“Is this good or bad?” Logan asked.
“Without knowing what the National Guard was trying to accomplish out there before,” I replied. “I have no way of knowing.”
“Let’s go check the TV and see if this is happening anywhere else,” Katie suggested. “Maybe someone else knows what it means.”
We all went to the TV room hoping to find out what this new development meant.
However, we never had the opportunity to find out anything, that is if there was anything to find out. When we turned on the TV, nothing happened.
We weren’t sure when the power went out, if the clock on my nightstand was any indicator, our best guess was around six o’clock.
We would be spending our first night surrounded by death and suffering in the dark, in more way than one.
Chapter 11
We all spent the night together in my bedroom.
None of us slept, we were all too upset to sleep, at best we were able to doze off for a few minutes before being shocked awake by the images of the day.
Emma and Katie had the bed, Logan and I had moved the recliners from the living room into the bedroom to make ourselves as comfortable as possible.
Age was apparently starting to catch up with me and by morning, after spending the night in the recliner, I had numerous cramps and other aches and pains that I haven’t felt in some time.
Shortly before dawn we were all startled to hear what sounded like a pack of dogs attacking the poor unfortunate victims who were staggering around outside the house.
None of us got up to look out the window to see the carnage that we could hear taking place outside.
It was too dark without street lights to see anything outside, besides none of us had a desire to see these people being attacked and helplessly torn apart.
I could see Emma pull her pillow over her head to drown out the horrible sounds.
Even now as the light began to filter in to the room from around the bedroom curtains, we could still hear the occasional savage sounds outside the house. Thankfully the sounds weren’t as loud or as vicious as they had sounded earlier.
Fortunately for us, the victims didn’t cry out in anguish as they were attacked, but the vicious sounds of the animals attacking them was more than enough to give us the picture of what was taking place. It was a terrible feeling to know what was happening and to also know that there wasn’t a thing we could do about it.
As the light coming in around the curtains grew brighter, a sign that today was going to be a beautiful sunny day, Katie got out of bed and announced that she was going to the bathroom.
I quickly got up to check out the house to make sure it was safe for her to go to the bathroom.
In a weak attempt to be humorous, Katie mumbled a comment about this being the first time she ever had an escort to go to the bathroom.
I in turn replied that it had better have been the first time a guy took her to the restroom, we both smiled briefly but it quickly faded as the reality of our situation quickly overwhelmed any humor either of us had briefly felt.
I walked back to the bedroom and sat down on my chair. Emma and Logan stared at me the entire way to my chair as if expecting me to make an announcement.
“You can relax, she made it safely to the bathroom,” I finally said. I was surprised to see Emma breathe a sigh of relief. The tension from what we had seen yesterday and the fear of the unknown horrors we expected to see today had us all on pins and needles.
We all sat quietly until we heard the toilet flush in the bathroom. We weren’t intentionally listening, but in a house with everyone sitting nervously on the edge of their seats, we couldn’t help but hear the sound. Emma stared at the bedroom door waiting for Katie to come back.
This had been the first time we had been separated since things started going all wrong yesterday, surprisingly I found myself holding my breath as I too watched the bedroom door.
We waited, expecting to see the bedroom door open, but instead a few minutes later we heard a blood chilling scream, I jumped from my chair and made a dash for the bathroom.
As I ran through the living room I slid to a halt when I saw Katie frozen in front of the living room window, her hands over her mouth as she stared at the window.
I could hear Emma gasping behind me when we saw what was on the other side of the window.
A bloody face kept ramming into the living room window, smearing blood over the glass and over itself.
Even over the loud echoing thumps caused by the person’s face hitting the window over and over, we could hear the loud groaning sound he was making.
As the face glared at the window, we could see his eyes were clouded over. I had no idea how this person could even see with those eyes, but he seemed focused firmly on the window, or more likely on Katie who was standing frozen only a few feet away on the other side of the glass. The skin color of the bloody mangled face was a darker gray than I had seen on the people staggering through the yard yesterday.
Sores and thick black veins covered the face.
The person, or whatever he was now, viciously snapped his bloody teeth as he repeatedly slammed his face against the invisible glass that blocked him from reaching Katie.
I ran over and put my arms around Katie as I continued to stare at the gruesome face battering our window.
“It’s OK, I’m here,” I said.
Katie turned and hugged me and let out a few sobs.
“I wanted to look outside and see what it was like out there this morning,” Katie said taking a deep breath. “When I pulled the curtain away from the window, this thing scared the hell out of me and started trying to batter his way through the window to get at me.”
“Just relax,” I said. “You’re safe.”
“But that’s not why I screamed.” Katie continued. “Well, it’s part of the reason I screamed. Dad, the red dots aren’t lying on the ground any more, now they are out there eating the people without red dots.”
“What?” I asked in a whisper as I raised my eyes and attempted to look out in the yard past the guy smashing his face into our living room window, but the loud crashing sounds and the unbelievable scene in front of me seemed to demand all of my attention.
The guy that gave no indication that he felt an ounce of pain as large wounds appeared and tore open as he battered his face against the glass, his broken teeth slid down the glass in streams of blood.
The guy was attacking the window so violently that I was almost afraid to take my eyes off him, but I was finally able to force my attention to what was taking place out in my yard and on the street.
The first thing I saw was that the street and my yard were a bright red color.
There were people lying on the ground everywhere, most had someone on top of them savagely tearing at their body. Many of the bodies on the ground were now little more than mangled skeletons with bits of flesh clinging to the blood covered bones.
The bodies that were staggering around were red with the blood of their victims, I could tell some of them had a red paint spot on the front of their clothes, but as saturated in blood as their clothes were, it was impossible to see the red paint spot on most of them. But I knew the red paint spot was there.
When my eyes finally got past the blood-soaked clothing, I saw that some of them were holding and eating arms or were carrying unidentifiable large chunks of flesh. Most of them had long bloody strands of flesh hanging from their teeth.
All I could think as I slowly scanned the sight was that I was having a vision of what it was like in Hell.
My horrifying thoughts were interrupted when I felt Katie squirming in my arms, then her hand began tapping my shoulder frantically.
“Dad, Dad, why are they all coming towards the house?” Katie asked nervously.
The morbid sight of what had happened had blocked my mind from seeing anything other than how horrifying they all looked, I didn’t realize until Katie got my attention that all the bloody savages h
ad abandoned the remains of their prior victims and were in fact now making their way towards the house.
“I don’t know,” I said suddenly feeling confused.
But when the second blood covered face began slamming into the living room window, then joined by a third and fourth, the reason became as clear as day.
They finally had noticed we were in here and they wanted us like they had wanted the people scattered around on the ground and street in front of our house.
They intended to do to us what they had done to those who were now lying in pieces out in front of my house.
The loud cracking sound and the cobweb pattern that quickly spread across the outside pane of glass on our double pane window brought me out of my trance.
“You only have three minutes!” my inner voice suddenly began to shout loudly inside my head.
“Logan, come with me, fast,” I yelled as I let go of Katie, turned and ran towards the inside garage door.
I threw open the door and grabbed the ladder as I yelled to Logan, “Logan get my drill and put on a fresh battery pack. Also grab that box of six-inch wood screws on the work bench.”
As Logan ran to the work bench, I climbed the ladder to reach the loft I had built overtop of the rails the garage door rode on.
I began sliding wood panels around until I found the panel I was looking for.
When I decided to prepare for the end of the financial world, besides food, I knew I would need a way to secure the house from desperate intruders. I made wooden panels to fit over all the windows. I knew that during desperate times that I might have to fend off attackers desperately looking for food and of course looters.
I didn’t feel it was necessary that I build a bomb shelter, but I did realize that desperate people would do anything to protect and feed their families. I also knew that there was always an element of society waiting for any excuse to go out and take all the things they were too lazy to work for like decent people did. I knew I would need a first line of defense when things like that began to happen.
The house was brick, the weakest point that could be exploited was the windows.
I balanced the large wooden panel on the top of the ladder and slowly moved down the ladder letting the heavy panel slide down after me.
Logan was waiting for me when I reached the floor.
“I found the drill and the screws,” Logan said.
“Grab one end of this panel and help me carry it into the living room,” I instructed. “Hurry.”
We quickly carried the panel into the living room.
As we entered the room, I heard the outer pane of glass shatter and fall out of the frame.
The savages began ramming their bloody mangled faces against the final pane of glass.
By the time we reached the window, cracks were spreading across the inner pane.
“Katie, grab the drill and the screws from Logan,” I yelled. “Emma, tear the curtains off the window. Logan help me lift this panel up over the window.”
When Emma had the curtains down, Logan and I held the panel up against the window.
“Emma, help Logan hold the panel, Katie give me the drill and then help your mother and brother,” I shouted.
Everyone quickly did what they were told.
I lined up the panel and while everyone else held it in place, I began driving the screws through the panel and into the window frame.
After I had driven in sixteen screws, four on each side of the panel, we all breathed a sigh of relief, until we heard the sound of skulls battering the wooden panel.
Emma looked worried.
“Is that going to keep them out?” a worried Emma asked.
“The panel is made out of heavy boards, we should be fine,” I replied.
But as soon I had said we should be fine, we heard a loud crash coming from the kitchen window.
“What about the rest of the windows?” Katie asked.
“I have a panel for each of the windows,” I replied. “I made them about a month after we moved to the house in case we would ever need them.”
“I think we are going to need them,” Katie added.
“So do I,” I replied. “We better get to work before they discover the other windows and start breaking them too. Logan, go keep an eye on the kitchen window while I get another panel.”
“Thirty minutes and two dead battery packs later, we had all the windows covered.
It was starting to get dark in the house by the time we had half the windows covered, so I had Logan run down to the basement and bring up two oil lanterns and light them to give us enough light to complete the job.
For good measure, I bolted two, two by fours across the front and back doors when we heard something crash into the front door.
By then, we were hearing a pounding sound coming from all sides of the house.
As the adrenaline rush died down, I dropped down on the couch to catch my breath.
“Dad,” Katie asked, “How do we get out of the house now?”
“We’ll figure that out when the time comes,” I replied. “Right now, the important thing is to keep those things out.”
“OK,” she added, “But how are we going to know when we can go outside, I can’t see a thing and I feel like I’m in a box.”
“Did you think that I hadn’t thought about that?” I asked.
“Yes,” Emma replied. “That would be something that you would overlook.”
“Well, I did think about it,” I said. “I knew we would have to see what was going on outside if we ever found it necessary to secure the house, so I put a couple doors near the peak of the roof that we can look out from up in the attic. The doors are also large enough that we could use them as an emergency exit if we had to.”
“The attic,” Katie said making a face, “aren’t there bugs and bats living up there?”
“Bugs and bats are the least of our worries,” Emma added.
“Can we go up and see them?” Logan asked.
“I was going to do that as soon as I caught my breath,” I said. “I didn’t get to see much out front before that guy tried to come through our front window. I’d like to get a look at the neighborhood and see if this is happening everywhere out there.”
“Dad, why are those red dot people trying to eat everyone?” Katie asked. “Did the serum the soldiers gave them do this?”
“I can’t say,” I replied.
“They look like zombies,” Katie added. “Do you think they could be zombies? They look like gross dead people.”
“I don’t know,” I replied again. “My brain is numb right now, I don’t know what to think.”
“Do you guys still have your phones turned on?” I asked as some part of my mind began to work again.
Katie pulled her phone out of her pocket, tapped the screen and showed me that it was on.
“How much power do you have left?” I ask.
Katie looked at her phone, “Fifty percent,” she replied. “I better go charge it.”
“How are you going to do that?” Logan asked sarcastically. “there isn’t any electricity.”
“I forgot about that,” Katie answered.
“I want you to try and call 911 and see if you can get a hold of anyone, if you do, let me talk to them,” I said. “If not, maybe you should turn your phones off to save the power.”
“How are we going to charge our phones?” Katie asked.
“We’re not,” Logan smiled. “That’s the point dummy.”
Katie dialed 911, when no one answered she quickly turned off her phone. “I hope the power comes back on soon,” she said softly. “I need my phone.”
Of everything that had happened over the last few days, I’m sure the idea of having to go without her phone was something that Katie had never considered.
By the look on her face, I would say that she was confused, not having a phone was uncharted territory for my teenage daughter.
If we weren’t surrounded by death and flesh-eat
ing zombies, I probably would have found that amusing.
I got up and started for the living room closet door. I opened the door and pulled down the folding stairs from the ceiling.
“I’m going up for a look in case anyone wants to join me,” I said.
Logan and Emma quickly got up and walked over next to me. Katie, finally deciding that she didn’t want to stay down here by herself, reluctantly got up and followed.
“Logan, grab a lantern,” I said. “There will be some light coming in through the vents, but we can use a little more.”
As I started up the steps, Emma said quietly so only I could hear her, “Brian, last night when it sounded like dogs attacking those people outside, it wasn’t dogs was it?”
“No, I think it was the red dot people attacking the others,” I replied.
“It sounded horrible,” Emma added.
“I’m sure it was, from what I did see out the front window, those people didn’t stand a chance. The bones and pieces of people lying around out front tells me it was a damn massacre. Hopefully those poor bastards were as out of it as they looked and didn’t feel a thing.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Emma said, her voice almost a whisper.
“Brian, any idea what could have turned those people into such monsters?” Emma asked.
“No, but I’m sure someone in the government knows what caused it,” I replied.
“If they knew, then why would they have done it?” Emma asked. “This is madness.”
“Like I always said, Emma,” I continued. “I doubt they expected this any more than we did, someone in Washington gets a goodie two shoes idea and for all our benefit they try to make it happen. The problem is ninety percent of the time they get the exact opposite of what they were trying to do. They have a habit of acting without thinking what kind of reactions their actions will cause.”
Just Trying To Stay Alive: A Prepper's Tale Page 10
