Safe Zone

by Chesla, Gary

  Safe Zone

  By G.M. Chesla

  February 2015

  Shaun and Megan lived in the outskirts of a small town near Latrobe, Pennsylvania.

  They ignored the news coverage of an outbreak in Africa. Africa was always having outbreaks of some sort of disease. When the networks began to report incidents taking place in Europe, they ignored the reports as another effort by the networks to sensationalize the news and make something out of nothing.

  They started to take the reports more seriously when outbreaks started to occur in New York and Pittsburgh. But by then, it was too late.

  Within days, the dead were everywhere. It was impossible to go into Latrobe, or any other of the towns or cities. At least it was impossible if you wanted to live.

  Shaun and Megan’s life changed. Each day was a struggle to avoid the dead, to find food and to just survive.

  The living began to disappear as the hordes of the dead grew. Other than their friends, Doug and Lisa, who were struggling to survive nearby, they were on their own in a world ruled by the dead.

  One day, when Shaun and Megan were out trying to find supplies, they saw a man and his family being attacked by the dead. Shaun and Megan felt obligated to help another living human. There were so few of them left.

  The man told them he was passing through, trying to take his family to a nearby town where he heard other living people had gathered and formed a Safe Zone. The people in the town had secured an area that was safe from the dead. Not only was it safe, but they had begun to push the dead out of the town and reclaim their lives. They operated a farm that supplied everyone with food.

  Shaun and Megan talked to their friends, Doug and Lisa, about the Safe Zone they had heard about. They debated whether or not they should try to go there. It was getting harder each day to just get by and they didn’t know how much longer they were going to be able to survive.

  The Safe Zone they had heard about could just be a rumor repeated by a desperate man trying to save his family.

  Before they could decide what to do, the decision was made for them. What food and shelter they had was destroyed and taken from them. They had barely managed to escape with their lives.

  In an effort to survive, they set out to make the journey in the hope of finding a place safe from the dead. A place with other people like themselves where they could rebuild a life and wake up from the nightmare they had been living.

  They journey was terrifying, but they finally arrived at their destination. What they found was amazing. It was everything they had been told and more.

  Unfortunately, much more!

  Chapter 1

  Megan walked slowly up the aisle in the little old corner deli. She listened carefully before going around the end of the row and starting up the next aisle. Shaun had checked out the store to be sure it was clear before they came in, but she knew that was no guarantee that the store was safe. Those ugly dead bastards had a way of showing up when you least expected them. You always had to be on guard, if you wanted to live.

  Just yesterday they had been in closer to downtown Latrobe. They were driving down by Wood and Chestnut Street, scouting out that part of town for any little delis that appeared to be still reasonably intact. They had ventured into this part of town because Shaun said he thought he had remembered going to a little store there for ice cream when he was a kid. They had ventured in about as far as they felt they could safely go, when Shaun spotted the little store. Don’s Corner Deli was its name. Shaun pulled up in front of the store. He left the engine running and had Megan lock the doors while he went in to see if it was safe for them to go inside.

  He had been gone for nearly ten minutes before coming back out to get Megan. He grabbed a couple burlap sacks and they went into the store. He said he had gone through the store and it looked like no one had bothered it. He took one sack and handed one to Megan. He instructed her to load up anything that looked edible. He would do the same and they would sort through everything when they got home.

  They had half filled their sacks when they heard the large front showcase window shatter and crash onto the floor, inside the store, raining broken glass down the aisles and around their feet. As the glass came crashing down the loud sound of the dead along with their sickening smell swarmed over them. The entire area in front of the store was crowded with the decaying dead, slowly staggering towards the front of the store. There had be at least fifty of them out there, unfortunately so was their van.

  Shaun had instructed Megan to lock herself in the back office, while he went out the back door. He would go out the back and circle around the side of the building and try to lure them away. He would try to lure them down Abbot Street. The dead are slow, as long as he didn’t get cornered, he could easily outrun them. He left Megan the long walking stick that had come in handy over the last six months. When the store got quiet, Megan was to go out the front with their bags and drive the van down about four blocks on Chestnut Street. He would meet her there and they would get out of Latrobe.

  Megan had waited in the office, with her ear to the door for at least fifteen minutes before the last crashing sound and the groaning dead wondered out the front of the store.

  Megan slowly opened the office door and looked down the short hallway into the front of the store.

  Except for the overwhelming smell and the long streaks of black blood that covered everything, it looked like the coast was clear.

  Megan checked her pocket to be sure she still had the keys for the van and then inched her way down the hall towards the front of the store. The dead had left to chase Shaun. The bloody trail went out to the front of the store and to the left where Shaun must have come around the side of the building to get their attention.

  After quickly looking around, Megan began to walk quickly towards the door. She wanted to hurry and get to the van to go meet up with Shaun. The dead were slow, but there were so many of them. Once the dead spotted a living person and began to groan, the dead would seem to come from every direction as if their groaning was a signal to all the others that they had found a live one.

  Shaun could out run the fifty or so dead from the store, but if they attracted the attention of the many other dead that seemed to be waiting everywhere, they could surround him. She had to hurry.

  She was almost to the door and the shattered front window, when two badly decomposed bodies stepped out in front of her, scaring the hell out of her.

  She rammed the pointy end of the walking stick through the empty eye socket and into the brain of the closest zombie. The creature fell to the floor in front of her, taking the walking stick with it, as the second dead creature continued to slowly come at her.

  The creature opened its toothless mouth and let out a loud groan as it tripped over the body of the first one, and fell into Megan knocking her to the floor.

  It bit into her left boot, but aside from leaving the end of her boot covered in a foul smelling goo, it hadn’t managed to penetrate through to her skin.

  Megan kicked it in the head with her other boot and scrambled to her feet. As the creature struggled to get to its feet, Megan got up and ran behind the shelves and around to the front of the store. After jumping out through where the large window had been, she ran for the van. She had lost their trusty walking stick and the two half bags of supplies, but wasn’t going to hang around here to go back and get them. She just wanted to get in the van and go get Shaun before he got trapped and before anymore of the dead showed up here at the deli trapping her.

  Megan ran behind the van. As she came around the back corner on the driver’s side to go up to the driver’s door, she ran right into another of the dead that was staggering around the van. Both Megan and the zombie fell to the ground, leaving the front of her jeans
and jacket covered in blood. Megan screamed as she jumped back up, kicked the struggling creature and ran to the driver’s door. She threw open the door and hopped into the seat as she struggled to get the keys out of her pocket. She was fumbling with the keys, trying to get them into the ignition as the creature’s face crashed into the window. The sight of the face with one eye missing, no nose, the right cheek and all of the teeth on the right side missing sliding over the window glass leaving a black smear everywhere it touched, made Megan scream again as the key found its mark.

  She swore as she jammed the van into gear and roared off down Chestnut Street. She quickly covered the four blocks to where she was to meet Shaun, but he wasn’t there. She stopped and nervously waited, hoping he would soon come around the corner so they could get away from here. She stared down Abbot Street trying to decide what to do.

  As she stared down Abbot, she caught motion from the corner of her left eye, further down Chestnut.

  She looked on in horror as Shaun ran out from Wood Street, being followed by a large horde of the dead. A large group of the dead were also starting to come in his direction from the houses behind him. If she didn’t move fast, he would be trapped between the two groups.

  Megan hit the gas and drove towards Shaun. He was looking at the dead moving in all around him as Megan drove up next to him, running over four bodies on her way to Shaun. Running over the dead was worse than running over a skunk, the smell would linger for a week. You couldn’t wash the damn smell off the van, but now with clean water being a precious item, they wouldn’t even try to clean it off until they got out to Kingston dam.

  Shaun jumped in the passenger’s door and shouted for Megan to go.

  They quickly drove down Chestnut Street, watching the dead seem to be coming out of every building in the area like ants out of an ant hill. They were glad to get out of Latrobe. For their efforts they had lost their trusty walking stick, Megan had gotten smelly zombie goo all over her jacket and jeans and now their van smelled like the dead. They weren’t able to get out of town with the supplies they were after and Megan would have to burn her clothes when they got home. Their little venture into Latrobe hadn’t worked out as they had hoped.

  They hadn’t been in Latrobe for over six months. It wasn’t safe to go anywhere near any large cities or towns after the plague or whatever it was struck.

  Six months ago, the news had been full of reports of the plague that had started in Africa. Megan hadn’t paid much attention to it. Africa always was having a plague of one sort or another. If it wasn’t a plague it was some warlord slaughtering thousands of innocent people.

  “Warlord, whoever came up with that name? It was a fancy name for some asshole that had happened to find more guns than anyone else and decided to kill everyone that didn’t think he should be king.” Megan thought.

  It had been going on as long as she could remember and she was sure it would continue to go on long after she was gone. When all the news stations had wall to wall African Plague coverage, she just changed the channel feeling it was just more news overkill, like the news networks all had a habit of doing.

  Each year as the weather changed and the first snow was approaching, the Severe Weather Team would start comparing the approaching snow storm to the blizzard of 94. The snow would come and drop a half inch of flurries and then be over. The blizzard of 94 dropped 42 inches of snow back in 1994. But with every approaching snow storm, the networks would all start their dire comparisons. If this storm is as big as the storm in 94, the power might be out for a month, the grocery stores will run out of food and people could freeze. People would mob the grocery stores to buy food and snow shovels. Again, after an inch or two of snow, the storm would pass. It was like listening to the little boy calling wolf over and over again.

  Megan didn’t even bother to listen to the news anymore.

  One day as she was flipping through the TV stations she heard a broadcast about Europe being decimated by the African Plague. “Sure!” She thought. “Probably some fifth grade class in Paris had four kids call in sick the same day with the flu.”

  She had missed all the reports about it spreading to the United States. Shaun came home one day saying he had heard some strange stories about something spreading through Boston, New York and Washington, but they just shrugged it off as another of the government propaganda campaigns for the upcoming flu shot program.

  By the time they started to take the reports seriously, it was too late. It came fast. The first places to be hit were the cities. Within days the cities were nothing but huge nests of the dead. You couldn’t get close to the cities without being mobbed by the dead. The dead had no interest in the stores and shops that were in the cities. They didn’t need food or clothes, all they wanted was the living. It was suicide to try to go into the cities.

  Shaun felt there was a lot of food, clothes and other useful items in the cities, but it was not possible to go in to get them and come back alive.

  You might come back, but you would not be alive. They had seen some of their neighbors try and go into the cities when they had run out of food. They had seen a few of them come back, staggering down the street dragging their intestines along behind them.

  They had never considered going into Latrobe before today. They had spent most of their time scavenging through the large grocery stores that were in the outskirts of Latrobe. In the early days they had caught a lot of fish out at the Kingston dam to eat. They had managed to stash away a lot of supplies and clothes from these places. Besides food and supplies they had managed to siphon gas from the abandoned cars that littered the roads and parking lots to fill their van and store in their basement for the future.

  But it was beginning to become too dangerous to continue going to these grocery stores and malls that were in the outskirts of the city. The food and supplies were almost all gone. The dead had started coming out of the cities looking for the living. They must have been coming to the suburbs to look for the living because there were none left in the cities.

  Even worse than the dead, gangs of the living were out looking to take what others had managed to scrounge up.

  They frequently spotted nasty looking gangs hanging around the Kingston dam out near Route 30, making it harder to go there to catch fish.

  It wasn’t safe anywhere. The dead were everywhere now and most of the living couldn’t be trusted.

  Shaun and Megan recently decided to test the outskirts of Latrobe. They lived near Derry, a small town about five miles North of Latrobe. Before the outbreak, Latrobe, Pennsylvania, had been a nice, upscale college town.

  Latrobe had a population of about 8500 people situated on 2.3 square miles of land that was located 40 miles southwest of Pittsburgh. Saint Vincent College added another 1800 people, making the number of people in Latrobe about 10,300.

  Latrobe was a nice town. The crime rate was low. In fact it had been years since the last murder had occurred. The worst crime the area police had to deal with was giving out speeding tickets near the Latrobe airport to travelers who were rushing to catch their flights.

  The city of Latrobe had three claims to fame, besides the college and airport.

  First, Latrobe was the hometown of legendary golfer, Arnold Palmer. They had proudly named the airport after Arnold Palmer. Arnold Palmer Motor’s, a Cadillac dealership, also was prominently located along Route 30 between the airport and downtown.

  The second claim to fame for Latrobe was it had been the home of Rolling Rock Brewery. It was a small brewery that brewed a popular niche market beer. In 2006 Anheuser-Busch bought the brand name, but not the brewery. They brewed Rolling Rock Beer somewhere out near Denver now. The old brewery in Latrobe now struggled to brew limited amounts of Iron City Beer for another company, but it was still known to all the locals as the Old Rolling Rock Brewery.

  The third claim to fame the city was proud of was the training camp for the Pittsburgh Steelers was held in Latrobe. Every August the appearance of the Ste
elers at Saint Vincent College signaled that the start of football season was right around the corner. Thousands of fans swarmed the area, along with the news media to see the Steelers daily training sessions that were open to the public.

  Latrobe always had a lot of activity taking place.

  When the outbreak hit Latrobe, it devastated the town in a matter of hours. With roughly 5000 people per square mile, once one person was infected, the chain reaction began. The conditions in Latrobe changed from a pleasant All American City to that of a violent shark feeding frenzy.

  That had been six months ago. Attempts to get near the city at the beginning made it obvious to Shaun and Megan that going Latrobe to find supplies was not an option they were willing to consider.

  Recently things had begun to feel different. They had started to see more of the dead coming out through their area. Why there seemed to be so many coming out of the cities, they didn’t know for sure, but just assumed it was that there were no living left in the cities anymore. Maybe the dead sensed where the living were now located, or maybe they were blindly going in search of living flesh. Either way, the dead were beginning to come out of the cities in larger numbers, making life for Shaun and Megan more difficult. But the dead flooding out of the cities also created a possible opportunity.

  They were hoping with the dead leaving to look for the living, maybe they would be able to go in and get the food and supplies that had to be there.

  Their scouting trips revealed that the center of Latrobe was still too dangerous to consider attempting to go in, but the outside edges of Latrobe seemed to be promising. The dead were still there, but their numbers seemed to be smaller. They would still run into the dead, but if they were cautious and moved fast, they might be able to get in and grab some items and get back out.

  Yesterday’s trip in to Chestnut Street was their first attempt to go into Latrobe a short distance to find supplies.