Among the Fallen: Resurrection

by Ross Shortall

  Alex leant over putting her head in her arms, her eyes peering over them and staring hatefully into the wall in front of her. Tidied up? That just about summed up the relationship she had with her father, rarely seeing him from one day to the next despite living in the same mansion together. The responsibility of her care as a child passed from carer to babysitter to housemaid until the day she was old enough to take a shit on her own. She remembered some nights staring out of the big gothic windows of her bedroom at night, staring into her father’s study on the east wing and sometimes catching him staring back at her, but nothing was ever said.

  “You know they caught the man that murdered you!” the Doctor said reassuringly.

  “I saw a newspaper, William Stanson!” she said with agreement.

  “William Stanson, Caught, confessed, tried and executed within a week of your murder” he said sadistically. “Scumbag got what he deserved!”

  “What did he look like?” Alex asked inquisitively, doubt written all over her face, her confidence in the system already in shreds.

  “Skinny, bout six foot maybe a little more, thirty five and a father of two. I was there when the filth fried in the chair, I declared him dead. He said the confession was false.” the Doctor said dismissing the idea point blank.

  “You fried the wrong guy!” she said sadly. “There were two of them, two men and they were arguing, they were in the middle of a domestic and I accidentally ran one of them over” she said as her eyes welled up. “Guess I pissed him off!”

  The Doctor looked down uncomfortably hiding his guilt and regret, his face sad and ill at ease. He nervously played with the handle on his briefcase until the silence was broken.

  “It takes between four and eight pounds of pressure to break a bone, Alex. Every bone in your body was smashed to pieces.” he said glumly. “When I laid you out in the mortuary your chest alone was just five inches in height where they not only smashed your rib cage in, but everything else too. It was the worst autopsy I have ever had to do.” the Doctor said cold and emotionless.

  Alex frowned.

  “And you, as a Doctor of medicine, think a skinny middle aged man had the power to do that on his own?” she said questioning his judgment.

  “I had reservations yes, but the city was in panic. Another murderer had surfaced and they had not murdered just anyone. They murdered Alexandra Beaumont. Women of all ages bought the clothes you wore, used the same perfumes and cosmetics you did. Whether you choose to believe it or not, you were an idol of importance to these people. You were one of the faces of your father’s company. It was a high profile case and a great loss to the company and someone needed to stand accountable!”

  “They murdered Sarah too!” she snapped back at him furiously.

  Alex’s black eyes welled up as she watched her cigarette burn to the stump; the Doctor shamefully gazed across the blood splashed coffee shop.

  “I only remember a little bit of it…” she mumbled solemnly as the Doctor looked away in obvious discomfort. Alex simply sat watching the ash grow further down her cigarette, empty and trance like. “The car flipped over and all I could hear were the screams of Sarah in the back seat. We got out, it was raining, raining hard!” she said as her mind played the incident over in her mind. “They killed Sarah; then me!”

  The Doctor looked at her sheepishly.

  “What was it like? Afterwards?!” he asked as he leant towards her inquisitively.

  Alex held her head as she struggled to think back to her death.

  “Dreamlike, surreal, peaceful but cold; I’m not very good at describing things; I can’t tell you what I saw, I don’t remember, it was the same as being asleep I guess. No Heaven, No Hell, just sleep.” she answered in a trance like state. The Doctor looked upon her almost sympathetically for a few moments and sighed. “I’m reserved on the Hell bit though, it’s not nice being ignored by your mourners!”

  “On any normal day I could get the Nobel Prize with just your blood and DNA alone, but sadly you and the un-dead are a common sight these days.” he said as he looked out of the front window cautiously into the street.

  “Common? I’ve only seen one?! and myself obviously!” she remarked puzzled and even surprised at labelling herself as un-dead as if it were a normal thing to say.

  “Shhh!” the Doctor hissed, covering his mouth with his finger. “You hear that?” he mumbled, referring to the moans and groans in the street that she heard earlier. Alex nodded her head unnervingly. “That is them!” he whispered.

  “Survivors?!” she asked confused as the Doctor looked at her with his head pressed against the glass.

  “The Dead!” he whispered, clearly frustrated. “They walk the streets!”

  Alex just looked at him like he was a complete madman.

  “Why haven’t I seen them?” she asked probingly, looking at the man with growing concern as she played into his story.

  “From what I’ve seen, they appear in groups, very seldom have I seen them acting alone, maybe it’s an instinctive thing, but I neither care, nor wish to know the details.” He growled impatiently.

  “What happened here, the city I mean? Were you even here?” she asked.

  The Doctor backed away from the window.

  “I do not know, all I know is everyone here started dropping with Swine Flu as they have all over America. My practice, as well as others in Blackwater was filled to the brim.” He said as he investigated a corpse that sat at a table with a stack of plates rammed into its mouth, its skin stretched and the corners of its mouth split. “Sometimes a hundred or even two hundred cases a day, we could not handle it; the system collapsed!”

  “Swine flu?” She said sarcastically. “Swine flu causes snotty noses, shitty toilets and lasting fevers, I don’t buy that for one second!” she said as she leaned over looking straight in the Doctors face. “I had Swine Flu two years ago; what makes this outbreak different? Even then surly we would be better prepared?”

  The Doctor stood away from the corpse and yawned.

  “Did you know, that no two flu viruses are the same, as they jump from host to host they mutate getting stronger and more drug resistant” he scorned. He wedged his tongue into the side of his mouth for a few seconds and then leant over looking at Alex in her lifeless eyes.

  “Do not ever tell me my job little girl!” he said with an undertone of narcissism. “If this was dealt with properly without emotion, it would never have spread. There are forces at work here your tiny shopping obsessed mind could never comprehend!”

  Alex broke away from his gaze and arrogantly stepped away from him as she lit up another cigarette.

  “The flu doesn’t crash cars, turn a city into a Middle East tourist attraction, hang people from the walls by their balls and turn the ground into metal!” she said angrily as she stormed over to a table, grabbing a corpse by the hair and pulling its head up with a sickening crunch of bones; the Doctor frowned as the corpse looked up at him, its mouth stretched open and full of cutlery. “THIS IS NOT

  FLU!” she barked as she pushed the face back into the table with a thump. “So don’t treat me like a fucking idiot!” she said abruptly.

  The Doctor grinned to himself, amused by her spirit, but even she could see he was hiding something.

  “It is merely a phenomena we had no contingency plan for, and the citizens were almost certainly not prepared!” he said with a hint of bullshit. Alex could always spot lies and false promises a mile away; she had a long string of exes to prove it a fact. What was the Doctor hiding and why?

  “Why are you still alive, Doc?” she said as he opened the door.

  The Doctor paused for a moment and looked down uncomfortably at his blood stained shoes.

  “I do not know Alex, honestly I don’t” He said before walking out. She watched him walk out into the street; checking his watch obsessively and looking up into the red sky before walking away into the darkness.

  “Don’t know my ass!” she scorned, light
ing up a cigarette and picking up the piece of paper from the floor.

  Memo to Doctor Laventhorpe from Grayston Beaumont - Thursday, 24 July 2012

  –—Original Message–—

  From: Beaumont, Grayston S

  Sent: Thurs 29/07/12

  To: Laventhorpe, Dr G R

  Subject: Swine Flu Contagion Procedures

  Words cannot explain how disappointed I am that people are still falling ill to this sickness, we are losing profit and must get this under control as soon as possible. So we at the board have put together a set of initiatives to get the situation under control until the Beaumont Corporation can supply us the vaccines on time.

  I)

  All new patients showing symptoms will be held at the Blackwater Detention Facility until the vaccine can be applied.

  II)

  All the prisoners in Blackwater Detention Centre have been temporally moved to a new secure location and the centre will be used as a holding Quarantine Centre.

  III)

  The Military will oversee the transfer and instigate Quarantine initiatives throughout the city preventing infection. Full bio warfare protection strategies and chemical resources will be available.

  IV)

  Any patient testing positive will be sectioned temporarily under the Mental Health act in order to protect citizens from exposure.

  V)

  All citizens without exception will take the vaccine on its arrival on Monday.

  We appreciate the medical effort and your concerns have been documented about the vaccine, but we must act fast to contain the spread of this virus.

  Thanks, G Beaumont, Mayor of Blackwater 3326.

  End of Memo, Alex discarded the Memo.

  What the hell are you up to old man she thought to herself, what concerns? What vaccine were they talking about?

  Having been dead at the time, Alex felt like she missed out on something pretty big. She walked over to the payphone and picked up the receiver and it was dead. Having not being totally surprised she picked up the directory and looked up the good Doctors home address. She looked in surprise as his name already appeared to be circled in blood.

  Laventhorpe, Lewis: 23 Cosilile Estates, Blackwater Bay.

  She ripped the page from the book and stuffed it in her pocket. She took one final gaze around the room at the strange, almost carnival style art that these poor people were sculpted into. She looked up at the neon blue light fly killer above the counter; it was humming with a long continuous tone with the odd pop from fly genocide every few moments. It is hard to imagine so much death until you see it first hand, she was not sure if it would be more preferable just seeing the city dumped in mass graves rather than seeing each face with its own story of anguish.

  She turned and stared into the street through the window and sighed at the thought of going back out into the torturous war zone, thinking further for a few moments and turned and glared at the bodies that lay splashed around the café. She soon came to the conclusion that there was actually no escaping it anywhere and at least in the street there were places to run to, maybe even hide if need be. Many questions were going through her head about the night already, and hiding away was going to get none of them answered any time soon.

  The Fallen that kept appearing and slipping her tiny bits of the story were definitely hiding the truth, even she could see that and this whole need to know basis was beginning to annoy her to no end.

  Why could someone not just give her a straight answer? Why was there so much secrecy about everything?

  She sat down as she got increasingly agitated, her back to the window she sulked with her head in her hands trying to work out what exactly happened here. As she sat sulking into her arms a man shuffled past the window, his head lowered and the darkness hiding its features as Alex sat oblivious. If there was one thing she could say positive about her father and it would be his ability under pressure, Beaumont’s excelled under pressure; which is more than likely how they got to where they have. But something went seriously wrong here. As the strange man shuffled past and disappeared off into the street, Alex decided it was about time she hit the streets once more. Her home was still a very long way away, and she only had a few hours until sunrise.

  Alex left the café and wandered out into the street, the peculiar Doctor had left her slightly baffled as to his involvement in the events that had transpired here and to be honest; she didn’t trust a single word he said. She stood outside the café as the sky cast a morbid red glow over her face; suddenly scowling as a wild dog ate the flesh from a small corpse across the road. The dog slavered and slopped as its jaws ripped muscle from the carrion, drooling and snarling as it seemed to ignore her completely. She grumbled furiously and looked at the ground next to her feet, picking up brick and throwing it at the rabid animal. The dog yelped in pain and scampered off into an alley within an instant; Alex frowning as she recomposed herself.

  “Have some fucking respect!” she mumbled bitterly as the dog vanished from sight. She grabbed a coat from the ground and approached the small body, covering it respectfully knowing all too well that the dog would sooner or later return, her sense of morality once again surfacing. She stood to her feet and purely gazed upon the hundreds of bodies that littered the street and rubbed her head in bewilderment. As the thought of losing her mind gradually came to pass, she glared up into the sky at thousands of crows that had gathered high above the city. Blackwater was rife with scavengers and the smell was attracting them in legions, but she had to move on nonetheless. As the night fell into the early stages of the morning, Alex felt the cold more and more with every second as the summer night slowly dropped in temperature. She eventually walked away from the Café and stepped into the next street, the bizarre and strange groans seemingly louder than ever, but again, she could see nothing around her.

  Chapter Sixteen: Dead Alive

  Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to it, ‘This is what the Sovereign LORD says: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe into these slain, that they may live.’“ Ezekiel 37:9

  Alex made her way along the litter strewn road and shivered as her lifeless skin dropped in temperature, her bones frozen and her breath steaming into the empty night. The crows sat along the rooftops quietly as she passed underneath, slowly watching her with their tiny bead-like eyes as they cawed amongst one another. Suddenly, Alex stopped at another barricade and sighed in further frustration as she started to heave herself over the abandoned military vehicles and concrete bollards. She stood at the top and just stared into the street below, hands snug in her pockets as she blew out the steam into the icy air. Below her seemed to be some sort of Military Outpost; makeshift to say the least; tanks; jeeps; bikes and other such vehicles waiting abandoned and decorated with dead soldiers and civilians alike. A military helicopter sat embedded in the side of a building, its blades creaking and bowing into the street as if they were about to snap, the building that held it crumbling and heaving with dust every now and then. She stood there simply staring at the sight with very little on her mind, it was hardly the worst sight she had seen, but there was something about it that was unquestionably eerie.

  She reached down and pulled a handgun from a soldier’s hand that lay twisted at her feet, holding it in front of her baffled as she examined it carefully. Without a thought, she pointed the gun in the air and pulled the trigger, firing a lone bullet into the heavens. The sudden crack of gunfire echoed through the silent streets and thousands of crows frantically leapt into the sky as if the whole street before suddenly took off. Cawing and screaming, they filled the skies above her, landing on the rooftops and circling in alarm. Alex clicked at the trigger a few times, its chamber locking as it smoked gently. She frowned grumpily and threw the gun from the blockade, leaping down to the ground smug and impatient.

  So where now? Where was the next sign?

  Alex strolled hastily through the streets trying to ignore the cor
pses and the bodies of the innocent as they peeled and decayed, savagely eaten away by bacteria, insects and mould. She climbed over makeshift barricades and threw aside anything that got in her way, leaping over concrete bollards and climbed charred vehicles. The calm haunting silence was only broken by the noise she made as she clambered over obstructions, crushing glass and rubble under her feet; almost carelessly and without thought. All the fires were now nothing more than sparks of flame, cindering spring exposed car seats and melted dashboards. Street lamps lay across the road, their heads hidden in shop windows or propped up loosely by scaffolding and brick walls. She stepped on metal signs as they lay flat in the road and peered into the looted shop windows and burnt out buildings while ammunition shells littered the floor. It had crossed her mind that since it was only dead people she was seeing, then maybe the battle here was against each other, looters maybe?

  She listened to the dead, as the good Doctor put it, far off in the distance. They definitely sounded creepy but in all honesty she weren’t buying the whole dead thing. There’s hundreds of dead as far as the eye could see, but were they moving? Well no? So what was the old fool talking about?

  Alex climbed up onto a jack-knifed lorry and stared at the street below, the tight avenue empty apart from the usual macabre and now commonplace chaos. She leapt down onto the bonnet and entered Beulaville Boulevard, a strip of shops popular with the girls and ladies, high end fashion and cheap clothes for all sizes. Probably one of the only places she knew like the back of her hand considering she spent a lot of her time here with Sarah; window shopping and spending obscene amounts of money on disposable outfits. The strip was dark and the shops were shut, their windows shattered and their goods ripped and trampled upon. Mannequins and shop dummies stared blankly into space without a care in the world, their plastic and chiselled expressions hiding the accounts of the horror they secretly bore witness to. The street was quiet and grey, the dead sprawled the sidewalks smothered in trash and newspapers, and yet, even they were less than interesting in this street. The veins and scaffolding covered the whole street and the strange iron skeletal walkways went from roof to roof and across the boulevard casting their ill-omened shadows to ground beneath her feet. The walls bled rust and black sludge and wept in pain silently, the fleshy parts throbbing and giant stained fans trapped behind grilled mesh slowly heaved.