Dying Humanity

by Sourav Deka

  I nodded.

  “So who was that man who shot you?”

  “It’s Jonas,” I said. “I thought he was dead,” I gulped. “How is he alive anyway?”

  “It might be the body protection spell,” mom said. “Aivors did that.”

  “Yeah,” I inhaled deeply. “I saw Sam and Bristy do that spell before. Where are they? We didn’t find their dead bodies there.”

  “They might have escaped from the camp before Jonas killed everyone,” Tanner said.

  I looked at him. “We need them, Tanner. They can help us.”

  “They know our camp. They can come here, but they didn’t.”

  I bit my lower lip. “I guess they are in trouble.”

  “Maybe Jonas did something to them.”

  “Yeah, we should search for them.”

  He shook his head lightly. “No need. They know where our camp is. If they escape they will come to us.”

  “What if they are in trouble?”

  “We don’t know where they are exactly?” he pressed his lips. “So we can’t help them, Ross, even if we wanted to.”

  I nodded. Tanner was right, we wanted to find them but we had no idea where they were.

  “But we can search for them when we go to reanimate dead people,” Tanner said. “You know after growing enough food, when we are ready to increase the population again.”

  “Yeah, I just thought we could have used their help,” I said. “Jonas and his men are alive. We don’t know what they are going to do next. Having Bristy and Sam on our side would have helped.”

  Michael and Aaron gained consciousness after an hour. Tanner gave us some immortal drinks. It cured us in seconds and made us good as new. They were running low on immortal drinks so they treated us the old way until they made some more. The doctors in the camp took out the bullets in our body and patched us up. Tanner gave some reanimation drinks to Nathan and Ethan as he promised. They went to the places of their dead parents and reanimated them. We were fortunate that we found another camp like us. Courgers and we helped each other. We shared our resources and they shared theirs with us. It made our work easy. We also found two other camps that were surviving for months. One of them was at Nancy hotel and the other one was in a forest. We all met and agreed to work together to start over everything. They helped us speed up the process. We brought a lot of dead people and increased the territory of our camp.

  *****************************

  Months passed by, Jonas and his men were nowhere to be seen. They didn’t try anything after they attacked us. Tanner sent some of his best people to find Jonas and his men but they were nowhere to be seen. We also tried searching for Bristy and Sam but we didn’t find them either. We knew that they weren’t dead as we didn’t find their bodies with the workers. Where are they? Did Jonas do something to them? What if Jonas attacks our camp someday? Having them on our side would have helped, so I asked Tanner’s men to keep looking. They might find them if they are alive.

  Everything was going well. We were all doing good. The overall population of all the camps increased to about hundred thousand people. We brought back a lot of people in a short amount of time, thanks to all the camps, they helped. We grew a lot of food to support that population. Our territories increased. We even had to create a court and make our own laws so that people in the camps stay in peace and don't commit crimes. Whoever commits any crime or breaks the law, they are punished. We even made our own prisons. Our camp got so big that it covered eight towns. But the weird thing was Jonas didn’t try anything after all these months. We were ready to face him. He couldn’t fight us all. We had a lot of manpower with weapons ready to fight him and his men, but they never showed up.

  We had a lot of food. It was time to bring back some more people. So I went to talk about it to Tanner. He was standing at the top of his house on the balcony drinking a glass of wine. I walked up to him.

  “We did a lot, Ross,” Tanner took a sip from his wine looking at the people working in the camp.

  “Yeah,” I smiled. “This is amazing. We are lucky that we found other camps. They helped a lot.”

  “Jonas won’t even dare to attack us. We have a lot of people to help,” he glared at his watch. “And my watch of course,” he chuckled.

  “Yeah, he won’t. We did it, man,” I raised my chin. “Human civilization is starting again.”

  “Yeah,” he smiled and took a sip from his wine. “This is the beginning.”

  “We should bring back more people. We are growing food at a very fast rate.”

  “Yeah, more the merrier,” he raised his glass.

  Michael entered the room. Earlier we decided to go a bit far away. We brought all the nearby dead people. Almost everyone in nearby towns became alive. We needed to increase our population so we decided to go into a city and start bringing back dead people from there.

  “Let’s go. We are ready,” Michael said.

  I nodded and looked at Tanner. “I will be back in two days.”

  “Be safe,” he patted my shoulder.

  I left the camp with Michael and three other people. One of them was a girl named Reena and the other two were middle aged guys named Ben and Norman. Norman and Ben were in the army before all this. Reena was in school like me. She lost her parents before the apocalypse and has lived in multiple foster homes since.

  ****************************

  We got in Michael’s car and left. It took us seven hours to reach the next city. We stopped near a tall building. The whole city was vacant, not a single human being was on sight. There were only buildings and empty roads with abandoned cars. I remembered how it used to be. People were so busy that they would walk in the streets staring at their cell phones. Cars and trucks would cross the roads. People would chat on the streets, in the restaurants, in offices, but now it was all vacant. No people, only remains of dead people and abandoned buildings.

  “You know we can take over these buildings,” I said, staring at a building. “We should bring people from camp to settle here, you know, expand our territory.”

  “Yeah, we should spread to other cities,” Michael said.

  “But these kinds of cities are not useful to us,” Reena said. “We can’t grow food here. How can we build farms in these streets?”

  “We can use the rooftops,” I said.

  “Yeah, but still that won’t be enough to grow a lot of food.”

  She was right. Cities like that were not good for farming, and we needed farms, a lot of farms, as we were planning to feed a big population. To grow crops we had to break the roads and pavements. That would take a lot of time, energy and effort.

  “We could destroy some buildings you know,” Ben said.

  “Destroy buildings?” Norman lifted his eyebrows. “We don’t have any huge machines to do that.”

  “Well, then we could start farming in the streets or destroy some shops and restaurants and make our place.”

  “Yeah, we can do that,” I said.

  We went to one of the buildings and checked some of the rooms. All the rooms were empty and things were lying here and there. Some of them had ashes, I guessed people tried to burn it down but the fire was taken out before it could destroy the whole building.

  “It was a hotel before, full of people,” Michael looked around. “Now the whole city is a ghost town,” he glanced at the ashes. “Ah, people went crazy when they ran out of resources.”

  “Yeah they did,” I said.

  Just then we heard a noise. It came from upstairs, seemed like someone dropped something. I guess we were not alone. There was someone else in the building other than us. We followed the sound and climbed the stairs. A girl with a bag was gathering some food in a room. She saw us and tried to run.

  “Wait!” I shouted. “We are not here to hurt you.”

  She didn’t listen and ran away. We all ran after her.

  “We can help you,” I shouted again.

  She stopped and turned her he
ad around. “Help?” she said.

  “Yes,” I tried to catch my breath. “We can.”

  She gulped. “What can you do? The whole world is dead.”

  “I know, but we are starting over. We have food, water, clothes, home, all the resources. We can help you.”

  “No, you can’t. The city is dead.”

  “Our camp is far away from this city. You don’t have to fear me,” I walked towards her. “What’s your name?”

  “Nia,” she said.

  “Ross,” I forwarded my hand. She was scared. I could see it in her sparkling blue eyes. She didn’t shake my hand and took a step back.” It’s okay,” I took back my hand.

  “Where do you have food?”

  “We have a camp in Atlanta, you can come with us.”

  “I can’t trust you,” she shook her head lightly and took a step back.

  “It’s okay. I understand,” I said softly. “It is hard, especially in a world like this. But I am telling you the truth,” I took out a burger from my bag. “See, we made this,” I handed her the burger. She took it and observed it. “See, I am not lying,” I smiled.

  “Is there someone else apart from you in this city?” Michael asked.

  “No,” she shook her head. “It’s only me.”

  Ben raised his eyebrows. “You are surviving alone?” he asked.

  Nia nodded. “Yeah, I am scavenging food and surviving here, all alone.”

  “We are all starting over. We need people,” Reena said. “You don’t have to roam here alone for food. You can come with us. We have almost everything.”

  “If you have everything you need, what are you doing here?” Nia asked.

  “We are bringing people back from the dead,” I said.

  Nia’s eyes widened. “What?”

  I nodded lightly. “Yes, the reanimation drink which caused this mess, we have it. We are trying to repair the damage that has been done to this world.”

  “The reanimation drink?”

  “Yeah, we have the guy who made it.”

  Her face reddened. “Ambrose???”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you kill him? Because of him all this happened,” she raised her voice.

  “I know. I had the same thought too, believe me he killed my parents. I want him dead too. But he is the one who knows how to make the reanimation drink. We need him for now to populate the earth.”

  She tightened her cheeks. “Bringing back people won’t fix anything. Everything is already destroyed.”

  “No, we can fix this. We are fixing this. We already have a hundred thousand people in Atlanta.”

  “What?”

  “Yes, we brought back a lot of people. We are trying to expand our territories. So we came here, to bring some more people.”

  We heard a tiger growling.

  “What the hell?” I looked around.

  “It’s the tiger,” Nia said.

  “Tiger???” Michael’s eyes widened. “This city has a tiger?”

  “Not only a tiger, some dogs, foxes, a lot of animals are here. As there are no people in the city. I guess they got into the city from the forests.”

  “Oh god!”

  “Come, I know a safe place,” she gestured to follow her. “Follow me.”

  Nia ran away. We followed her and went wherever she went. There was no choice, we had to trust her. Well, no one likes getting eaten by a tiger. After running for a couple of minutes, she took us to a subway and we hid in a train. It was very dark. We couldn’t see anything clearly. There were some woods in the subway near the train which she stocked up for days. She took out a match from her bag and lighted up the woods making it a bonfire.

  “They don’t come here,” Nia said, eyeing at the bonfire. “I have been living here since all the mess happened.”

  Reena sat on one of the chairs in the subway and sighed. “So, we won’t be able to bring people from the dead.”

  “No, we can. We have guns,” Michael said.

  “Guns??” Nia chuckled. “You can’t kill them with guns. You haven’t seen all of them. There are a lot of them. You will run out of bullets.”

  “What?” I said.

  She nodded. “Yeah, it’s not safe outside. I just go out there to scavenge food.”

  “For how long are you staying in this subway?” I asked.

  “Since all this started,” she crossed her arms. “People got crazy, started killing each other. I ran from place to place and finally ended up here.”

  “When can we go out?” Reena asked. “We have to bring back dead people and head back to our camp.”

  “You can go now. But as I said, there are a lot of them. You can’t take out all the animals even with your guns.”

  “Well, we have vehicles,” Michael said.

  “Yes, that can help us escape, but what about our mission?” I said. “We came here to bring back dead people and take them to the camp.”

  “Try tomorrow,” Nia said, eyeing at the bonfire. “It’s going to be dark soon. It will be too dangerous to go now.”

  I nodded. “Okay, we wait here tonight.” I sat on one of the subway chairs.

  Michael rolled his eyes. “Great.”

  We waited at the subway. We had no options. There were so many dangerous animals out there that I didn’t dare to go out. Michael thought we could take them with our guns, but I didn’t agree. It was too risky. If we waste our bullets, it would become more difficult. We can’t be stuck here like Nia. We have to do this smartly or else we will never get back to our camp.

  Nia was hungry, so I gave her some of my food. She hasn’t eaten good food for months. Maybe offering her food will help us win her trust. Living in the subway for months alone can make anyone mad. She had no one to talk to. I can’t even imagine how it would feel like. But she survived, she was strong. I would have gone crazy if I had to spend months living alone in a ghost city.

  It was midnight. We heard tigers roaring and wolves howl. Nia said they come in numbers at night to hunt. Now it wasn’t a normal city anymore. It was their place. They migrated from forests and took over as there were no humans to keep them away. Spending the night in the subway was the only way to be safe. We were really tired from our journey, so we slept in the train while the bonfire kept burning at the side. It kept up the light in the room.

  CHAPTER 15

  I woke up next morning, rubbed my eyes and adjusted my vision. My bags were gone. Michael, Reena, Ben and Norman were sleeping in the train seats. Their bags were gone too. Nia! She betrayed us. She took our food, water, guns, everything we had. I looked around and searched for her in the subway, but she was nowhere to be seen.

  I pounded my hands on the train’s wall. “Shit!”

  The noise woke up everyone.

  “What happened?” Michael rubbed his eyes and stood up quickly.

  “Nia, she took our stuff,” I said.

  “What?” Reena’s eyes widened.

  “Yes. She betrayed us.”

  “Did you look around?” she asked.

  “Yes, she is not here,” I tightened my cheeks. “She just wanted to steal our stuff and leave.”

  “Damn it!” Reena clenched her fists. “I knew something was off with that girl. She didn’t trust us, but we did.”

  “That’s our mistake,” Ben stood up. “Let’s find her,” he said.

  “No, don’t you remember what she said?” Norman said. “There are dangerous animals out there. We need our guns.”

  “She stole our guns,” Michael raised his voice. “She stole everything.”

  “We have to go outside,” I went upstairs and tried to look outside through the door. “It's dawn, maybe the animals went away.”

  Norman shook his head. “No, it’s dangerous.”

  I gave a half shrug. “What do you want to do then? Stay here?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, we will be dead outside. There are tigers, man.”

  “We have to take our chances, Norman. We can’t jus
t stay here and starve.”

  “Yes, Ross is right,” Michael said. “We have to go. It’s dawn, the animals must have left.”

  We opened the door and went outside the subway. The animals were gone, just a couple of stray dogs were roaming around and some crows were eating on the dead bodies. Michael’s car was gone, I guess Nia took it.

  “She took my car,” Michael sighed and rolled his eyes. “Of course she will.”

  “We have to find her,” I said.

  “What? No,” Reena shook her head. “Mission failed, Ross. We are going to hotwire some vehicle and leave. We don’t know how much time we have. If those animals come back, we are dead.”

  “No, she needs help.”

  She frowned. “She stole from us, Ross. She betrayed us.”

  “I know,” I gulped. “She is scared I guess. She was all alone in this city. Anyone will go crazy living in that subway alone for months, Reena.”

  “Whatever,” she looked away. “We can’t risk our lives for her. She made her choice and now we have to make ours. Let’s just leave. We will come back after some days, prepared.”

  “She is right,” Michael said.

  “Yeah I agree,” Ben and Norman said together.

  I shook my head. “No, I am not leaving without her.”

  “Then stay here and die,” Reena walked up to a car on the street and broke it’s window’s glass. “I am going to hotwire it and leave. You all do whatever you want to do.”

  “You all go,” Michael said. “I will stay with Ross and help him find her.”

  “Come on, man,” Norman rolled his eyes.

  “Yes, you all go,” I said. “Come after a couple of days with full preparation. If we survive, you will find us.”

  “Ross, that’s just a girl. You don’t owe her anything,” Ben said.

  “I know, but I want to stay. She needs help. She doesn’t trust me, that’s why she stole our stuff. I have to earn her trust.”

  “But……….”

  “It’s okay, you all go. Michael and I will come back with her.”

  Ben sighed and nodded.

  They didn’t want to leave us, but they were not interested in risking their lives for Nia. Why would they? They didn’t know her and she even stole from us. But I was thinking differently. There is a reason she didn’t trust us. She was living in the city all alone for months, hasn’t met any human for so long, that would make it hard for her to trust anyone. When she met us she didn’t believe that we were the good guys. She was just interested in stealing all our stuff. I have to convince her that she can trust us. I have to save her. She has survived till now but she can’t survive in the city her whole life. If I don’t help her sooner or later she is going to die.