by Lee Ragans
1
It was dark. Very dark. Moving was painful, and Carter made a small moan as he sat up. He felt around and realized he was in bed. His eyes adjusted, and he could see starlight coming through the one unboarded window. He was alone, the door was still barred, and then the city was silent. He felt for the wound on his leg, and it hurt to move. He moaned. He touched the burned skin and felt no pain on the spot.
As he moved to the window, he hurt less. His joints ached with each step. The window faced the camp, and there were no lights. He could see one small light from the hotel, but none from the camp.
How long had he been asleep? He did not need to pee, and he was not hungry. He was really ill.
Taking a seat in his recliner, he turned on a flashlight and saw his hands were pale and gray. He grabbed the flashlight and went to the bathroom. The sight of his gaunt face looked back at him. His lips had receded showing his teeth. He started to let out a scream, but all that came out was, "Aaaaaaaarrrrrggaaaaaaahhhh."
Fainting would have been a good thing right then. It would have made Carter happy to lose consciousness and not deal with this reality. It did not happen. He just stood there.
The flashlight weakened, and sunrise happened. Carter walked to the window. The camp was gone. Nothing. The area looked to be abandoned. A handful of zombie shambled about but no people. No cars, no animals.
2
Working his way down the stairs he heard a few thumps, and he started to run as a zombie approached, but it ignored him and walked by. He was moving well enough, but he was not sure running could happen if he tried.
Stepping outside he heard someone run down Spring Street. Then another person. He started to call out and then saw his hand. Quickly he went back to the stairwell and pulled the door closed with a louder than he wanted thump.
He thought he was breathing hard, and then he realized he was not breathing. Carter collapsed the ground and heard the thud but felt little of it. There was no more pain. There was also a complete lack of fine motor skills, and a sense of touch was gone. When he touched the wall of the stairwell it felt like his hand was asleep, but no stinging needles. His body was numb.
During the long walk back up the stairs to his apartment, he fell multiple times and then realized is left fibula was broken. The next hour was spent fashioning a splint for the broken leg, and then he made an exoskeleton of the items he could find in his apartment.
First, he wrapped himself with ace bandages and then he put on his heavy camouflage BDUs. He has no sense of temperature, so it was not comfortable or uncomfortable. The knee and elbow pads stayed on and then the combat gloves. He was still cold, but it did not matter. He was feeling no pain.
Carter pulled himself together and wanted to panic, but knew that panic would not get him anywhere. His first thought was to try to get help, then he realized there was no help to get. Anyone who would see him might just shoot him before he could demonstrate he was not going to eat them. Though the thought of raw flesh made him long to eat. He thought about it, and he wanted to find out what was going on with him. Going to a hospital would get him killed. He needed a science lab at a school. No one would be at a school.
Waiting until sundown, he unlocked his door and walked slowly down the hall, down the stairs and outside. The dark did not bother him. He walked past other dead and even tried to talk to them. They did not notice him.
He thought, “There must be two types. Those that keep their minds and those that go mad. Like in Fallout, the ghouls.” In the video game humans exposed to radiation turned to ghouls and looked like zombies but were the same people they were before the bombs. Some ghouls turned feral and were just like movie zombies rushing at the player and trying to bite them.
The thought crossed his mind that others like him had been killed. He would make a point to put a sign on his front and back saying he still could think. Though how to do that, he could not fathom at the moment stumbling in the dark.
By midnight he found the middle school, it was empty as he hoped. By dawn, he stumbled upon the science labs. Using a hammer, he found smashed into the head of a dead zombie he smashed the lock and got into the room.
It took another hour to successfully move a microscope successfully from the cabinet to a table. The microscope was just like the one he used in high school, the batteries still worked, so it did not need to be plugged in. With no power that was a huge break.
Putting a slide down on the table he touched the slide with one of his broken fingernails and put a dab of his own blood on the slide. Long minutes later the slide was in place, and he started the slow task of adjusting the microscope without breaking the slide.
He watched the blood under the microscope adjusting the view. His eyesight was getting worse as his eyes died slowly along with the rest of his body. Then he saw it, a small orb dotted across the slide. Then another and another. Adjust the microscope he could see it was a tiny machine. There were thousands in the drop of blood. That was it, the disease was some kind of nanobot machine. When people were bitten, they were infected with the machines, killed, and then reanimated.
It all made sense. It was some kind of military weapon out of control. Nothing natural could spread as fast and as well as this did. It was just as he feared. They called him a conspiracy theorist as if that was a bad thing. There were conspiracies, and this was the biggest. It was too late, but at least Carter knew he was right all along.
In the hallways, he heard footsteps. It was not the shambling of another zombie. It was human footsteps. A middle school aged boy screamed when he saw Carter through the door. Carter shambled away as fast as possible toward the other door.
“Sorry, Mister. I thought you were one of them.”
Carter slowed and looked back. He pointed to his mouth and made a gurgling sound.
“It’s okay mister, I get it you can’t talk. Looks like you were beaten up pretty bad.”
Carter nodded.
“I have some food if you are hungry.”
The thought of food did not make him hungry. Carter suddenly wanted to bite the kid’s neck and taste his blood and flesh. Fearing if he got too close he might attack the boy. Carter shook his head declining the food and started walking toward the far door.
“I am alone mister. I really don’t want to be alone again.”
Carter stopped. He pointed to his mouth again and gurgled. He wanted to say it was not safe to be with him, but only gurgles came out.
“Thanks. I have a place to sleep down the hall. I used the nurse's bed and the canned food from the cafeteria is okay. Don’t try to eat the canned pizza crust. It is not good uncooked.”
Carter stared.
The boy walked past Carter, opened the door and said, “Come on. I have plenty to share.”
Carter followed. The kid had a good setup in the principal’s office. Canned food with a can opener. A bed and a stack of books from the library. It was not great by pre-outbreak standards, but in a world dominated by the dead, it was downright perfect.
The kid ate, and Carter watched. He rejected the offer of a bowl of stewed tomatoes. The kid read, and Carter sat down. When the kid fell, asleep Carter slipped off. It may make him feel abandoned again, but it was safer for him.
The long walk home at night his mind swirled. He was infected by some military weapon. There had to be a way to let people know, but writing was not easy now. He would find a way. He got home to his apartment and lay back down on the bed. He did not bother to take off his clothes and the bandages that held his decaying body together.
Epilogue
Karen pointed down the alley. A naked walking corpse moved toward them and then turned away flailing its arms.
Josh did not hesitate. He fired two shots into the head, and it dropped. The sound struck Josh wrong. He walked up and noticed the eyes had not turned. It was a sick person, but they had not turned.
“Shit.”
Karen moved up, “What is it?”
“Dude
was sick but was not one of the dead.”
“He looks like he would have been dead any minute.” She nudged the exposed leg and the recently bleeding wound. “Looks like he was bitten, but he lasted a long time. That looks like it started to heal.”
“Yeah, he was lucky. Well… sort of…” Josh said.
David waved them up the road from about a half mile ahead. They did not have time for the pleasantries of burying the dead. Karen turned the dead guy over and crossed his arms over his chest. His eyes did not want to close. Carter’s body was arranged so that anyone coming by in the future would know that someone cared for him after death. It was the best they could offer.
The Big Chicken
The beak kept going. It was electric, and the batteries had not given out. Whoever designed it was both lazy and innovative at the same time. Most people would have hooked the motors on the beak to the building power supply. The designer was uninterested in having to deal with a switch, so they hooked it to batteries that were connected to solar panels. It was not loud, but in the deafening silence of the land of the dead, it was audible for a half mile around.
The KFC was unremarkable with the exception of the giant chicken on the roof. Mark Brinson lost his family early in the outbreak and then lost his friends soon after. His girlfriend left long before the outbreak.
He took his knowledge of 3rd world food preparation thanks to time in the peach corps and took on the mission of keeping people alive. The Big chicken was abandoned sitting in the middle of the 120 loop that surrounded most of the city of Marietta. The pawn store next door was nicely secured and served as a kind of group home for the newly formed community.
Cobb Parkway and Roswell Street were wider than many superhighways in the world. Now months later they were cleared out, and the cars once abandoned there were rolled or driven into a large loose ring making it difficult, not impossible for the dead to enter the ring of relative safety. The few survivors in the area made a giant ring of two and 3 cars deep. A living person could easily walk around the spikes and over the hoods and trunks of the cars without going to the small openings, but out of courtesy people still walked to the marked entrances.
Parking lots had their asphalt removed with days of back-breaking labor to make open ground for planting. The sorghum crops were working well, and they would soon have more food than they could eat. This meant that surrounding survivors could be traded with.
Mark sat and stared at the stalks. He was so bored he swore he could watch them grow. The other people were all families. He was the only one who was alone. He had no dating options. He was miserable and frustrated. There were no options for him to relieve his frustration at life or his sexual frustrations. One night using some precious electricity he started to watch a porn DVD. He became instantly overwhelmed with horror knowing the everyone in the video was dead. So even the old standby for a single male was out. He did nothing.
He watched the roads. Hoping that anyone was going to walk up. It was another wasted day.
As the sun went down, he walked inside to the pawn shop and arranged his stuff. He read books to pass the time. He could hear his housemates talking. Then late in the night when the kids were asleep he could hear the husband and wife’s bed creaking.
Mark tried to stifle it… he screamed, “Really? Really?” He did not know even what he meant by it. He was just frustrated.
The bed creaking stopped. A knock on his door a few minutes later, it was the Husband, Ted. In the dark, he stood there and said, “Look man. That is not cool.”
“Yeah. It is not fair to you guys. I have to move to the chicken tomorrow. You deserve happiness. In fact, I am going to go there now. You guys carrying on.”
“Sorta not going to happen, now, but thanks.” Ted closed the door and went back to his room.
Mark packed quickly into his one bag. The same one he walked into the chicken with months ago. He could fit everything he needed in the bag. He rolled up his sleeping bag and grabbed the pillow He found up the road. With his electric lantern, he walked to the chicken.
He sat alone in the chicken just hearing the beak move outside. He was alone. Now alone at night. It was okay. It was better.
There were only 3 families there and him. He considered just walking away, but the crop was growing. The crop was his life. When the sorghum came in it would change everything. How he had no idea, but food was life.
He fell asleep sometime after midnight. He dreamed of his girlfriend, Carol. Well, his last girlfriend who dumped him just before the outbreak. He knew Carol was dead. He had seen her. When he was awake, he remembers her dead face, and it was not disturbing. He could hear her say, “I need to take a break.” What that meant was she really wanted to have sex with everyone in her CrossFit group. In his dreams she was his, and they were happy.
The sun rose, and he sat up. There had been no chicken cooked in the building since the outbreak, yet it still managed to smell of fried chicken. It made him hungry. But there were no chickens available now. Even if there were, they would eat too much to be worth it.
Mark knew crops and subsistence farming. He learned everything in Rural India. The village he went to was constantly visited by religious pilgrims who wanted to bring Jesus to the heathens. Mark laughed and the Baptists. They build churches and some homes. He was there teaching them to plant crops and bring clean water to the village. These people had a religion that was ancient when the bible was being written.
One young mother flirted with him and implied she was available to him. Her husband was in the Army and gone. She had even shown him her stash of condoms. Not something a Hindi married woman would show any man other than her husband. He declined. He was staying loyal to Carol. He supposed his year overseas was when Carol started CrossFit. Probably when she started mating with the rest of the muscle crew.
He thought of the box of condoms and the young mother as he watered the crops as the sun was coming up. He was miserable and had a life of missed opportunities. The water was still flowing from the reservoir 3 miles up the road. If they were just one mile south there would have been no water, it would require a lift station to have the power to get the water there. The big chicken was at the end of the line for the water tower.
Ted came out and wanted to talk. Mark waved him off. “We will talk later, but it is all good.”
Ted just walked away to check the wall of cars. They each had their duties. Mark paid attention the crops. The 3 families worked together. They knew that the crop was showing no food yet, but each understood the promise.
Ted and his wife cleared the zombies from the cars and the traps. Allison was a tall, strong woman. No one would call her a beauty, but she was distracting in a tank top killing the dead and dragging them to a burn pile. Mark caught himself watching and feeling guilty. Ted did not care. He said once that he did not mind Mark staring so long as he kept his hands off and was not so creepy.
The other families lived in an RV parked at the far side of the walled-off area. They kept to themselves and were inclined to go scavenging. It took Mark a month to figure out who was married to who. The couples are always together. They explained over dinner that they did not know each other before the outbreak, and they were at the same campground. Now they just traveled together.
They did think Mark was creepy and they avoid him. He tried to be uncreepy, and that made it worse. He gave up. They accepted him, and he accepted them doing their thing. This morning the scavengers headed out and were already gone. They passed by, two men and one woman. The other woman was in the RV with the 3 kids.
As they passed, they said to Mark, “Going to the shopping center up the road. Need anything?”
Mark thought for a moment and said, “Any books would be nice. If you find part of a series try to get the whole thing.”
“Will do.” They said as they went through the gate past Allison and Ted.
The Sorghum was close. In a few weeks, the first harvest would be in. In the meantime, Mar
k just prepared the KFC to become a food processing plant. The large stainless steel work tables were easy to clean. A large mixing bowl that had been unused since the early days was pulled out the storage and would be perfect for processing.
He was ready to make bread using the ovens if he had power. He didn’t so he was looking at building a brick oven. There was a Lowes nearby, and he thought about taking a car to get some bricks. Instead, he used bricks from the unnecessary wall in the parking lot. Using a sledgehammer from the pawnshop's tool section, he was able to carefully remove bricks from the edges. By late afternoon he had enough to start on the base. He used sand and water. It was not real mortar, but it worked in a pinch. He had plenty of bricks, and he cross stacked them. The fire pit was going to be fine. Putting on a grill and a plate from the unused ovens and he was halfway done.
The scavengers came running back in. They were screaming that a horde was on the way. It turned out to be 12 dead. Not really a horde. Ted and Allison looked at them like they were idiots. The wall of cars held, and the spikes and traps worked perfectly. The 12 were held fast. Ted and Allison finished them with spears and then pulled them onto a pile.
