Life After: The Void

by Bryan Way

  THE VOID

  Life After: The Void is a work of fiction. Names, organizations, places, characters, products, and incidents are either the invention of the author’s imagination or are used entirely fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 Bryan Way

  All rights reserved.

  ASIN: B01LX8ZPSQ

  To Mom and Dad

  Without whom I would not be possible.

  To Dani

  Without whom nothing is possible.

  He who fights with monsters should look to it

  that he himself does not become a monster.

  And if you gaze long into an abyss,

  the abyss gazes also into you.

  ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

  CONTENTS

  THOMAS MASSEY HIGH SCHOOL

  10-19-04 – 12-18-04

  12-19-04, SUNDAY

  12-20-04, MONDAY

  12-21-04, TUESDAY

  12-22-04, WEDNESDAY

  12-23-04, THURSDAY

  12-24-04, FRIDAY

  12-25-04, SATURDAY

  12-26-04, SUNDAY

  12-27-04, MONDAY

  12-28-04, TUESDAY

  12-29-04, WEDNESDAY

  12-30-04, THURSDAY

  12-31-04, FRIDAY

  01-01-05, SATURDAY

  01-02-05, SUNDAY

  01-03-05, MONDAY

  01-04-05, TUESDAY

  01-05-05, WEDNESDAY

  01-07-05, FRIDAY

  “So are they getting through south side or not?” I say into the bulky radio.

  “The doors are plated on the south side.” Someone responds. I honestly don’t know whom.

  “Okay. See you in the caf in ten.”

  Returning to my alma mater was a natural choice. Between her effortless redecoration of the rooms and the dramatic flair brought to the decidedly staid menu, I can say that our new home wouldn’t have been this comfortable had it not been for Julia. As a result, our dining table in the school cafeteria is always a source for lively conversation and speculation about the rest of the world, particularly in regards to the cessation of the Zombie flow, the efforts to reestablish government, and the creation of a vaccine.

  The wordless conversation of this particular meal does not distinguish itself but for a pastoral sense of familiarity; I know what everyone is saying, and though their mouths continue to move, I have the feeling that no sound is being produced. Ignoring the absence of a dull conversational buzz, I notice that some of our dinner guests have decided to don formalwear. Most of the people at this table are strangers to me; I’ve known them for years, they only seem unfamiliar.

  The energetic conversation continues as our guests eat off foodless plates resting upon the slightly fluctuating colors of the table cloth. The oscillation of the room is of no concern to anyone, really, and I myself hardly notice it, but I lose focus on the nostalgic strangers when I look into Julia’s eyes. The veneer of the transient sub-reality collapses on itself only to rebuild simultaneously, both slightly the same and slightly altered. My heart rate skyrockets, and I can only concentrate on Julia’s eyes as the surface continues to dissolve.

  Of all the unreal things around me that I can’t notice, her mere existence is a source of reference for a false reality my brain has fabricated. A latch unlocks, fitting the pieces together for a brief moment of catharsis within a world that is otherwise blissfully chaotic. Everything fades to hazy gray except her, and she’s telling me something. I can’t read the words, and I can’t hear them. Something else has pervaded my thoughts, something sinister, part of a distant reality. Not alive, and not dead. A rush of anger propels the collapse, and the façade crumbles.

  Hyperventilating, my eyes struggle open to reveal a dark room, the only remnant of light sneaking around the seams of the wooden doors by the front left side of room 218. The images I previously held as reality quickly fragment to the point that I have only moments and themes to bind them. I grab my flashlight and go into my backpack, pulling out a spiral notebook upon which I’ve written my impressions of everything I recall up to this point. I’ve been putting this off for too long.

  10-19-04 – 12-18-04

  Our residency at TMHS began in earnest on October 19th. Rich’s attempt to lure the dead away with the bus worked, and we welcomed Helen Cleary to our group. The ensuing skirmish with the remaining undead was mild and uneventful, ending with Anderson and me introducing fresh corpses to their final resting place in our converted pool. We furnished the adjacent windows with curtains from the auditorium by the end of the week, and when the dust settled, I felt compelled to sit down and record the events of the last few weeks as I remember them. I am troubled by the fact that I cannot recall much about the days before the arising, so I realize that I won’t be able to sleep until I retrace our steps over the past two months.

  After enduring a few weeks of contradictory reports, we were treated to static on both the television and radio on the 19th. The school’s satellite later picked up an errant national broadcast stating that a presidential decree stipulated all local stations report local news only. The networks were choked with misinformation stemming from unreliable sources, so this measure was intended to help those in need of critical updates about troop movements, safe houses, and neighborhood posses. It’s now impossible to judge this strategy in Philadelphia.

  The next day we began to take stock of our supplies; Anderson, Mursak and myself eventually took a stolen truck out when Mursak insisted that our spoils of war would depreciate quickly. After several trips to supermarkets and drug stores, Anderson and I painstakingly accounted for all of our ammunition. The numbers we have checked are as follows:

  9mm: 1,031 rounds.

  .45 ACP: 321 rounds.

  .45 Long: 339 rounds.

  .308: 116 rounds.

  .38 Special: 344 rounds.

  12-gauge 3” Buckshot: 166 rounds.

  12-gauge 3” Slugs: 60 rounds.

  .357 Magnum: 193 rounds.

  .300 Winchester Magnum: 277 rounds.

  .25-06 Remington: 59 rounds.

  Anderson’s assessment that we had to be more judicious about exhausting ammo was both pointed and obvious. True to form, Karen took a practical approach to our supplies, ascertaining that we needed more clothes and blankets for the upcoming winter. Jake suggested we alter the gear comprising our ‘survival packs’; aside from the standardized belts, radios, walkie-talkies, Leatherman tools, and flashlights, we discussed the importance of extra water, food, can openers, paper, markers, and grease pens. Anderson insisted we needed larger packs with better back support. Melody and Karen insisted that further travels emphasize acquiring tampons, and lots of them.

  These revelations took Rich, Karen, Melody, Helen, and Anderson on a trip to the mall. In addition to a wealth of gear, they brought back a woman, Althea Luangrath, who had attempted to take shelter having heard it was still a functioning safe house. Ironically, she arrived only days after we left, scouring the mall for supplies, and locating the military’s cache of MREs along with water filters and dehydrated milk. She also found a sealed loading dock full of body bags that Anderson checked, discovering that their occupants had all been shot in the head.

  Over the course of another day we took all the school desks we could find to reinforce every desk-laden entry, doubling up so the extra desks would sit upside down on the current ones, any leftovers placed legs-up on the floor of all classrooms with accessible windows; it wouldn’t stop a full invasion, but we’d be guaranteed to hear when any room was breached. We stripped supplies from each classroom, reinforced the windows, and boarded the doors shut. Later, we used fluorescent stage tape to mark the edg
es of potential visibility points on the floors outside classrooms. Following that, half of us procured ladders and scaffolding to ease our roof transits while Mursak sealed the doors to the new wings with concrete bricks, removed the door handles, and cemented the locks. Anderson and Rich used this time to install rudimentary skid plates on the bus, while Althea and Karen stocked and sealed a pallet of emergency rations so we can leave quickly if need be.

  After we finished the next round of reinforcement, we made a trip to several local plant nurseries, taking them for nearly every seed or root they had, including a herculean effort in carting some apple trees. We transplanted fifteen altogether and seeded another twenty in the courtyard, but we’ll have to wait until spring to see if they take. In that same day, we discovered several more bags of cement, ultimately using them to reinforce the back of the trucks parked at the band room exit. We later applied the same technique to the dumpsters blocking the rear entrance to the cafeteria. Our attempt to police the vicinity led us to the revelation that someone, at some point, tore through the cemetery gates that dump out on the road in front of the school. We secured them as best we could with chains and combination locks, after which Melody pointed out that we still had a hole in the roof of the gym. Once again, Anderson and Rich set about correcting that.

  One of our more technically exhaustive projects came about when Anderson alluded to the school’s few defunct security cameras posted around the first floor. When I suggested it was a bad idea to attempt a fix and keep ourselves on the ground level monitoring CCTVs, he and Rich made several trips to local hardware stores for supplies. After acquiring my video camera and several others from the technology wing, they posted them in various rooms facing the front and back, moving the school’s CCTV monitoring screens and recorders. With seven tapes for each day of the week at 40 hours a week, we can go seven days without reusing one.

  We spent an inordinate amount of time drilling holes in the office ceiling and running cables into the nearest second floor classroom. Rich and Anderson rewired the address system to consolidate the video and audio control to one room, and once we blacked out the window, we’d created a security office. Anderson still brags about it, but I don’t think I’ve seen anyone other than him or Helen use it. As if that wasn’t enough, Anderson spent the next two days talking about a regimented security system, including teaching us the basics of police ten-code to use on the radios when we suspected other people might be listening. He got pissed when Melody told him his yellow and red alert system was useless, so he bitterly reorganized it into a series of alert conditions, which, if nothing else, stop us from scaring Elena when calling out commands.

  Anderson followed this up by forging a strategy to fight the undead with melee weapons. Once he worked out a few ideas, we tested his tactics on the remainder of the group at the Gauntlett Center to outstanding success. Even after we’d disposed of the bodies inside, it was difficult to get Anderson to shut up about his ‘genius’ strategies. He then took the time to disconfirm the ridiculous hypothesis that the undead can be fooled by attempting to act like them, covering a rain suit with their blood and failing to walk among them covertly.

  Anderson’s boastful nature came in handy when Rich tried to lecture us about weaning ourselves off comfort food, a lesson that quickly turned into a tirade about how easy we’d had it before. Just when Rich started to needle us about our cushy, middle-class lifestyle, Anderson shut him down with a diatribe about how Rich could have lifted himself out of poverty by joining the military. All told, it was the tensest game of rock-paper-scissors I’ve ever seen.

  With the defenses sufficiently tightened, Rich began renaming parts of the school to limit confusion when calling out commands. Using mostly feudal castle terminology, the front of the school became the front yard and the back became the backyard. The parking lot entrance and exit, both still packed with cars, became the rampart and the stockade, respectively. The only unlocked door became the gate and the rope ladder was appropriately renamed the drawbridge. The main doors in the back became the postern, the basement exit in the back became the priest hole, the front basement windows became the moat, the greenhouse became the pinnacle, 218 turned into the keep, our nurse’s station just down the hall became the medlab, and the classroom directly next to the gate became our flank.

  Aside from an overall tightening of our interior defenses and strategies, a large concern of ours has been rehabilitating Rob. It hasn’t been easy, but there is absolutely no opportunity for him to relapse. He has been crying, screaming, breaking things, slamming his head into walls, acting comatose, and acting like a madman; Karen suggests with near certainty that the drug I flushed was heroin because of Rob’s longterm recovery, which she terms post-acute-withdrawal syndrome. Karen asserts that it will be a long time before we can totally trust Rob with firearms. I plan on never giving them back.

  Shortly after Karen’s diagnosis, Melody discovered that Karen and Rich had become involved. No surprises there. Before she could elaborate, Jake pointed out that Melody wasn’t wearing a bra, which she played off as though she had simply forgotten. Fortunately, she remembered one the next day when she spilled a drink on her shirt during dinner and took it off to wring it out. Mursak attempted to assuage the awkwardness by making witty but nevertheless crude sexual reference, opening an opportunity for her to eviscerate his slut-shaming insult, leaving us all embarrassed for Mursak. Afterward, Althea was keen on analyzing their motives.

  Given that this was the first time Althea spoke at length, I gather she has had difficulty adapting. She’s the easiest person to talk to in the group, which is not surprising since she had been going to graduate school for a PhD in clinical psychology. While I delight in the usefulness of an amateur shrink in our ranks, Anderson won’t acknowledge her chosen profession, instead deflecting any conversation concerning her to the ‘emergency hammer’ she found in the mall that very much resembles a war hammer. In spite of my inability to understand his reticence, and the fact that I find her calm and helpful, I feel her occasional condescensions do little to improve morale.

  Helen, on the other hand, is an unqualified pain in the ass. Mursak informed me that she overheard our radio banter shortly after she was rescued, and my conduct was less than gentlemanly. He did his best to assuage her doubts, but she has remained loyal to Anderson and bitter toward me ever since. Her lazy excuses to avoid work, like depression over the death of her family, are not readily accepted by the others, particularly me. Melody, again, was the first to notice that Anderson is the only person to defend her. Althea then suggested Anderson has hero syndrome and Helen has parataxic distortion. She explained both, but I wasn’t paying attention. In any case, Anderson has been hedging his votes among the big three since Helen has shown up, something both Rich and I find irritating. That said, she seems to hate Rob as much as I do, though I can’t divine her reasoning.

  In other new arrival news, we’ve had some difficulty putting the death of Elena’s parents to her lightly. We’ve explained it in a variety of ways, saying that Colin is now her father, a role it seems he might have filled anyway. Althea stressed that this was counterproductive and offered herself to smooth the transition into Mursak being more like a legal guardian. Elena was upset for a while, but I swear she’s adjusting better than the rest of us. Karen has been treating her like a daughter ever since she got here, something for which I give her a lot of credit.

  Jake turned fifteen and we threw him a rather uneventful birthday party. He’s improved in his handling of day-to-day situations, but I find myself more and more irritated by his defiant attitude. Fortunately, Anderson has been good at keeping him from believing he’s immune to doing work, while Rich has continued to serve as a father and a mentor. He even taught him how to drive, thankfully.

  In an effort to alleviate some of the tension, we’ve considered moving ourselves into separate rooms; I’ve staked a claim in one that overlooks the courtyard. As I began my exodus from 218, Jake sugges
ted we use my mini DV camera to record goodbye messages in case we don’t survive. I don’t know what good we expect them to do, as most of us have come to terms with the fact that our families are gone. For example, I now know for a fact that my brother is dead.

  Alan and Jack were persuaded into a trek to Dave’s apartment by me and their friend Dory, who also knew him. There, they surmised that he and his roommates had tried and failed to barricade the door. Alan wouldn’t relate the particulars, convincing me it was better that I not know. He did tell me that Dave’s roommates, and several other undead, were scattered around the complex. At my direction, Alan recovered Dave’s cell phone and sent text messages to my parents intimating that he was okay, lying that his phone’s receiver was broken and he didn’t have access to another.

  This ruse physically pains me, but I don’t know how else to break it to my parents and don’t know enough about being one to assume their ignorance is bliss. Alan confided in me that he hasn’t heard from his family since the middle of October and they won’t return his messages. In all the time we’d been talking, he hadn’t said a word about it until I brought it up. In any case, Dory didn’t make it back from their excursion and I can’t help but feel responsible, so I promised Alan I’d do something to make it up to him. In all, it was an emotional few days, but with so much grief over Julia’s death, it seemed as though I can’t spare a thought for Dave.

  Having nothing to do has forced me into dealing with Julia rather quickly; at this point, I just flat-out miss her. No matter what happens in the future, my memories of her will always be warm. As I write this, and think deeply on her departure, I don’t have a single tear forthcoming. I miss her very much the same way I miss seeing England; having been there and back, I would absolutely love to return, but I can live the rest of my life knowing I was there.