledge us.
“Johnston,” I said.
He continued to type for a moment. Then he stopped and stared at his computer screen and printed out whatever it was he was typing.
“Johnston,” I said once more.
He looked at me as he pulled the document from the printer. “Is everything all right?” he asked as he looked at the paper and folded it up and put it in his coat pocket.
“What did you write?”
“The website’s last article. Channel Five has signed off.”
“What are you going to do now?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
The three of us went to the conference room and sat around the large table in the middle of the room. We each poured a cup of coffee and sat in silence. The television had the CHANNEL 5 EMERGENCY SYSTEM logo plastered on the screen. The words STAY TUNED FOR UPDATES scrolled along the bottom.
After a moment, Johnston got up and turned off the TV. He stared at the blank screen and looked at his watch. “Time of death: 3:25 a.m.”
I stared at my coffee, not knowing what to do or say. Julia was concentrating on her cell phone, then put it on the table. “Time of death: 3:25,” she said.
Johnston and I looked at her.
“My phone,” she said. “I’ve been using it sparingly. My charger is at home. The battery is finally dead. I don’t know if I’ll ever charge it again.”
Johnston sat back down at the table, this time closer to us than before. “Thank you both for all that you’ve done,” he said.
“Thank you,” Julia said.
“It’s been a pleasure,” I added.
Johnston nodded. “I suppose we should decide what we’re going to do.”
“Should we sleep?” Julia asked.
“That’s not a bad idea,” I said. “If we’re going to leave, we might as well wait for the sun to come up.”
“Get some rest,” Johnston smiled. “We’ll figure things out in a few hours.”
I awoke on a couch in my office several hours later. Julia was curled up in a chair, as she didn’t have an office of her own, though she probably had several to choose from at this point. But I got the feeling she just didn’t want to be alone.
I rose and looked out my window. The sun was up and weather-wise, it seemed like it would be a nice day.
Suddenly, there was a knock at my door—it was Johnston.
“I figure we have two choices,” he said. “We can get some signs on the roof to let rescue teams know we’re here, or we can get out of here and make our way to one of the safe zones.”
“We do have an approved list of them, right?” I asked.
“That’s right, and I haven’t heard any air traffic since yesterday.”
“What do you think we should do?” I asked.
“I think…I think we should get the hell out of here.”
“Me too,” Julia agreed. She’d been awake without us knowing.
I looked at both of them and nodded my head slowly. “Let’s do it then.”
We gathered some things together and decided we would head out to the safe zone in Warren, Massachusetts. The list was up-to-date from eighteen hours ago, so hopefully nothing had changed. After I felt ready to go, I went and sat at the broadcasting booth. I shuffled through the papers leftover from the broadcast and looked at the camera for a moment. “This is Andrew Helms at Channel Five News signing off,” I said to the studio.
Julia walked into the studio. “Great job.”
I smiled at her. “Where’s Johnston?”
She pointed to his office. The door was closed again.
“What about you? Are you ready to go?” I asked.
“I don’t think I’m coming with you to Warren.”
I stared at her, not knowing what to say. Was she serious? What was she going to do? Abandon us after all we’d been through?
“I have a family, a boyfriend,” she explained. “I need to see if they’re…I just need to see. After that, I’ll come to Warren.”
I nodded as Johnston came out of his office. Julia once again explained her situation to him. “I hope you find them,” he said.
On our way out, I looked around one last time and thought about how this place had become my second home. How much I’d grown as a person and defined my life as a news anchor.
It was surreal to think that I might never step foot in the studio again. Johnston seemed to know what I was thinking, and he gave me a reassuring nod and patted me on the back.
We finally left the studio and walked down the empty halls of the typically buzzing building. As we made our way through, Johnston explained that he and I would take a news truck as its doors were solid and the equipment might come in handy.
“Are you sure you don’t want to come with us?” I asked Julia when she followed us to the parking garage.
“I need to go see, and I can’t ask you to come.”
“It’s all right,” Johnston said. “We’ll see each other soon.”
The garage was under the building and gated off from public access. We looked around thoroughly, as we couldn’t be too careful. The garage was empty other than our own cars and several news vans. Julia was parked far away, so we drove her to her car, then we each drove out of the garage. The gates opened as Johnston swiped his card. This simple thing made me think about how things used to be.
I wondered if things would be fixed or if the power would eventually go out and we would perhaps be the last people to activate these electronic locks.
Julia pulled out behind us. She beeped twice as she turned right and we went left. Johnston beeped back and we began our journey.
As we rode through town, we saw no signs of people anywhere—infected or otherwise. We drove by several cars. Some were crashed, some parked, and some just abandoned.
I entered the address the list provided us with for Warren, Mass into the GPS. It was on Main Street—likely the Town Hall or something similar. According to the GPS, we would be there in a little less than an hour. We expected some detours though.
“Thanks again for sticking it out back there,” Johnston said.
“I didn’t know what else to do.”
He nodded and shrugged.
“What was your last article about?” I asked.
He simply patted his chest pocket. “Someday.”
I was curious, but didn’t want to pry, so I dropped the subject. We took a turn as the GPS dictated and saw a group of people ahead—infected people by the looks of them. They looked like they were tearing something apart in the middle of the road.
“What the hell is this?” Johnston asked.
“This,” I said, “is what we spent the last couple of days reporting on.”
He shook his head in disgust.
I couldn’t believe it either. We were finally being exposed to reality without the buffer of our familiar workplace. We both sat and watched for a moment in the idle van.
Then Johnston switched the gear back into drive and started moving forward. He slowly drove past the horrific sight and we didn’t say anything more about it.
As we passed them, I looked in the side mirror and watched when some of the infected reached for our vehicle.
Their fronts were covered in what appeared to be blood. I don’t know if Johnston noticed, but I didn’t tell him.
As we continued on our way to Warren, the image of one infected individual stuck with me. He almost didn’t look human anymore.
He had light brown hair and his face was covered in what looked to be a mixture of dirt and dried blood. His eyes looked dead when they stared directly at me, and his lips, they were gone. I saw all of his blood-stained teeth as he gnashed them in my direction.
“You okay?” Johnston asked.
I nodded and stared out the window. He knew something was up. I just couldn’t get the image out of my head. That creature—that thing, it used to be like me. It used to be human, but it just wasn’t anymore.
This sickness was even worse than I could have ever imagined, despite having seen footage and reported information on the details of it.
I thought back to when I was first told what was happening. They took me aside after we’d filmed the morning news.
“Something’s happening,” Barbara, one of the assistant producers told me. “A disease has broken out in New England.”
“Like a form of the flu?” I’d asked.
“No, this is different” she’d said. “We’re going live and exclusively covering this.”
“Is this big?” I’d asked. If we were going live, it had to be big.
“Looks like it,” she’d said bluntly.
Looking back, I felt sick to my stomach at how selfish I was. I was damn near excited at the fact that I was going to get to cover an emergency broadcast.
Some anchors live their entire lives without ever getting an opportunity like that, and it was beginning to seem like there wasn’t much of my life left to live.
I kept thinking that Johnston would turn a corner and come across some military trucks or a makeshift base or something. But we just kept going, passing infected people, abandoned cars, accident sites and other unreal scenery. We hardly spoke; we had no idea what to say.
Nothing seemed right. We couldn’t speak about what was happening as any words we would try to form would just fall short. I wanted to pinch myself—there was no way this was real. I thought about the little things.
I thought about how I’d been planning on cleaning my fish tanks this weekend. I thought about the Red Sox tickets I had for the June 25th game against the Orioles.
I even thought about how my credit card bills were due in a couple of days. The mundane things began to haunt me and I was sure I would never get the chance to complete any of those tasks.
I kept thinking about my fish. It had only been a few days and they were probably all doing absolutely fine. Other than being a little hungrier than usual, they were probably swimming around without giving any thought to the current state of things. I envied them.
That’s right, me, a successful news anchor, was envious of a dozen African Cichlids. I smirked at the outlandish—yet true—idea.
Soon, we had left the city behind and we found ourselves on a quiet road. It seemed quite clear as we looked as far as we could see in all directions. There were a few cars on the shoulder, but for the most part, it looked like it might just end up being smooth sailing for a little while.
The GPS began barking orders and we went straight for six more miles. Six miles on this clear road? Perhaps our luck was turning around. Johnston began stepping on the gas and for the first time during the trip, he exceeded the speed limit. Instead of crawling through mazes of traffic and debris, we were now hitting 55-60 mph!
We were cruising; passing small businesses and a couple of infected people here and there, but nothing like what we’d seen previously.
But then something big happened. A man darted out into the road, a seemingly healthy man. He was running from an infected person. He ran right in our path. Johnston slammed on the brakes and swerved away from him, but when he almost struck the infected person, he lost complete control of the vehicle.
The van swerved around as he tried to regain control of the steering wheel.
“Shit!” he cried.
“Keep it steady!”
He kept swerving, the van coming up on two wheels. Then, suddenly, we crashed.
I opened my eyes and looked at the ground for a moment as I tried to find my equilibrium. After a moment, I realized that the van had flipped over. I couldn’t tell what we’d hit, but we were down for the count.
“Johnston…” I muttered. “You all right?”
I looked over to him, and saw that something had smashed right through his window and basically crushed his head. I reached over and checked his pulse. I knew what the result would be, but I had to check anyways. He was gone. I sat there and looked at him, the man who used to be my boss, a man I grew to look up to.
He was dead and I couldn’t help but think that he might have been the last person I w
ould ever speak to. I wondered if Julia was doing okay. I hoped she’d found her family. I hoped she was doing better than me.
I looked around the van glad to be alive. My side of the van was lying on the pavement with the windows shattered and the windshield smashed up against a telephone pole. I figured it must have flipped and slid on one side until it hit the pole. I was very lucky to be alive, but very unlucky to be where I was. I didn’t see an easy way out of the wreckage. Then I saw that I might be able to climb out of Johnston’s window.
I decided to get moving. I went to unclick my seat belt but it was stuck. The button would not press down. I began to shake in panic. I pulled on the belt, hoping somehow it would open. No luck.
It wasn’t budging. I began searching for shards of glass large enough to cut through the belts. The pieces were pretty small and were from safety glass but I still had to try. I found one that showed some promise, but only ended up cutting up my hand rather than the belt.
I wanted to cry but nothing came out. Everything had happened so quickly. I looked at Johnston’s corpse and thought about the past few days.
Decay: A Zombie Story Page 13
