OUTPOURING: Typhoon Yolanda Relief Anthology

by Dean Francis Alfar

  Something similar to him was observing, watching, and recording silently.

  From his crouched position behind an old car, Daniel scanned the vista before him, taking in the peeling paintwork of the houses, the overgrown gardens and the weeds growing through cracks in the asphalt.

  He saw nothing, yet the sense of a timeless and emotionless intellect observing him persisted.

  Turning his focus within, he spoke.

  ‘What is this town, Daniel?’

  Silence.

  ‘Don’t be childish, Daniel. I can make you talk.’

  They both knew this was a lie, for whilst Daniel’s body had been taken from him, his soul was his own and he had been resolutely silent since he had become a prisoner within himself.

  In its natural state, the entity would have easily been able to detect whatever was observing them, but even the thought of abandoning this new home was abhorrent.

  The feeling persisted, but he decided to move onwards and crossed the road, swiftly stepping into the welcome and obscuring embrace of the foliage beyond.

  Almost home now.

  Behind one of the blankly empty windows, a camera peered outward. It surveyed the same scene every moment of every year.

  Near it, a small box hummed, connected to the camera via a cable and by yet another cable to a solar array and radio antennae on the far side of the roof.

  Distant mobile phone towers, once used to transmit a vast plethora of inane and pointless messages, received the signal and passed it on to a cool concrete room where a large metal box gently whirred with the sound of electric cooling fans.

  An automated subroutine flagged the video feed as unusual and escalated the information to the Artificial Intelligence that occupied this computer.

  The AI consulted the list of events it had been given by the United Nations and recognised that it had to tell someone. So an image was mailed to an operator and from there, through the chain of command and finally to a group of three soldiers who were currently sitting upon their Armoured Car, enjoying the sunshine.

  Five minutes after Daniel crossed the road, the car rumbled to life and three peacekeepers headed in his direction, each sitting tense and uneasy within the armoured vehicle.

  Daniel made good time as he strolled home, the summer sun was beating down pleasantly upon his face and the smell of the countryside was amazing to him.

  The green leaves of the trees above his path contrasted with the faded brown grasses and shrubs underfoot, and he smiled every time he crossed the trail of a small animal.

  His path was marked clearly by two things; small country animals, both hunter and prey alike, crouched under cover and snarled or shivered at his passing and in his wake the verdant foliage turned grey and mottled with decay.

  The walls of his home looked drab in the sunlight as he topped a rise on the overgrown path. The weather-stained reinforced concrete slabs stood eight feet tall and surrounded the village. Behind them, earthworks had been raised so that patrols could walk the perimeter of the walls.

  All the houses outside the walls had been burned and then torn down, leaving piles of overgrown rubble standing amongst patches of cultivated greenery.

  The town grew as much fresh produce as possible.

  The houses and buildings within the walls were typical, English brick-built dwellings sporting tiled roofs and almost without exception, each looked weathered and faded.

  The town, although walled, was a bastion of civilised life in what remained of the United Kingdom.

  Other towns had not fared as well in the past, the major cities had quickly fallen, and on the most up to date maps held by the United Nations, they were simply black-marked areas to be avoided by all and patrolled in case of anyone foolishly seeking entry or exit.

  Daniel smiled as he walked up to the gates, matching the welcoming waves and smiles with his own.

  Behind him the grass died.

  #

  The interior of the armoured car was kept clean as per regulations, but nothing could prevent the smell of oil and human sweat that had accumulated over the passage of time.

  The neighbourhood units hadn’t received new hardware since the fall of the cities as the global budget just didn’t allow for it, so the soldiers kept things as clean and serviceable as possible.

  The three men each had multiple functions within their unit, each taking charge whenever their specialty demanded, but all under the authority of their Lieutenant.

  Lieutenant Marx wore a new designation upon his uniform, a strange melange of the symbols of the major world religions; it was called the Multi-faith badge and indicated he possessed some form of training in that area.

  It was his concern that had infected the other two soldiers.

  The emergence of the Black Zones had taken the world by surprise, city after city going quiet over a period of a few hours or days. Recon missions into the zones never returned, and those who escaped whispered in terrified tones of unlikely terrors and supernatural events which stretched credibility.

  Then, a webcam left broadcasting over a secure connection showed the chaos that accompanied the birth of a Black Zone from the district where infection first took place. The world realised that it had a serious problem.

  The video feed was captured and uploaded to the internet and the scenes of rape and violence, coupled with a visible warping of reality and recorded supernatural abilities amongst the infected, soon spawned a term on the volatile internet.

  The Black Zones became known as Hellzones.

  Cities fell like dominoes, survivors seeking solitude and walling themselves away from strangers and the unknown threat of supernatural infection.

  Lieutenant Marx had walked out of London several years before, his once-dark hair turned white, and he now possessed a look of controlled terror in his eyes.

  ‘How far?’ he asked tersely.

  ‘A mile, Sir.’

  The diesel engine rumbled fiercely, the thick steel-plated walls and armoured tires offering a conventional defense against a primeval enemy.

  Rounding a corner, the concrete walls of the village came into view and the three men lurched violently forward as the driver applied the brakes in a sudden emergency stop.

  Outside the car, a grey smoke rose from the rubber tyres and behind the car, burnt and melted rubber skid marks showed the stopping distance of the heavy vehicle.

  ‘Oh God,’ the driver’s voice was a mere whisper, carried to their ears through the often-repaired headsets.

  Ahead of them the village seemed to burn, yet the distortion around the place was only partly smoke, the very air seemed darkened and opaque.

  ‘We’re too late,’ breathed Lieutenant Marx, his hand absently tracing the design of the multi-faith symbol upon his jacket in a desperate comfort-seeking gesture.

  ‘How can this have happened so quickly?’

  ‘You know how these places are,’ commented Marx, ‘Back away quickly.’

  The driver remained still, eyes fixed upon the walls of the village.

  ‘I’ve never seen one sir,’ he choked out, unable to tear his eyes from the tragedy before him, his cheeks wet with anguished tears.

  The village walls had been decorated with the bodies of the animals once living amongst the villagers.

  Dogs and cats hung by lengths of string, rope or wire ripped from the houses, their entrails dripping from their bodies.

  One or two of the wretched creatures kicked in terminal agony.

  Larger animals had been eviscerated and dismembered, their heads resting upon the walls and gates and their body parts strewn all over the walls in a gruesome display.

  Yet it was the small pale corpses of the children of the village which broke something deep within the human spirit, untouched and yet quite still amongst the scarlet carnage of the animals they had once loved and played amongst.

  Lieutenant Marx leaned forward and shook the driver roughly, ‘Move us away, now.’

  His voice
held an edge of steel that cut through the cloying despair and horror.

  The driver clutched at the controls of the car, fumbling numbly through familiar motions and the vehicle slowly edged away from the darkly glimmering village.

  Marx flipped down the keyboard upon the console next to him and pulled up their mission briefing. A few keystrokes later a new Hellzone had been declared and another Black Zone, albeit a small one, appeared on the maps.

  ‘Why was he outside the village, Sir? The driver’s voice was thick with suppressed emotion.

  Marx looked at the screen and clicked through a few windows until he found the file, and upon reading, his lips quivered with dismay.

  ‘Sir?’

  Marx looked up, then flipped the keyboard back to its resting position with an abrupt angry movement.

  ‘Shoes,’ His voice quavered. ‘The fool went out to get some children’s shoes.’

  Highway Run

  By Alexander Osias

  I REACH UP and punch the garage door control duct-taped to the ceiling of my Mustang 5.0. The door slides upward with the rattle and hum of a well-maintained mechanism. My left foot smoothly mashes down on the clutch, as I shift into reverse. Then I rev the engine slightly, let out the clutch slowly, and back out into the driveway.

  Danny and Debbie are waiting for me on the sidewalk. I roll down the window to hear what they’re saying.

  “You’re really going ahead with it, Tony?”

  “It’s family, Deb,” I say as nonchalantly as I can. “Besides, it’s not so bad this time of year.”

  “Going with the trucking surge is smart, Tony,” drawls Danny. “But it ain’t no guarantee. Get someone like Lisa or Roderick to ride shotgun, at least.”

  “No, I’ll be fine. I did it once, same time last year. Didn’t even see a single shambler.”

  Debbie lets go of her husband’s hand and takes a step closer. “Be careful, you. And say hi to Chestica. I know you’re going to visit her to get gas,” she says.

  I nod, she steps back, and I do my best not to peel out as I leave.

  I’M ALWAYS ON the verge of telling her, even with Danny there. But it’s only been a seventeen months since the first outbreak, and eleven since the Los Angeles burnout. There’s always a bit of panic lurking underneath our reclaimed semblance of civilization, and I don’t want to become a victim of it.

  While everyone relies on the government’s troops, support, and relief goods, nobody trusts their official statements anymore— especially since science still can’t tell us why some folks who are bitten die, while others turn into shamblers, while even others turn into runners, while a lucky few are immune to the bite.

  Instead, it’s a constant struggle to judge how reliable the latest reports are, from professional journalists and foolhardy amateurs venturing out into the wildlands with the patrols.

  As for me, and a few others like me, I volunteered and joined a Plague Response Team.

  I figured that if there was any bad news, we’d be the first to know.

  I EASE THE ’Stang into the Russino gas station at the T-intersection of Polhemus Road and De Anza Boulevard. It gets a lot of traffic from the Safeway and strip mall just up the road.

  Russino’s used to be a Chevron station, until the plague hit; now it’s under new management—a mother and daughter with strong ties to the county and the federal government. This Sunday, it’s Jessica—the daughter—overseeing operations.

  “Ms. Russino,” I say courteously, bowing to the curvaceous figure in the tinted cashier’s tower in the center island of the gas station. “I’ll be loading up on a full tank.”

  “Tony,” yells Jessie, sliding open the tower, so her voice can be heard better. “Good to see you! I’ll put it on your tab.”

  “I’m paying up front and settling accounts today, Jessie.”

  Jessie’s cornflower-blue eyes widen, and she leans out of the cashier’s tower to get a closer look at the Mustang. She takes in the brand new tires, the NewSlick frictionless coating on my roof and hood, and the reinforced bumper, then trains her gaze on me.

  “You leaving me, Tonio?”

  I shake my head, smiling at her use of my old nickname—only family and childhood friends call me that these days. “Just going down to L.A. for a few days. I’ll be back.”

  Without another word, she slides the tower shut. There’s a rattling of keys, as she opens the reinforced door to the tower and she steps out in a jeans-and-leather ensemble meant to keep lonely customers coming back. In one hand, a Glock; in the other, a once-illegal sawed-off shotgun, now considered an indispensable part of a neighborhood defense system.

  She hands the Glock to me, which I refuse on principle.

  “That’s Lou’s—”

  “Stop being such a gentleman, Tonio. Last I saw him, the idiot said he was going to ‘check out Tahoe for a few days’, and he never made it back because he didn’t take this with him. Now, help yourself to some gas, while I find the rest of the bullets.”

  I nod and step to the nearest working gas pump, and try to sneak a glance at Jessie’s silhouette and memorize it for the trip ahead. She catches me looking, and raises an eyebrow.

  “When are you going to stop window shopping, Tonio? The door’s always open for you,” she says, before she struts off to the supply room with an extra wiggle in her walk.

  SHE HAS A right to be worried, of course. Her mother works for the Federal Government; her father flies to the Center for Disease Control every month to update them on the outbreaks of the plague. I’m sure they tell her things even I don’t get to hear about.

  What I know, I get from monthly briefings from Jessica’s dad—who I still call Mr. Russino despite his admonitions to call him by his first name—when he’s in town, and from the weekly poker nights of the Plague Response Team: what roads have been reclaimed, what areas we can’t hold onto, what foodstuffs are running low, what utilities and luxuries have been restored and stabilized.

  But it’s all about the United Bay Area Counties, and nothing much about what lies south. Once I’m past the checkpoints down by Milpitas and out onto I-5, there’s no telling what I’ll run into until I get to the big Harris Ranch compound and the expanded perimeter they’ve set up down there—a shambler herd, a lone runner, or a whole lot of nothing.

  I’m hoping for the latter; doesn’t everyone? Of course, it never works out that way.

  At least, not for me.

  I COAX THE Mustang southbound onto the 280 freeway and enjoy the sight of the fog-covered Santa Cruz Mountains to my right. They still call it the World’s Most Beautiful Freeway, but most of the residents of the Bay Area look to it these days as one of their most secure sources of food and fresh water.

  When the outbreak first hit, some folks ran from the cities to the mountains and found that shamblers and runners shied away from uneven ground, unless they caught sight of food. This made it easy for the mobs and militias to sweep the streets and highways clean of plague victims, which made reconnecting with the other cities and counties faster.

  These days, the Highway and Road Patrol sweep the roads daily, looking for plague victims.

  Fifteen minutes into my drive down 280, I again consider trading in the stickshift ’Stang for an automatic. Automatics are great for these long drives—you can set the cars on cruise control and they’ll maintain the speed you set it at. But there are things that you can do with sticks that you can’t with automatics—downshift to lose velocity, disengaging the gears on inclines, and, of course, roll-starting your car. Faced with the potential loss of control, I once again reaffirm my decision to keep the car.

  At the thirty-minute mark, I shut off the iTunes player and select the pre-memorized AM channel for Patrol bulletins. First I listen to the official announcements: the schedules for patrol sweeps along major roadways and verified plague victim sightings from the past twenty-four hours. Next, a list of anonymous sightings for verification by the local community patrols. Finally, the weat
her forecast: fog in the afternoon. Last, but certainly not least: the time the sun sets—when you can’t see, even a shambler can get up close without you knowing.

  Coming up on the Page Mill Road in Palo Alto, I slow down.

  There’s a car on the freeway shoulder—a vintage Camaro—with its hood raised. Once the state-wide sign that you were having car troubles, it does double duty now; anyone capable of popping the hood and raising it isn’t a shambler or a runner.

  I roll and park the ’Stang a respectful distance ahead of the Camaro, and approach with my hands to my sides. An old man leans out of the driver’s side and says they’ve called the Patrol. I nod, ask if they need any help, then head back behind the wheel when they politely refuse.

  I decide to call it in to the Patrol again anyway, before peeling out onto 280 once more and merging into the almost non-existent traffic.

  On a whim, I decide to leave 280 and take the 85 exit. It should steer me clear of the high-security roadblocks and checkpoints that plague Santa Clara these days. As one of the hubs of statewide telecommunications networks and personal electronics production in the wake of the outbreak, it’s become a target for destabilization attacks by renegade militiamen.

  The sight of unfamiliar roads jars me for a few seconds, and I find myself thinking of Jessie. I decide to phone in a request to Jessica’s favorite radio station. I almost ask for her favorite song—‘Hotel California’—but the lyrics would seem ominous, given the situation. So I dedicate Bob Seger’s ‘Hollywood Nights’ to her instead.

  Then I lose myself in classic rock for a while, as I follow State Route 85 all the way to Southern San Jose.

  I’M IN THE middle of a double shot of AC/DC—‘Big Balls’ and ‘Highway to Hell’—when my cellphone buzzes.

  It’s Mr. Russino. Apparently Jessica has asked him to check why I’m headed south. I tell him that it’s because I have family in Los Angeles, an aunt who’s ill but not with the plague. Before I can elaborate further on my fabricated story, he stops me short with a short phrase: “Possible shambler on I-5.”