(the first part of something I am working on at the moment. i posted it originally on Lost Zombies (http://www.lostzombies.com) a month ago. i think this makes a perfect first post here.)
"Don't ever humanize them."
-grafitti found spraypainted in red across a rotting billboard 60 miles out of Chicago
The glee of the fundamentalists on morning talkshows was what pissed him off to no end. Here was a worldwide epidemic shotgunning through certain major cities across the globe, infecting millions, and the self-appointed voices of god were blabbering about judgment upon a wicked world.
For about two weeks after the infection hit the news and was screamed around the world in thousands of programs, blogs, and websites, he kept up his daily routine. Life in his city was normal enough. Sure there was a run on bottled water and canned goods in all the stores, things which even he himself decided to stock up on just in case, but he wondered if it was just the paranoia of a post-9/11 world again.
Unlike most others, he did take reports of reanimated corpses seriously, but just like most others, it didn't affect him personally, no matter how bizarre and titillating the idea was. Right out of a horror film. He figured the authorities and the medical community would get a handle on it and isolate the outbreaks and contain the infected or deranged or whatever in the hell they really were. Undead or no. This surely couldn't be anything the government couldn't handle.
But those were the first several days. When outbreaks were just that. And there was no talk of swarms or of quarantined areas being breached. Just sick people and sick "camps." That was before Las Vegas was devoured into silence. Before Tokyo went up in a sea of fire. Before the massive riots in Paris turned into the fatal game of runners and shamblers verses those who could still scream. Zombies. He almost couldn't believe the word had jumped right out of a horror film and into the world media. Taking a huge bite out of the world in the process.
On the day his world started to end, he woke up at his normal time, brushed his teeth, and remembered a line from an old horror movie as the news on the tv blared about the national guard being over-run down in Houston. "The death of death."
He walked the short block to the train station and went up to the platform to wait for the next line of metal cars taking people to wherever it is they went each morning. He knew they were all going to jobs, like him, but he liked to imagine that everyone was just riding the train for the hell of it and would do whatever else they wanted to do that day but work.
From the platform, he noticed on the street corner about a half mile away, the burning wreck of a police car. This was about the same time he noticed nobody was on the platform and not a sign of any train. "Fuck" he muttered to himself in growing anxiety as he looked around in every direction while running down the stairs on onto the street back towards his home.
Strangest of things, as he reached his building, he reached for his phone and left his boss a message that he wasn't coming in today. Sick, as he said.
*****
After two days of being holed up in his apartment and hearing the occasional siren or smashing glass outside, he decided he would need to get his gun from the closet, clean it up and load it. He never cared much for the gun, but had kept it in the way some people keep family bibles. It was once his older brother's gun. A hand-me-down.
He mused about how quiet everything seemed, even though the news channels kept shrieking and showing images of mass destruction in other cities. But then again, he was high up on the 12th floor. There were more riots in central Europe. Civilians being gunned down by soldiers in India. Nothing in the images seemed too out of the ordinary for the modern world, except for the occasional footage of someone being cornered by those things and torn apart. Those things looked just like people. They were people, or had been recently. What in the hell were those things?
Regardless of the quiet, this morning he had moved a heavy dresser against his apartment door. And then in front of the dresser, an old oak trunk he picked up months ago at an antique shop. Just for good measure. If he rationed out his food, both recently bought and looted, he could last for a couple weeks. If his neighbors had all fled as he suspected, perhaps he could pick up more supplies once he was certain things would stay quiet. He knew too many things already about the walking undead, such as how they searched for the living or uninfected living anyway.
As for useful information, even the internet proved more useless than ever. He thought if he could find information about how not to become truly sick, he would just follow the instructions and ride it out. If his neighbors had largely gotten the hell away, perhaps he could stay for a long time without any of the zed heads ever being the wiser. He had wandered into the small grocery store downstairs yesterday and grabbed what he could carry. He felt a twinge of guilt about it, but the windows had already been blown out and the store looked as if a tsunami had crashed into it. On his adventure, he didn't see anyone else, living or dead. Though there was a lot of congealed and dried blood on sidewalk at the corner, by the bus stop.
The reports he read from frightened bloggers and watched from snatches of media footage tended to claim either that infected people would freak out in homicidal rage, attacking and eating the uninfected or that the infected were reanimated dead who were feasting on the living. The infection was spread through bodily fluid contact. Almost all attack victims would either die from infection only later to reanimate and shamble-hunt for the living or they would ratchet up into crazed predators in 28 Days fashion. If a victim had only been bitten, they could live for hours before symptoms presented, sometimes traveling among everyone else into safe zones and rescue stations, before themselves flipping out murderously or dying and reanimating, attacking those who assumed they had made it to safety.
He learned a whole slew of new slang words to refer to the things. Besides the ever popular "zombies" and the traditional "ghouls," there was Z heads, Zs, gut-buckets, stenches, eaters, Gs, moaners, biters, pus bags and so on. Most of these were from the military, many of whose soldiers were still running various missions and returning to base or some rescue station and getting online possibly to stave off the growing sense of sheer lunacy.
Here he was, stuck in his apartment. Waiting for the city around him to show its unraveling. Half wishing and wondering whether the hordes of zeds would move on away after fleeing refugees.
He wondered which of the times he awoke to sounds of smashing and sirens had been when that store got hit.
He didn't hear much of any screaming, or many random noises. No knocking or bashing sounds. None of the moaning he had expected. So he just waited. For as long as the broadcasts and the internet were running, people were at least proving that something would be done about this, and afterwards everyone would all get drunk and celebrate it, like v-day or one of the older commemorations.
He had been following the blog posts of a soldier stationed about 300 miles away. Finally, he decided to post a reply to one particularly harrowing entry titled "Get the Fuck Out of Dodge if You are Still Alive." It had just been posted 20 minutes ago, and perhaps he could find this soldier was still online, and maybe learn just what chances he had should he stick to his original plans and hole up for a while.
