Survival Series (Book 1): Survival

by Hawkley, D. E.

  Reaching the Stenson home, I looked for a way around the pile that had once been a home that housed a family, but there was no way around it. The house next to the property had collapsed sideways filling the driveway and walk into the backyard.

  The Stenson family had been comprised of four people, John and Mary, the adults, and their two children, Lance and Annie. Looking around I did not see any bodies outside the home and what was left of their minivan was still in the driveway, crushed beneath the roof of the collapsed garage.

  John had been a police officer and it was possible he had managed to escape with his family, or maybe like me they were housed inside a safe room inside the home. The Stenson's had seemed like nice people, hardworking and quiet.

  As I made my way up onto the rubble, I tried to wrap my head around who would want to cause so much chaos and death. The news over the last few weeks had not hinted at anything wrong, no one seeking wide scale death against the people in our city or even our country.

  I had been paying attention to only my footing and my thoughts as I crossed the pile of rubble that no longer resembled a home when my ear picked up another sound.

  The sound was low, barely audible, but it was there. If there had been any other sound that morning, even that of a morning song bird, I may have missed it; but it was there, barely, in the cold silence of the morning.

  A whimper.

  It was coming from somewhere within the rubble, beneath my feet.

  Leaning down I got my ear as close to the ground as I could and listened, straining to hear the sound again. The morning had returned to its cold silence and I got to my feet and brushed off the dust when I heard it again. It was a low whining sound, but I could hear the pain within the sound.

  Quickly I tried to scramble through my thoughts, did the Stenson’s have a dog? Could there be a dog trapped under the rubble, in a room that had managed to survive; or, was it simply trapped and dying?

  Surveying the collapsed home, I looked for a way to get inside. There had been a way out of my house, it had taken time to find it, but it was there, perhaps there was also a way into the Stenson’s house.

  The morning dragged on as I searched around the property and up and over the rubble multiple times. It was mid-morning before I finally found what I was looking for, the corner of a set of stairs that lead down.

  The Stenson’s had a backdoor that led into the basement, hidden under a piece of fallen roof. Grunting as I strained and pulling with all I had in me, I was able to move it but only slightly, and only enough to slip stomach pulled in down onto the steps leading to the backdoor.

  I tried to peer through the window in the backdoor, it was dark inside the house now that the windows were either gone or covered by rubble. The stairs which I had come down didn’t offer much in the way of light either given that part of a roof blocked any chance of the sun shining down.

  Leaning against the window I put my hands up around my face to minimize anything that may distract me, and I stared intently into the dark. I tried to focus as hard as I could, as if my eyes could pierce through the darkness if I concentrated hard enough. Something moved. It was only slightly, but it moved, and it was much bigger than a dog.

  Could one of the Stenson’s still be alive? Could they have survived?

  “Mr. Stenson? Mrs. Stenson? Lance? Annie? Is that you?” I called out as I hammered on the door. “It’s Kyle from down the street. Are you alright? Does anyone need medical assistance?”

  The dark figure shuffled in the darkness, but it looked almost as if they were walking into the wall. Could someone have been hit on the head or blinded in the explosions? Reaching into my backpack I grabbed the flashlight I had packed in case I needed it. I didn’t want to burn the batteries out, but I need to know what was going on beyond the door in the darkness.

  Pressing the flashlight against the window, I leaned forward once again to avoid as much glare as I could and flicked it on.

  My breath caught in my throat at what I saw in when the darkness vanished amidst the light. The one still standing was John Stenson, at his feet laid Mary and the children. The family dog, the one I had heard whimpering, laid on the ground barely alive - torn in half.

  The light on his back must have caught John’s attention because he stopped moving and turned slowly towards the light, towards me. John stared at me with black eyes rimmed in red. Blood covered his hands and the front of his shirt. Clearly the death of his wife and children and the mutilation of the dog had been by his hands. Chunks were missing out of the three bodies that laid on the floor as well, had John been eating his family?

  Try as I might I could not break my gaze from John’s he looked as though he was blind but there was something else in his eyes, a sort of savagery and a knowing. A knowing that he could not get to me, not yet, but the slight grin that pulled at his lips said that he would, when the time came.

  Backing up quickly I flicked off the flashlight and scrambled up the stairs, pushing my way out between the roof and ground. Could this be what had happened to the others at the hospital, I wondered as I tried my best to distance myself from John. The world had truly become something else and it seemed that some may have survived, but they were not who they had been.

  Words like zombie and tv shows like the Walking Dead, these things ran through my mind as I broke into a run, but I dismissed them and pushed them aside. John was not dead, he was not a zombie, at least not like any zombie I had seen portrayed in movies or tv shows. He didn’t seem human anymore either, or if he was human, he was mutated. There was something not all that human about him.

  Running through the broken back fence of the Stenson home I headed in the direction of the hospital. I needed to get to Joanne, if she was still alive, and find out what she knew about what was going on. The world had become an unknown place to me and yet I hoped that somewhere I could find the answers I needed, or I would not survive this world at all.

  .THREE.

  Off the Beaten Path

  The sun was at its peak in the sky as I jumped over yet another charred body. I had run until I was winded and was forced to slow down to a job, finally coming to a stop. As I stood in the middle of the cracked and ruined street I leaned forward, hands on my knees and dry heaved. My lungs felt as though they were on fire and my heart pounded heavily inside my chest.

  Trying to catch my breath I found my thoughts drawn back to the Stenson home. Whatever John had become, I feared that he would not be the only one I would come across. It wasn’t only the fact that he had enough strength to tear his family pet in half; or that, by the looks of it, he had murdered his wife and children and had been gnawing on their lifeless corpses, it was his eyes and the grin.

  Those eyes had said he would get me, the grin said he knew that I knew it. What he had done was savage, but he had a clarity in those deep black eyes that said he knew exactly what he had done. John Stenson, though he had done horrible things, seemed collected and calm.

  As far as I could tell I had not stepped out into some sort of Walking Dead, zombie filled reality. John, aside from eating pieces of the bodies of his family, showed no characteristics of the classic zombie. In the world before it had changed John was a police officer who had helped people, he always had a glimmer in his eyes when he talked about the evil people he had caught. Yet now, he had suddenly become something evil and he was conscious and aware of what he was.

  Standing at that door I had expect John to rush the door, to hammer on the glass and try to break it. To be filled with an insatiable hunger and need to crack open my skull and devour my brains. The idea of a world full of zombies seemed like it would be preferable to what the world I was in now. At least if there had been zombie, after watching so many old movies and tv shows, I would know what I was dealing with. Zombie were predictable in their actions, John’s calm and collected nature, given his situation, made him unpredictable.

  When I finally managed to slow the hammering of my heart in my chest and my brea
thing had returned to as normal as I could manage, I looked around quickly. I stood at the edge of the Trinity Woods Park, a massive park that stood between me and the hospital - my destination.

  Trinity Woods was a park filled with small clustering of trees and trails running through it, it was much like Central Park in New York City. Looking out across the park I was surprised to see that although many trees looked as though they had been knocked down by the sheer force of the bombs exploding, none of the trees were burnt. From what I could tell the park had not been hit by the bombs at all.

  Well the park looked virtually undisturbed, there were no sounds at all, not even the chattering of small animals. Standing at the edge of the park I found my thoughts pulled back to the Stenson house. John may have been contained, locked behind the basement door, in the darkness, but what could be hiding in the shadows amongst the thick gathering of trees in the park.

  It didn’t matter and I knew it, I would have to leave the sidewalk and cut through the park along the paths if I wanted to reach the hospital before nightfall. Given the amount of time I had wasted out in the open so far, I was not going to reach the hospital and make it back to my bunker before nightfall. Walking around the hospital could leave me stranded at any point. If I got stuck at an impasse of collapsed buildings I could be forced to backtrack and cut through the park in the dark. Whereas the park had no buildings or rubble, it would be a simple jog along the trail.

  Reaching into my backpack I pulled out the small axe I had packed for emergencies. When I packed it, I had assumed I would need it to bust through a jammed door or to scare off some wild animals, but now I knew that I might have to use it to protect myself from other things, possibly other people.

  Mentally, I did not know if I would be able to take the life of another person, even if they had become whatever John Stenson had. I wasn’t even sure I would have been able to kill Stenson given the strength he had clearly acquired. It was clearly however, that if I wanted to survive, I would need to be willing to kill, if the situation called for it. Besides, Joanne was counting on me to make it to the hospital alive and that, at least in part, was keeping me moving forward.

  The gravel crunched beneath my feet as I stepped onto the park path. I would need to keep my eyes and ears open moving through the park as both side of the path, at places, had trees. As I reached the first of the tree clusters in the park, I became tense. I could hear my heart in my ear as it beat hard inside my chest. The only sounds I could hear outside my heart beating was the short-ragged inhales of my breath and the footfalls of my feet echoing in the early afternoon silence.

  There was an unsettling feeling in my stomach walking through a now potentially deserted park that once, not long ago, was a community haven and a busy cut through for many business people heading to and from work.

  As a stiff breeze blew through the cluster of trees I jumped when the something out of the corner of my eyes caught my attention. Turning quickly, axe raised, I squinted into the shadows that hid amongst the trees - there was nothing there. The shadows of the trees branches dances amongst the wind in a sort of mocking laughter. Mother nature it seems was not without a cruel sense of humor.

  While it seems that my eyes and the shadows created by tree and wind were playing tricks on me there was still an uneasy feeling growing in the bottom of my gut as I continued further into the park.

  Off to my left, I watched as the old community center building rose up out of the trees like a mountain over the forest. I had a sudden urge to break off the trail and run to the building, to check it for survivors, but choose against it. The building may be intact, however without electricity running through it anything could have taken up residence. Continuing along the trail my eyes shifting from side to side, I headed towards the wheel path; a circular path that connected the other paths that ran through the forest. It would lead me to the path that would take me out the other side of the park.

  Walking through the park was quicker but it felt like it was taking forever. My eyes caught every shadow or movement, my ears pricked up every time that wind blew in any way that seemed foreign or alien. Of course, this world was alien to me now and I was headed towards at least one thing that didn’t seem alien - another living human.

  The world would seem foreign for a while I guess, I was living through the aftermath of what seemed like the apocalypse. Apocalypse, the word tickled my thoughts and I was drawn back to the day of Sunday school and the sermons in church. Sermons about the end of the world and the rapture, the coming of the antichrist and the war that would be fought. Was this the end of days spoken of in the Bible? I gave my head a small shake, it couldn’t be, at least not the one the Bible spoke of; there had been no rapture, the dead bodies of all the good people in my neighborhood, scattered about in pieces was evidence to that.

  However, while it may not have been the End of Days that was laid out in the Bible, I was definitely walking through a world that had experienced an apocalypse of sorts.

  The wheel path came into view and I found myself drawn to a halt. I listened intently. Something in my gut told me that I need to hide, to duck into the bushes - now. Moving quickly and as quietly as I could manage, I slipped into the bushes near where the trails intersected and crouched down. I searched in all directions that I could see for the reason my heart was once again jackhammering in my chest, but I could see nothing that would give it cause to do so.

  In either direction the path looked clear, inviting even, yet I found myself cowering in the bushes straining to hear anything. Something beyond my scope of seeing had turned on an alarm in my head and caused my gut to clench.

  Finally, after a few moments of silence, holding my breath, I heard it.

  Boom. Boom. Boom.

  It was only faint at the moment, but it was definitely there.

  Ding. Ding. Ding.

  What was it I wondered? I continued to strain to see which direction it was coming from. Surely there was no parade marching band coming through the park along the trail. However, it did sound like someone pounding on a drum and perhaps a triangle. There was something in the beat of the drum and triangle, it sounded almost like a calling to dinner like in the old movies about the south.

  Hunkered down in the bushes I watched, as best as I could, both directions, alternating left and right every few seconds. Finally, off in the distance along the right-hand path I saw what was making the noise - who was making the noise.

  There was a small group, four people, people being a loose term, surely, they were human of a sorts, but they had taken on similar characteristics of John Stenson. They were human, but not human.

  The larger of the four, in my head I had given him the name Boomer because it was this grotesque looking man who was hammering on the drum, he pounded the drum in alternating beat with his big meat hook fists. The smallest of the four was a young lad, from where I was, he looked maybe ten or eleven, he was using what looked like a knife to clatter a steel triangle. The other two, a man and a woman, looked catatonic, simply walking along in tandem with the sound of the instruments.

  My mind was racing, what could these four possibly be up to; were they hoping to lure out potential victims to feast up. I had been listening carefully the whole time I moved about the trail and had heard nothing, no one, did these monsters know better than I did.

  As if the Gods had decided to answer my unspoken question, what would become another nightmare in the bank of nightmares that was slowly getting bigger in my memory, I witnessed what they had already known - what they were doing and why.

  The tempo of the drum had gotten quicker and more angry, vicious, and suddenly a young woman, she could not have been more than sixteen, tore out of the bushes not even fifty feet from where I was. She was closer to the violent band of flesh eaters than I was. As she ran along the path, tearing past me a look of unspeakable fear filling her eyes, the four took chase. They were fast, faster than any human I had ever seen run and the look in their eyes as t
hey tore past me was a satisfactory bloodlust - a hunger.

  I wanted to run out, to try and help the young girl, to maybe draw them in my direction and give her time to run, but I didn’t move; I was frozen in place. My hand gripped the handle of the axe so hard my knuckles were white. The young girl was screaming for help, help that was surely nowhere to be found.

  Suddenly they were on top of her, attacking like ravenous rabid dogs who had been starved and beaten for weeks. She screams as the sound of rending flesh filled the air. I tried to look away, but I could get my head to turn, or my eyes to close. Tears ran down my cheek as I bit my lip, I could taste blood as I fought off the screams, I feared would escape my mouth if I didn’t bite hard enough. The world was blurry as the young woman’s screams rose to a wailing, haunting pitch and finally died down.

  The four were clearly savages, not cool and calm like Stenson had been; or perhaps Stenson would have been more like them if the door didn’t stand between us. The attack, the tearing of flesh and screams did not go quickly, it had lasted at least fifteen minutes, or so my brain had assumed. The entire time she screamed I could hear flesh being torn away and chewed.

  What was left of the young girl when the four finally departed, satisfied for now, was nothing but a mess of broken bones and blood. Little bits of flesh still clung to the bones, but it was her head - her head was completely intact, they had not touched it at all. The eyes were open and staring in my direction, silently accusing me of being a coward in the face of danger and death.

  You let me die. The stare said though not in word. You could have saved me, but you didn’t. You are a coward. How do you plan to save Joanne coward?

  I wrapped my arms around my knees, drawn up under my chin, and sobbed. The world had become a landscape of savagery. I had waited, cowering in the bush for what seemed like forever, the four had gone and left the park engulfed in an eerie silence once more. They had taken what they had wanted from the young woman and moved on.