by GJ Zukow
The little hairy fiend hit the asphalt with a solid "thunk" and lay there momentarily stunned. The thing landed no more than a foot away from a burly guy who had just gotten off of a Honda motorcycle. A brief moment passed, and the squirrel from hell (wild-eyed and tangled hair all askew to begin with, now practically covered in the blood of its victims) started to twitch and recover. There was a small amount of panic in the biker's eye as he went to stomp the squirrel to death with his heavy boots. I could plainly hear the maddened tree-rats skull and bones breaking and crushing as the big, 300 plus pound biker repeatedly put some serious boot leather down, over and over again until there was naught left but hair and gore.
My Gandalf (the brand name of the computerized dispatch system) went off then, telling me I had a fare to pick-up. I left the scene, driving slowly away thinking this was an isolated case and would make a hell of a story to tell my friends.
How wrong I was. It wasn’t an isolated case. This same scene was playing out all over the world, and it wasn’t just squirrels going mad. Whatever rats survived went into a blood frenzy...and mice...and cats, both feral and domesticated...and raccoons, to name a few. Basically all the smaller species of mammals went hell bent for blood. Dogs, horses, cattle, things like that, they didn’t go mad, but they also suffered the onslaught.
The crazed critters didn’t just attack people, they attacked anything that moved, even each other. Over the next few days, as Mother Nature turned on herself in an orgy of violent, pointless destruction, everything practically came to a halt worldwide.
The American CDC and the British NHS both announced that the cause was due to some kind of new parasite. Stay inside until this was over they said.
This dreadful single celled menace seemed to lodge in its hosts’ brain and shut down any serotonin production, while putting the aggression and anger centers into overdrive. The parasites eggs were transmitted into a new host through the saliva into the victims’ bloodstream.
A mass killing of cats and hamsters and any and every other small pet ensued, adding to the death toll that was happening outdoors.
As humanity waited for the unbelievable, horrible act to play out, and the animal madness left, Scarlet fever strode onto the stage. There was already the smell of death and the rotting of flesh in the air from the billions upon billions of animals who died within the two, seemingly eternal, weeks it took for the infected ones to starve off.
I stayed in my apartment for those two weeks, until the wave of horror subsided. It hadn’t completely ended, but I was broke and absolutely had to get back to work. I guess the same could be said for most people, as we tried to get back to some semblance of normality. Unemployment went down, as animal corpse collection, and elimination (mainly by burning the corpses) became a new career choice. Teams went out dressed in heavy riot gear and killed any animal they even suspected of being capable of being infected. The heavy black smoke of the burn piles and the constant sound of gun-fire added to my overwhelming feeling that I had somehow breached the walls of hell and had ended up in some obscure ring of Dante’s Inferno.
That was nothing compared to what was starting up. The first symptoms of Scarlet, small red freckle like splotches, started showing up on everybody. Everybody except the ten percent, or so, of us that were for some reason immune.
I’ve got to go and check on the spread of the fire now. From the thickness and smell of the smoke, I think that the building next door has started to burn. It may be a huge danger, one that may roast me, but it may also be my savior if my plan works.
5
I did it! I made it out of there! This new place is good, and it's isolated, and it's got food! I'm going to eat. Then I'm going to get to work on making this place more secure. Then I'm going to get some rest. Somebody had already started on some fortifications here, now I'm going to finish them. There's also a hell of a lot of blood, blackened and dried, not only in the entry way but spread throughout the house. Oddly there are no bodies or, thankfully, zeds. Whatever happened here it took place possibly months or more ago. The place is abandoned now. More later.
Ok, I feel better than I have in a long time. It's abso-fucking-lutely amazing what a meal and some decent sleep can do for someone. Before I continue with what I remember with the rise of the Scarlet, I want to tell you how I got out of the tool and die shop.
There was nothing special about the shop, it was a standard set-up. Offices on the second floor, loading dock and machinery on the first. The loading dock had a sturdy metal roll-up door and although it bowed inward and shook and moved with the weight of the zeds trying to gain entry, it held quite nicely. There was a propane fueled Hi-Lo and an assortment of chain hoists and tools, as I suppose there is in every machine shop.
Until the fire started, I didn't think of any use for the Hi-Lo besides driving it out of there. That would be suicide, most of the zeds can still shuffle along quick enough to catch up to a slow moving Hi-Lo. I have to say though that they do seem to be slowing down. It's about god damned time too. After almost a full year they're finally starting to show some signs of true decomposition.
There was a small window, the old fashioned kind operated by a little hand crank, at the top of the stairs facing the burning buildings to the west. It wouldn't open more than a crack and the glass was the opaque kind that you couldn't see through. I used a sledge hammer I found in the shop below to bust apart the window. At the time I was mainly interested in just having a better view of the spread of the conflagration. It only took a couple of good whacks from the sledge to knock the window out.
The undead bastards immediately started converging on this side of the building. There were a bunch of them here already, but now they were just piling into the area. Their hearing isn’t very good but they were already close enough to hear the window being shattered from the other sides of the shop.
(I have to comment on something though, as long as I’m writing. The zombies in the movies always either moaned or hilariously shambled around muttering “Brains...” In reality though, they never uttered a single intentional sound. Occasionally they will bump into each other, forcing putrid air out of their lungs and past whatever is left of their vocal chords, making a sound that’s an odd cross between a sigh and a whimper. The multiplied chorus is completely unnerving when they group up in a “herd”, packed close together and in large numbers. Combined with the foot dragging, they sound like some huge beast thrashing around in agony in the dirt and whining in its death throes. I guess in some way, that is exactly what is happening.)
I got pissed at the abominations and started throwing pieces of the window down at them. The pieces just bounced off, of course, and I started looking around for something heavier to drop on their heads. In a rage I started to destroy the surrounding wall, hoping to get a whole block of the construction masonry to come apart to crush some skulls. It wasn’t working though, the sledge was just busting off fist sized pieces. I dropped the heavy hammer as the blaze swelled rapidly, engulfing almost the whole of the building that was merely ten to fifteen feet away from me.
Downstairs I found iron and steel and brass rods and bar stock. Not quite what I was looking for. The rods were approximately a half an inch in diameter and about twelve foot long. I briefly thought about making a spear with one of the pieces, but then something else caught my attention. There was a propane canister rack where the Hi-Lo was parked.
The full canisters were heavy enough by themselves to crush a zeds head by throwing it down on them from above. As an extra added bonus, I knew they could explode. I didn’t have any idea of how to make that happen, nor could I find any flares or something to attach to them. I figured that I could toss them into the inferno raging next door, and that the flames would be hot enough to cause the canisters to fail and release a nice fireball. It was dangerous, bordering on insanity. I really knew nothing about if they would actually explode, or for that matter, how big the explosion(s) would be. There were six full propane tanks and I
dragged them to the upstairs landing, setting them under the gaping hole in the wall where the window used to be.
It took no time at all before the building wall opposite me started to catch. The zeds seemed oblivious to the fire with some getting so close to the heat that the rags they wore started to smoke. I had to be sure my plan would work so I waited until the most opportune moment to toss these babies into the voracious crowd of undead below me.
The smoke started to become as thick as water and I could start to feel the heat of the flames. Small flames started to grow on some of the zombies hair and clothing. It wasn’t my plan to simply catch the horrors on fire, they would burn for some time before they stopped moving. Not to mention the fact that a flaming zombie horde is much worse than a normal zombie horde. The fire next door by itself may or may not light this building on fire, but a flaming zombie horde sure would. I wanted to blow a hole in the herd that I could run through and escape to freedom.
I went and quickly gathered my backpack and few possessions I brought with me, adding a few tools from the shop to it in preparation for whatever happened next.
Back upstairs the outside paint started peeling and I crouched under the partial wall to stay out of the majority of the heat. A couple of the zeds were actually alight now, but it seemed they didn’t burn well for some reason (There was some kind of waxy coating they developed, or at least it appeared so. I never actually wanted to get close enough to one to give it a physical examination). After a brief few minutes I could hear the supports and ceiling of the structure across from me about to give way. Now is the time I thought.
I nervously heaved those propane canisters through the jagged hole in the wall and prayed they didn’t go off until I got to a safe place (not knowing how big the explosion would be and also hoping that it wouldn’t collapse this building on my head), if they even went off at all.
I was able to run and hide behind a huge CNC machine in the shop and as I was wondering how long it would take for them to explode, they went off. I heard the structure next door collapsing, followed by multiple explosions. They sounded huge to my ears as pieces of rubble and flaming debris wafted down around me.
I got up quickly, more than worried, and made my way through the ruins as fast as I could, hoping I didn’t just sign my own death certificate. I initially was thinking I would have to go back up the stairs and risk jumping out the cavity I made in the wall, but when I got there, the wall was gone. The wall was gone not just by where the window used to be, but the whole west wall was gone. Small flames started up inside the shop and bright red embers were falling all around, both inside and outside the collapsed wall. The smoke was thicker the closer I got to the outside. I didn’t see any standing zombies as I ran outdoors, through the burning wreckage, but there were pieces of them. I ran. I ran as fast as I could. I looked behind me at the horde that I knew now was recovering from the shock-wave and detonations. Most were struggling to stand upright, having been packed so densely together they must have fallen like dominoes. A shit load of them were on fire, which pleased me to no end. The surrounding area was practically zed free, the ravenous undead had been driven by their hunger towards the Tool & Die shop where I was holed up. There were a few stragglers here and there, but they were much slower and clumsier now so I had no problem out running them.
My luck was good that day. I found a dirt bike right out in the middle of the road, just waiting for me to claim it. It started on the first kick and I drove it, off road, away from civilization. The bike ran out of gas on me on some dirt road. Only God knew where I was now, but it seemed clear. Following the lonely, now slightly overgrown, two track road, I came to this place. I cased it out from a distance and slowly, hesitantly, made my way towards it.
I’ve got stuff to do. I’ve spent more time than I thought I would writing this out. It does seem to be helping me though, so I’ll continue the next time I get a chance.
6
Everybody was traumatized to some extent from what had just happened. The madness that swept the animal kingdom was finally waning. People the world over were just starting to timidly poke their heads out from their homes, like scared rabbits (I don‘t even know if there are any rabbits left) from their earthen burrows. Just because a lot of the population wasn’t personally attacked by the marauding parasite controlled critters, didn’t mean they didn’t suffer loss or know terror. Children especially, were terrorized by what they saw on TV. Added to this, many were also in mourning over a beloved family pet that had to be put down or were frightened to death about going outside. The media was in full swing of their over-coverage, of course, endlessly showing animal attacks again and again. The twenty-four hour looping of some of the more violent and horrendous videos were only broken up by speculation and baseless accusations. The Army and National Guard units were still conducting sweeps in the more inaccessible parts of the nation, while trying to effectively quarantine the most remote and unreachable wildernesses.
The food chain was broken, and the natural order of things was truly screwed up. Nobody had any idea of what Mother Nature was going to do next.
I remember watching a particularly disturbing video in which a whole colony of prairie dogs was ripping the flesh off of a herd of cattle. The cows, which had for thousands of years been bred for docileness and timidity, seemed confused and unable to react to this new threat. The image of the fear and agony of these poor victims stays with me even now, creeping into my dreams.
I remember coming to the realization that our food supply was also dealt a heavy blow. Farms were abandoned and the countryside was quickly de-populated. In areas where the animals outnumbered people, the people fled to the urban areas. Even though the initial threat was on the decline, most people didn’t want to go back out to the country until this had completely dissipated. There was talk of the government actually forcing people back to the farms. The U.S. was the bread basket of the world before the parasite and now whole states were without any living livestock. Produce was rotting in the fields. Once crowded chicken and turkey farms were open fields of decaying meat, having been ravaged by maddened squirrels, rabbits, cats, etc.
Famine wasn’t the only thing we had to look forward to, oh no, there was more coming. The predators, those that survived being attacked by what used to be their prey, would start coming in force into the urban areas. A second wave of animal attacks was rushing towards us like a freight train (and we were tied to the tracks). Wolves, coyotes, bears, eagles, hawks, wolverines and every kind of animal that used to feed on the smaller animals were going to starve and they would do the only thing they could, they would add mankind to the menu. For the most part, people didn’t (or didn’t want to) think about what the near future held in store for them, although everybody knew. But that was still in the future, and that was what was going to happen if the Scarlet fever hadn’t reared its ugly head. The Scarlet saved us from an agonizing slow death and granted us a quick and violent one.
When the Scarlet fever first appeared, it showed up as small freckle like, blood-red spots all over the body. Everyone knew this had to be connected to the parasites somehow. The government and CDC were trying to keep as close a lid as possible on it. Looking back, I’m absolutely positive they knew what was happening, and what was going to happen. I’m also absolutely sure they had no idea how to treat it though, otherwise they would have and they would still be alive today (maybe). Maybe it didn’t matter. The CDC admitted that it was indeed a reaction to being infected with the parasite. In the beginning they (and every government on earth) tried to calm the populace, telling us that it would quickly pass and it would be ok. No other large mammal they said (and they were right in this), reacted to this in any other way than a mild cold or flu. They guaranteed that now that they knew what they were facing, that they would shortly have a cure. Top scientists were working day and night they said.
People were clearly on edge. Tempers were short and anger flared easily. Myself, I just put it down to
all the stress people were under lately. Fistfights, brawls and a slight increase in the murder rate ensued. Completely understandable for what we were going through. It got so much worse though.
As the parasitic infection grew in its new hosts, the little red freckles became larger and larger. As the parasitic infection grew, people started acting more and more like the infected animals that had plagued them previously.
The people who were obviously suffering from the infestation openly started to hate the small percentage of us that were immune. It got to the point that everyone who got into my cab, upon seeing me, went into a spit flying rage at me for no reason at all.
When I watched some wild eyed, scarlet speckled teenager with a knife chase an older woman into rush hour traffic on Colonial Drive I decided I was done driving a cab for awhile. The teen’s eyes were a deep blood red (almost black), I remember it clearly, there was no white left. The panic-stricken woman was chased into traffic and got hit by a passing motorist, who I’m sure didn’t see the terrified woman at all. As the poor woman was thrown by the impact and lay in the middle of the street, the teen ran over to her and just started stabbing the injured woman over and over again. I don’t even think she was conscious, thankfully.
