Survival Series (Book 1): Survival
Page 5
‘Suicide is the whispers of the devil.’ I could hear the cracking in my great aunt’s voice when those words repeated in my head. Of course, she didn’t think so much after her son hung himself, then it was just someone who was called home too early to serve God.
Pushing away both the thoughts and the memories, locking them in the deepest darkest parts of my mind I began searching the vehicle.
By the time I crawl out of the back-driver side window I had acquired another handgun that had been inside a heat resistance lockbox in the glove box and two full clips. The revolver, even if it did shoot would be useless as there were no bullets for it anywhere in the car. Perhaps the man carried it as his last option. The second gun, a cobalt blue steel .357 magnum, from the lock box had a full clip in it.
Standing on top of the Buick, one of the few cars closer to the ground, I looked up at the sky. I had no watch and my phone had been destroy in the collapsing of the house, so I had to judge by the position of the sun in the sky what time it was.
I had spent the better part of an hour searching the vehicles and soon enough dusk would fall across the city leaving more vulnerable, out in the open. It was time to move on and to tackle whatever the maze was going to through at me.
Climbing down onto the street I started towards what look like the entrance to it all, had it been an actual maze to go through. I needed to be ready for anything and so I placed the empty revolver into my backpack and retrieved my small axe which I slid into my belt loop.
I flicked the safety off on the gun and took a deep breath. I had never fired a gun before in my life and just holding it made me feel uneasy. All I really knew about guns was that you point them at the threat and squeeze the trigger. In old style westerns it was usually a quick and clean death, but this wasn’t a movie.
As I moved slowly towards the entrance to the twisted metal and stone maze, I began to wonder what would happen if someone had attacked me and managed to wrestle away the gun from me.
Game over, a small voice in my head whispered.
Swallowing a lump that was had to push down I took a deep breath, found my footing on the cracked asphalt and moved around the cluster of burned out vehicles and entered the first of the fallen chunks of building, entering the maze.
There were more dead bodies amongst the rubble of the fallen buildings. It seemed some people had managed to get out of their vehicles and had tried to seek shelter inside the office buildings, though it did them no good. I wondered if anyone had in fact made it out of the city and if they had, where did they go? Would the still be alive, so to speak, like I was and hopefully Joanne still was, or would they have eventually changed like John Stenson had, or worse, like the four had.
Lost in my thoughts of what ifs and could haves, I did not hear the thud ahead of me. It was the sudden feeling of being watched that brought my eyes to lock on the man that stood ahead of me, the man who had brought me quickly to a standstill.
Though it was not Stenson as I had thought for a moment, the man before me had changed the same way Stenson had. There was no sudden urge in the man to come barreling forward and his eyes had the same red rim around them. As we stared locked in each other’s sights I slowly moved my finger to the trigger of the gun in my hand. I didn’t want to make any sudden movements, to bring this monster of a man charging at me like an enraged bull.
If I had not known better, if I was not conscious of the ring of red around the man’s eyes, I may have mistaken him for a normal person. The four in the park walked slow and methodical, but like Stenson this man simple stood his ground staring me down.
Perhaps they are all the same, my mind whispered to my paranoia. Maybe they are calm and collected until you run and that is when the savage comes out. There was no way I was going to run and find out. I had not been able to see the faces of the four clearly enough to know if they had the telltale trademark of red rimmed eyes, so anything was possible. It could very well have been the young girls sudden burst of fear and running that set off the four causing them to charge at her like a bull charging a muleta.
Whoever this man had been in life he clearly was not anymore. He still breathed, I could see the rising and falling of his chest from where I stood. My breath however was caught in my throat and I was feeling dizzy. Had this man, who was a head taller than Stenson had been and built like an old army tank, decided to charge me I wondered if even the bullets in the gun would stop him.
Gripping the handle of the gun tightly I prepared myself for what I knew would come next. The confrontation between me and this monster would need to end quickly if I was to survive it. I knew that if he got within reach even for a split second, I would lose my life here and now.
We stood there, the two of us, like they did in the old westerns at dawn. I flexed my grip on the gun and I saw his hands flex as well and then it happened, there it was, the grin that pulled up the sides of his lips slightly.
For a moment I was stunned and caught myself wondering if there was anything going through the man’s mind. Was this human, not human, able to comprehend the dangers that existed for him in a standoff with a man who held a gun; or, did he know something that I did not?
I knew nothing of the abilities of these things. What of them was still as fragile as a regular human and which parts were changed to something else. Maybe this thing had survived bullets before. In the three months that I had been locked up behind those walls of my bunker, it could have been out hunting and killing people that had survived the bombs. If nothing else, it was still alive.
Even if it didn’t comprehend the danger a loaded gun possessed maybe it was counting on its speed, its ability to reach me before I even got a shot off. The four on the trail moved with undeniably faster speed than that of a regular human and had closed a greater distance to catch the young girl in a matter of seconds.
The distance between myself and this human, not human, this stranger, this monster that stood before me was only thirty or so feet, maybe it was close enough that he would kill me before I could kill him.
In the silence that hung between us I listened to the man’s heavy breathing as it mirrored my own. Did he really need to breath, like the zombies and vampires and other creatures of fiction was air no longer a necessity and this was just a force of habit.
Clearly there was something going through that brain of his, I decided, as we stared each other down. His eyes looked me over and then flittered to the gun and back up to my face. He was wondering weighing his options I realized as a heavy pit of worry grew in my stomach; considering his own options and if he had a way to kill me before the bullets in the gun tore through his flesh and perhaps his still beating heart.
While it seemed drawn out, it happened fast, a few seconds at most. The man had made his choice, mouth open letting out a guttural inhuman roar he lunged at me. I didn’t even think, the gun came up, there was no time to aim, I pulled the trigger repeatedly. Bullet after bullet erupted from the chamber of the gun, shells kicked out to clatter on the ground around me.
It took three bullets to finally hit the man. When the third bullet hit, it tore through clothing and flesh, catching the man in the shoulder. The fourth bullet missed, however the fifth and sixth hit his legs causing him to stumble forward before the seventh struck him in the chest.
The beasts stride broke, his footing lost, the man tripped, his large frame coming forward fast and uneven. I pulled the trigger three more times, all three bullets struck him in the fast before he came down crashing into the ground less than five feet from where I stood still pulling the trigger on an emptied clip.
I was shaking so bad with fear that I dropped the gun to the ground and fell to my knees. Staring at the man, or what had been a man, lying dead in front of me. I gasped at the air, feeling as though I was suffocating even though I wasn’t, I had never imagined I would ever have to kill someone.
Though I had just survived my first real confrontation with whatever it was that inhabited this unfamiliar
world I had been thrust into, a world I no longer felt a native of, I wanted to cry. The logical part of my brain screamed at me it was kill or be killed, well the emotional part of me broke down. He wasn’t human, a voice in my head tried desperately to convince me. If he had lived, you would have died; Joanne still needs you.
“Joanne,” I said out loud to no one.
A hydroelectric pole that had fallen across the rubble near me caught my eye. The small blue sign with the white capital H - the hospital - I knew I had to keep going, that I needed to reach the hospital.
Surely not all was lost yet. The man who laid on the ground unmoving, still, dead, before me was another reason to keep going. If there was a way to save these people from what they had become, to save John Stenson, then I had to survive long enough to find it.
Getting to my feet I brushed off the dust and rubble and moved to stand over the man that I had just gunned down to save my own life. Kneeling down, with as much strength and effort that I could exert, I rolled the man over. I needed to know what could have changed this man. There were no burn marks on him at all, nothing to say he was affected by something the bombs had done.
Seeing nothing I began to push myself to my feet when I stumbled backwards, grabbing the dead man to stop from falling over. Squinting my eyes, I leaned back in towards the man when I noticed the one thing I had missed. On his neck, it was small, but it was there, a small bug that looked almost like a tick. Only, it wasn’t a bug, it was not something natural at all, it was manmade. There was a small flashing red light on it that dimmed and went black. The bug fell to the ground crumbling like ash.
Getting to my feet I backed away from the man’s body slowly. Something about the thing that had been on his neck drove shivers down my spine. I needed to get to the hospital.
Reaching into my backpack I pulled out a fresh clip for the gun and loaded it before sliding it into my waist. I knew I was a bad shot and would need to get better if I was going to conserve ammunition, bullets were in short supply and I feared that things were going to get worse before they got any better.
The sun was almost gone. Dusk had fallen on the city while I was standing around trying to figure out the man I had just killed. I needed to get through this maze of brick and steel and get to Joanne, if she was still alive. It had been something I had to consider, perhaps her radio went dead not because it had died, but because she had. She had said she needed to explain in person about what she meant in regard to not being anyone else anymore.
Maybe those others had been like the one I had just killed. If she had managed to lock herself away from them, they might have found a way to get to her and kill her. How fast could one move with a broken leg, trapped in a hospital basement?
Continuing through the maze I knew the sun would vanish soon and I could end up lost in the darkness. The hospital, my destination is where I needed to get before the light was gone completely. If I was stuck out in the city, in the dark for the night, I may not live to see tomorrow come.
.FIVE.
A Place of No Healing
The sun was little more than a sliver on the horizon when I finally reached the hospital. The building which had once been a major facility in the city had been eight floors high; now, most of it had been reduced to two at most, less in other places, the roof and walls having collapsed. It looked as though the hospital had been hit by an earthquake.
It seemed that the rules of war, surrounding hospitals and churches, had been ignored. The small church across the street from the hospital, sometimes used for larger groups of people in the event that the hospital chapel could not accommodate had also been hit. The front half of the church was gone and the large crucifix that had adorned the hall laid amongst the rubble.
Cars, presumably patients and staff trying to escape had been blown over like leaves during an autumn wind storm, landing on their sides and roofs. Those inside, or what was left of them, most likely having died from the impact were left to decay and rot. One car, which was on its roof, the roof crushed down from the impact of its landing had an arm hanging out of it a piece of paper clutched in the lifeless grip.
Slowly I approached the car as if the arm were still alive and would grab at me if I got to close. Whoever had been in the car when it upended had been alive, but for how long. Did they die of starvation, dehydration, or injuries sustained from the impact? More questions, no answers.
Reaching down I grab the edge of the paper and pulled it. It slipped out between the fingers, the grip had been loosened, likely by the person's death. Unfolding the note, I scanned it over. There were more than one person in the car, according to the note, there had been three. The note had been their last hope at escaping, if anyone had come by before they perished trapped in their steel tomb. Desperation was in the words of the note, but not for the two adults in the car, for the child.
Folding the note up I could not read anymore. I placed the note back into the hand that had held it and lightly pressed the fingers back around it. There was nothing that could be done, not now.
I had been back in this world for one day, not even one day, and I was already feeling the hopelessness closing in around me like arms smothering me. Running my fingers through my hair I closed my eyes and simply breathed for a moment. Who could do something so horrible to so many good people? This wasn’t an attack where a single innocent person died, or even a dozen, the attack had destroyed the city or even more as I had no idea how far this had gone. So many innocent lives lost.
What little light was left of the day was fading away and I still needed to find a way into the hospital. Whispering a small prayer for the family who had perished in the car, had lived through the initial bombs only to die slowly, I pushed forward.
The hospital looked like it would prove more difficult to get in than it had been getting out of my house. Navigating it was tough before its destruction and there had been maps inside the waiting rooms. Now however, it was going to be much like the maze that was the street but on a large more complex scale.
Rubble, which had not yet come to settle, crumbled from a building somewhere off to my left, starling me as my nerves were already on edge.
What would I encounter in the hospital? I wondered to myself. Stenson had not been the only Collected one, as the one in the street maze had proven to be similar to him, and I knew the four in the park could not be the only Savages. Stenson and the man in the maze waited like spiders on in their web for their victims to come to them, sitting quietly. Creatures like them could be anywhere in the hospital as it would be dark. The four however, they had used fear to draw out their victim and then savagely ripped her apart like rabid dogs starved for weeks.
Holding the gun up, steading it on my arm, I slowly climbed up and over upended vehicles, my hand shaking, whether from the drop-in temperature or my nerves or both I could not tell.
As I moved towards the hospital, I felt like something was off. The hospital was a high traffic area, day and night, with people coming and going, but the number of cars and bodies scattered about seemed much lower than I would have expected.
Two buses had collided with an ambulance not far from where the hospital entrance had been, all three vehicles were on their sides the contents of them spilled out on the road.
Crossing the street quickly I made my way to the ambulance and began searching through the contents on the road and inside it. Most of the items were useless, destroyed by the collusion. There was a paramedic and a patient in the back, both dead, and the ambulance driver, still buckled in was dead as well.
Searching through the front of the ambulance I noticed two things out of place; the laptop, which was usually mounted to the dashboard was gone. At first, I had thought it had broken off in the collusion but there was no sign of it anywhere. Also, the ambulance drivers’ jacket was gone as well. It had to have been taken after he had died for his arm had been broken and laid stiff at an awkward angle.
It all pointed to one thing - someone had
been here already.
Spinning around quickly I held the gun at shoulder height. I searched first left, then right staring up at the windows in the blown-out buildings that were still standing. It felt like there were eyes in the shadows watching my every move. Nothing moved in the shadows, at least nothing I could see, surely if there had been survivors or looters, they were long since gone.
I glanced at the horizon as the sun, holding up as long as it could, winked out like a light dropping beyond the edge. Dusk had come and gone, evening had ended, and night had fallen upon me, the trek, which would have taken an hour by bus, a bit longer by foot, had taken the entire day.
Caution had caused me to move slowly, fear had caused me to hide; and without not, the new world had shown me, and taken from me, the first of my days outside of the bunker. The new world had even changed me from the person I had once been. I had watched a young girl die, whereas in my life before this I had lashed out at a man who had hit his wife in the streets. And, I swallowed back the vomit that threatened to overtake me, I killed a man, human or not, I had committed murder to survive.
What would be left of who I was if a way to save the city, the country, the world, ever presented itself?
Leaving the ambulance behind I quickly, using my flashlight sparingly, checked the overturned buses and a few cars; finding little of use I headed towards an opening I saw near the right wing of the hospital.
The hole in the hospital wall lead directly into what looked like it had once been a waiting room. Much to my surprise there were no bodies, those who had been in the room must have fled before the hospital collapsed or managed to escape through the hole. Hoping I would find more batteries I left my flashlight on and started in.
Signs on the wall told me I was in the emergency department of the hospital as I made my way slowly down the hallway towards administration. Holding the gun in one hand I used my other hand to aim the flashlight. The rooms I could open, I found were empty; others were either barricaded from the inside, those inside likely dead, or the roof in the rooms could have collapsed and now held the door closed.