by Lee Ragans
Air travel, highways and then eventually the water supply passed it around. We thought it was a virus. Then some kind of bacteria. It did not matter. It got us. The rumors were that it was a doomsday cult releasing a military bio-weapon. There were claims from Jihadists in the middle east. But they claimed responsibility when the power went out after a storm, so it was mostly ignored. If it was a bio-weapon, it was the most successful one ever made. It spread and spread. Ultimately it did not matter who made it, or if it just happened. It won.
Within 1 month, there were more dead walking that living. In 3 months it was over. Stories started of places where there was no disease. Then the web went dark. Power and television soon after. The stories traveled by word of mouth. Then there were fewer mouths to share the news. There were plenty of mouths trying to eat the living.
I was alone in my apartment building. Well, alone in the sense that I was the only one alive. I had ideas of traveling to San Diego and going to the Blizzard Corporate Headquarters. The only thing that had kept me sane for years was World of Warcraft. It was the only thing I missed. I know I should say, my parents, friends, or even other people. I just didn't. My idea of an epic quest ended as soon as I pondered how hard it would be to walk from Atlanta to San Diego. Sure I might be able to drive some, but I am sure it would end up walking.
I was sleepwalking through my life before. Now that the world ended I woke up. The strong left the city a long time ago. They swung hammers and axes, used shotguns and pistols. They set fires and made armored vehicles. They fought their way out of Atlanta. Where they went, I have no idea. Most people who decided to hunt the undead ended up joining them. I was more interested in being alive.
The weak were left behind. We huddled in our houses and condos. We sat quietly while hordes of the undead shambled by our hiding places. We did nothing but hide. We lost weight, which many of us needed to do anyway. Then when the water and food were completely gone, we had to act.
The 4 of us found each other at the W Hotel on Williams Street. Actually, we signaled using mirrors for long minutes from the surrounding buildings. It seems like a good idea to communicate this way. Eventually, we realized no one knew Morse code and all we were doing was waving at each other with lights.
Over the course of a week, 3 of us joined the 1 already at the W, Jake, and an alliance was formed. Without wasting words, we knew that we were all extremely lucky to be alive. Also, that luck was probably the only reason we were alive.
The office building next door was full of zombies and looked like a giant ant farm. In the daytime, you could see the zombies bumping and wandering around. Sometimes they would attack each other and often they would smash their hands into the windows, but the thick security glass would not give.
The hotel-condo side was almost zombie free when we arrived. It had been an evacuation shelter. The soldiers and the survivors there cleaned out the undead before they left in convoy.
Jake watched the convoy leave and instead of joining them decided to move in. A sane person would ask why he did not try to join. Jake knew better. He was a diabetic, and with no insulin, they would see him as a risk. He had been shunned by groups of survivors already. They all said the same thing, why waste food on a man that was going to die anyway. He was fond of saying that he was already lucky to be alive. If he had type 1 diabetes, he would have died soon after the insulin ran out. He had type 2 diabetes. He could make some insulin himself, it was just not efficient. At least, that is how he explained it.
Jake liked proving people wrong. He scavenged almost 100 pounds of beef jerky from surrounding stores and worked out 4 hours a day. The combination of low carbohydrates and heavy exertion combined to keep diabetes from killing him. He still had bad turns and sometimes had severe reactions, but he was alive. Also in great physical shape. The few zombies roaming the W were dispatched by Jake with his sledgehammer before we finished fortifying the building.
Vendela was an asthmatic. We found a large amount of coffee for her, and she used the caffeine as a reasonable homeopathic remedy. She was pretty but nervous. Her once pretty hair had been hacked off with a knife when it got too long. She often talked about fixing it with scissors but never seemed to find the time or the scissors to improve her coif. If she had been around normal males, they would have complimented her on her hair and her looks, and she would have gotten what she innately expected. The other 3 were far from normal males.
Brian was friendly enough, but he was mildly autistic. He did not like to be touched and was extremely upset that the televisions did not work. When we got a generator working and were able to play the Blue Ray of Battleship you would have thought we fixed all of the world's problems. Brian watched the movie again and again without complaint. When the gas ran out, he was upset, but instead of trying to turn on every television he found, he just looked longingly at the wrecked fuel truck on the interstate.
Me, I was just a nerd. I had a million reasons that I should have been fine, but I was not. I was depressed. Clinically so. Drugs helped with that before the zombies. Now the drugs had run out. I was depressed but in a weird twist. I was happy that I now had something to be depressed about. 99% of the world was dead and walking around trying to eat those of us that were not yet dead.
For me, it was a depressed dream come true. The world was now as shitty as I felt. And the scales evened out making me feel okay.
1
We had food, plenty of it. The storage for the kitchen had been stocked for a convention just before the outbreak. When the survivors left, they had not bothered to load the food on the trucks. Our collective guess as to the reason for our luck was that they chose to take people instead of food. Good for the people and good for us. We considered they may be planning to come back for the food in the future, so we took extra care to secure the building from people and not just zombies.
We had all scrounged shotguns, and we found 3 cases of shotgun shells at the army post on the street under a pile of garbage. Again, their loss our gain. Police cars were great sources of equipment. I had my riot gear which kept me much safer when I went out. Twice I had been bitten on the arm, but the zombies were too weak to break through the body armor.
I was amazed at how much stronger and faster I was now, 6 months after the outbreak. I lost 50 pounds, and I could now run for miles. In the words of every doctor that had prescribed one serotonin uptake inhibitor or another, "I was thriving."
It was a Tuesday, we were all sure of that. Mostly we took Brian's word for it. He would not have been happy if he did not know the day of the week, so we just accepted whatever he thought it was.
I grew tired of watching Vendela sit on the couch reading a book hoping for a glimpse of cleavage. In the month, we had been together no male had tried to make a move. We were all afraid of scaring her off. None of us realized that for once an attractive woman literally had nowhere to go.
Brian was still staring at the fuel truck, and I had an idea. It was not my smartest idea, but it was something to do instead of sitting around waiting for the undead to find a weakness in our defenses. It was also a way to prove my worth and win the attention of the girl. Yeah, I thought crap like that then. I suppose I still do.
Jake opened the door to the elevator shaft for me. He would wait there in case I was on the run when I came back. We had long ago fully blocked the stairwells with furniture from the hotel rooms. They were completely impassable by anything larger than a rat. The elevator shaft was the only way up from the lobby.
I climbed down the ladder from the 2nd floor to the main lobby. Looking around there were no new visitors, and I was able to slip out of the once glass enclosed, now wide open lobby into the cool morning air. The smell of dead city waiting for me.
I moved as quietly as I could trying to not attract attention, the trapped former workers in the building next to the W spotted me but slammed their now broken and rotting hands against the tempered glass. They were no threat right now.
The grass
was long and dead thanks to the coming winter. I expected to see trash flying around, but there was none. In 6 months, the paper and plastic that once flew had found their permanent homes in corners and stuck in or under now untrimmed bushes.
The fuel truck was jack-knifed covering 5 lanes of the southbound connector just 100 meters away from the ledge I had to drop down. I could see that nothing was moving and the truck was mostly alone. Before the cars were abandoned, they seemed to make space for the large truck.
I got to the tanker and immediately realized I had no idea what to do. I tried to turn the handles to let fuel out. Then realized that was not how they worked. I was smart and educated but had never worked a fuel transfer system. I quickly realized that the truck was designed to safely deliver fuel, and not spill. That very design made my ham-handed attempts to get into the fuel fruitless.
I slipped and hit the side of the truck with one of the large hoses making a deep clanging sound. I held still for a long minute listening to see if something noticed. There were plenty of roamers among the cars. We could see them from the W's windows.
I suddenly felt very lucky that I was alone.
I spent another 10 minutes flipping handles and turning valves. Then I got lucky. Some combination allowed me to override the safety features and out poured gasoline. I could read 93 written on the label over the valve, so it was supreme. I hoped that would work in the generator.
I caught 5 gallons in the large red plastic fuel can, and spilled about 50 gallons in the process. I was not proud of the loss. I had to find a funnel for the next time.
The smell of the fuel and the sound of the liquid must have been the trigger. I closed the last valve, and the fuel stopped. I took off at a fast walk. The fuel was far heavier than I had thought. I could hear them but not see them yet. I did not want to see them. I really did not want to see them.
I made it up the ledge onto the back entrance of the W when I saw the first zombie. It was a mailman, a damn mailman of all things. How he had his hat still on, I had no idea. Maybe it made him feel better before the turned. He was 30 meters away and moving slowly. They were never fast, just relentless. I did not wait to see the others. I carried the fuel with two hands and shuffled quickly. I rounded the corner into the parking area that leads to the hotel lobby. A roamer wandered in the distance up the road. If there was one, there were 100. I moved quickly in the lobby and yelled for a rope up the elevator shaft.
It took long minutes to tie the rope to the fuel then I yelled, and Jake started pulling it up. I got on the ladder and closed and latched the elevator shaft doors with our makeshift latch. The zombies could not climb the ladder, but enough of them might fill the shaft if the door was open.
We pulled the ladder up and closed the elevator shaft doors out of habit. We kept the generators on the balcony off of the rooms we decided to use. We had a whole hotel and a hundred abandoned condos, but we all stayed down one hallway.
The generator was fueled, and the TV came on. Brian was happy, and we enjoyed having a fridge and freezer working. We stocked it with canned drinks and ice cube trays. It would take hours to cool, but we would wait. It was worth it.
I found a spot on the couch and enjoyed watching Brian watch Battleship. Without notice, Vendela moved over and lay on my shoulder and kissed my cheek. She said, "You are very sweet to do that for him." She did not move. Yes. I was sweet.
I thought Jake would glare at me, but he just smiled and said, "I gotta go work out. I will leave you two love-birds to the TV." This was the best day in months. Honestly maybe in years. Brian was happy, Vendela was happy, Jake was happy. I had to admit that I was happy too.
2
The quiet Honda generators lasted 2 days on the fuel we had. The ice was fantastic, and the cokes were still good, but we all knew they were going to go out of date one day. We made another run, this time, both me and Jake with a funnel and brought back enough fuel to last us a week. We ran them only a few hours at a time, and that let us have a working refrigerator with cool drinks and ice. It was easy to forget for that week how much the world had gone to shit.
Jake and I decided to go room by room in the condos upstairs and look for more luxury items. By our calculations, we had enough canned food for a year. Maybe more. It was not always what we wanted, but we could live. It was time to find something that made life worth living.
I caught Jake between his 4 workouts a day he did to keep his diabetes under control, and we went as a pair. Vendela stayed on the couch. She did not do much, she was always afraid of an asthma attack. Brian walked our floor watching out of the windows for people or large hordes of zombies. We were never really sure what he was thinking, but he was always watching.
The first condo was a bust. It had been emptied by its owner and had nothing but trash. It took 4 more to find something of value to us. In the 5th condo, we smashed the lock, and the door opened to a beautifully furnished apartment with walls lined with bookshelves full of leather-bound books. The smell of the leather was so strong it almost overpowered the smell of the previous undead occupant crawling from the bedroom toward us.
Jake got to the creature first and smashed the rotting skull with his sledgehammer. It stopped writhing after a few minutes. They did not always stop moving when you smashed their skulls, but they stopped being a danger. So long as you did not let a flailing arm scratch you or stray jaw close and bite you.
We checked the kitchen and found no food. The guy had starved to death in his own home. It was sad, but he should have come out.
We grabbed a few of our favorite books from the shelves. I took the science fiction I could find. A signed copy of Dune and another signed copy of Ender's Game. Jake surprised me and grabbed some classics, I did not think he would go for Red Badge of Courage, but he did.
As we walked with full backpacks of books and our favorites in our hands, I asked him, "Are you okay with me hanging out with Vendela."
He smiled and said in a smooth urban Southern drawl, "Hell after the week I spend in a diabetic coma my junk is dead. I don't know what I could bring to a nekked woman other than disappointment." He slapped me on the back with a strong arm and laughed.
That was all the answer I needed. I was not going to fight Jake over the only woman we had. As far as I knew Brian did not even know what to do with a woman, so I did not see him as competition.
Vendela squealed when she saw the books and gave both Jake and me a hug. She followed us up the stairs and examined the collection. The walk down caused an asthma attack, and she used her rescue inhaler once while I made her some coffee. It was worth firing up the generator to have a pot of coffee.
That night I asked, and Vendela moved to my bed. We did not do anything other than spoon, but it was nice to not be alone. From that time on we never slept apart.
3
We made trips daily for fuel now and had a large drum of gas on the balcony. We did not run the generators at night. We did not want lights to give away we were there. We wanted the zombies and any passers-by to ignore us. We had what we had and then had nothing to trade.
Walking back into the old lobby with fuel Jake said, "This place looks too clean. I wonder if we could attract some zombies to make it look really uninviting."
I had never thought of that. It was nice to have a safe exit, but a safe exit meant a safe entrance for anyone with bad intentions. We put the fuel down and then drug some dead zombies over. We propped up a few zombies near the entrance and then placed one strategically on the floor near the elevator entrance.
It looks more uninviting that before. I was sure Vendela would not like it at all. She seemed to be completely oblivious the realities outside, and I was happy to be her man, so I did not want to push it.
I stood outside on the street, and I was happy to only hear a slight hum from the generator 5 floors above. I pondered that we needed to move it to the roof so it could not be heard as easily if at all.
That thinking was good, but it would prove to
be too late. We had our first visitors that evening.
4
As I walked out onto the balcony to shut down the generator, I heard a woman's voice shout, "We can hear the generator. Can we get safe shelter?"
I looked down to see a thin woman with straight black hair in loose-fitting military clothes and two men in full army battle dress. The woman looks safe, but the men looked like trouble. Their rifles were slung down at their sides, but they still looked animals ready to pounce even from a distance.
Brian came over to the balcony. Vendela went to get Jake.
I called out, "We are not very equipped to receive company at the moment."
The woman laughed, "Well that is not a no."
She waited for a second and said, "Let me lay it out for you, we have about 10,000 zombies coming down Spring Street. They will be here in about 30 minutes, and we need shelter."
I looked at Brian. He said, "They are okay."
I have no idea why I trusted his instincts.
"We will meet you in the lobby," I yelled and closed the balcony door.
