by GJ Zukow
make it through the next week or so most of the danger will have passed.
It's three a.m. and the neighborhood would normally be almost dead quiet at this time but not tonight. Tonight the air is full of the sound of near and distant gunfire. Screams, some horrified, some pain filled and all colored with an uncontrolled rage, are sporadically heard. Uncontrolled and unfought fires dot the landscape, a heavy smoke drifts through the air like fog. Army and National Guard units patrol the streets in Armored Personnel Carriers and Abrams tanks.
There's an armed check point at the main entrance to the subdivision where I live. I don't know or care which branch of the military is manning it since the Federal Government ordered a severely strict Martial Law order. I've been watching them with a cheap pair of bird watching binoculars I looted from the now empty house next door where old lady Hoffner used to live. They have the Scarlet just as everybody else around the world has but only half as bad. Only half of the soldiers’ skin has turned the deep scarlet, compared to the average citizen who is almost completely covered with the tell-tale coloring. Three times a day, every eight hours like clockwork, an officer comes around and hands them a pill. They are obviously under orders to take the pills, as they all take them together. The officer then has them open their mouths and ensures that the pills have been swallowed before they return to their duties. Their duties seem to be to kill anyone outside of their homes at night. To be caught on the street at night is an offense punishable by death. To be caught looting is an offense punishable by death. To be overcome by the disease is punishable by death. In fact everything is an offense punishable by death. When they kill somebody they just leave the body where it falls. After, that is, they put a round into the person's head.
As for the rest of the Federal Government, the President, Vice President and the leading members of the Senate and Congress and their families, nobody has seen them for almost a week now. The consensus is that they are holed up in some hermetically sealed, state of the art, secret, deep bunker somewhere, waiting for all of this to blow over. Probably they are undergoing the curing process that no one else could go through without being re-infected the same day. I don't know who they think they're going to order around when they finally pop their heads back out, certainly not me.
My mother never came home from her shift at the hospital on Monday night. I tried over and over again to reach her through her cell phone but the whole network seems to be down. With all of the chaos washing over the city I nervously waited for her return until Tuesday morning, thinking (hoping) that she had decided to stay overnight at the hospital until it was safer. I knew she would have at least called me on a hospital phone to check on us and let us know she was alright but when the call never came I called up the hospital myself. Something is very wrong at the hospital. The phone rings and rings, then gets placed into a message stating to use the voice mail of the person who I'm trying to contact. I tried doing that and left her a number of messages. I tried to get a hold of the switchboard operators, only to be placed into an eternal hold with easy listening music playing. It is extremely surreal to be listening to music meant to be calming while people are losing their minds and killing each other all around me. I spent at least an hour trying every extension and internal number I could, only to be met with unanswered rings leading to being placed on hold and then transferred to another department that goes into the same, unanswered loop.
When all of this dies down, when all of the madness that the Scarlet has brought with it finally ends, I will go to the hospital and find my mother's body and give her a proper burial next to Lucy.
Lucy had been getting harder and harder to control. Yesterday morning she was groggy from the sedation but she had enough appetite to eat. What she wanted was meat. Red meat. Normally she was never really big on red meat, preferring chicken or pasta. Macaroni and cheese with chicken tenders used to be her favorite meal, along with pizza and the junk food that most kids like. She was almost screaming at the top of her lungs for me to get some red meat for her and I promised her I would find her some for lunch and dinner. For breakfast she refused her favorite cereal with soy milk and even nixed my flapjack idea (basically just flour, water, baking powder and vanilla – the only ingredients we could get at the stores with milk and butter and eggs being gone) by throwing things at me. Instead I got her to eat some of the remaining (and precious) chicken soup. I felt kind of bad about spiking her soup with the sedatives. Her skin was about eighty percent red by then and her gums, fingernails and whites of her eyes were starting to turn black. I knew she would die soon, and decided that I would risk being caught breaking into Mrs. Hoffner's house to try to find a decent last meal for my little sister.
Mrs. Hoffner's house hadn't been touched by anyone in the two weeks or so since her cats opened up her veins. The county took her and the infected feline's corpses away, to be burned, and the house has been empty since. Her relatives all lived in California but with the animal madness, quickly followed by the scarlet, no one in their right mind would come across the country just to box her things up.
After I checked to make sure the guards at the check point weren't getting ready to do one of their random rounds of the neighborhood and surrounding area I jumped the fence into Mrs. Hoffner's backyard. I didn't take the rifle with me, thinking that if I were caught it would be easier to explain what I was doing in my neighbor’s house if I weren't armed. While I will never make the mistake of going anywhere unarmed again, it may have saved my life. If the army guy's had heard a gunshot, especially so close to their check point, they would have surely responded. They would have investigated the gunshot just to make sure that nobody was shooting at them, which happens all the time. The parasite crazed populace goes after any authority figures first, especially police and anyone who was ordering them around.
The back door was locked, dead-bolted and had a chain on it. I hesitated for a moment not knowing how to proceed, I had never done any breaking and entering before. The windows had a simple clasp on the inside to lock the window so I threw a rock through it, un-clasped it and raised the window. The breaking of the glass seemed horribly loud to my ears. I prayed a little silent prayer to the Gods that the surrounding sounds of the turmoil of the world collapsing would cover or at least mitigate it. As quickly as I could I slipped through the window, knocking out the screen, and went straight for the kitchen.
I was in luck as the electric company hadn't shut the power off yet and her freezer was well stocked with all kinds of meat. I filled two shopping bags full of the now nearly impossible to get swag and unlocked the back door.
No sooner than I had opened the back door and was stepping outside when I sensed, more than saw, something being swung at my head. Instinctively I ducked back into the house as a nail studded bat hit the screen door, slashing the screen with its sharp nail points. I recognized that bat. The last time I had seen it, it was being wielded by Mr. McConnell. Today the bat was being used by Mrs. McConnell, a large, heavy set woman who had at least a hundred pounds on me and was practically pure red.
Mrs. McConnell rushed straight into the house before I could shut the door on her.
"Bad girl, you know you shouldn't be here."
The words came out of her mouth with a sinister malice in them, having slipped past yellowed teeth surrounded by black gums and a blackened tongue. Insanity clearly burned in eyes that were more like dark holes in her head, they were so black.
"I just need some food Mrs. McConnell," I said.
"Look," I continued, trying to reason with her. "I found some meat here, I'll split it with you and there's more in the freezer."
"Oh, yes, I found some meat here too." She said, raising her weapon.
I'll never forget the look in her eyes or her weird cackle as she swung the wicked spiked bludgeon at me. As I backed up I blocked it with one of the bags of frozen meat. The nails tore through the plastic bag and embedded themselves into a frozen pot roast. The bat got caught up momentarily in the bag,
the meat and my yanking and backing away. It was then I saw the sheen of sweat that covered her. It was only due to her sweat slick hands that she lost her grip on the bat. Not losing a moment she bull rushed me. I was faster though and dodged out of the way. Without thinking about it at all I grabbed the bat and twisted it in my grip so the unentangled nails were facing her. She turned her bulk around to face me and go at me again and as she did I swung the bat, plastic bag and frozen pot roast still clinging to it. It was all so quick. Before she had fully turned back towards me I was swinging the nail studded bat at her temple.
It's still lodged in the side of her head, still with the (I suppose) thawing pot roast and shredded plastic bag hanging from it.
Looking back, I find it surprising that after I murdered her (in self defense) I gathered up the frozen meat that had spilled into a fresh bag. After all, it was what I went there for. Then I hurriedly, silently as I could, left the house and its new corpse and proceeded to cook Lucy a fitting last meal.
When Lucy woke up next she was past being controllable. At first she smelled the steaks I was cooking and her mouth watered so much she
