“Incorrect. The movie did, the book didn’t. In fact, the movie was vastly different than the book in many ways which is one of the reasons I stopped watching movies based on books.”
“In what ways?”
“Well, in the book the zombies were all slow. In the movie they were incredibly fast and had become very athletic in their dead state. In the book they overwhelmed the living in numbers only, not by speed. But the biggest difference is that in the movie they found a “cure”” (I had put my fingers in the air to signify quoting). “In the book they never found a cure, they just found a much better way to avoid (for lack of a better word) the dead. They knew that the cold couldn’t kill the dead, but it would literally freeze them in their tracks, so they migrated north and started killing the dead in their frozen state. They also realized that if they could bottleneck the dead they were easier to kill. This wouldn’t have worked in the movie since bottlenecking the dead seemingly made it easier for the them to overcome the living.”
“Ah, so we’re fucked, is what you’re saying.”
“There’s a good chance of that. Who knows, maybe they will learn something from all those stories and contain the situation to the major cities.”
“So, we’re fucked.”
“Without so much as a reach around.”
We both stood there in the hall pondering the seriousness of what seemed to be going on. Neither one of really wanting to move or say anything. Finally, Steve looked at me and asked, “How long do you think we have?”
I regarded Steve with my best reproachful teacher look, which isn’t much of a serious look, but tends to work regardless. “I don’t have a clue Steve. I’m a History professor. Sure, so far, we’ve only seen reports from the major cities, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t already started happening here. My best guess is, time has already run out.”
“What do you suggest then Professor Thompson?” The seriousness that I saw on Steve’s face took me by surprise.
I really didn’t know what to say to Steve to help or temper his fear. What I did say was what I was planning to. “Stay calm, Steve. Go about as you normally do, just be more mindful of your surroundings.”
“Okay professor. I’ll do my best.” Fear crept into his face and I could tell he was very unsure of what to do. To be honest, the fear factor in my mind had started to fill up and I was unsure of what I would do. Steve started to walk away.
“Steve.”
He stopped and turned around.
“Check in with me as often as you feel you need to. You know my phone is always on.”
He smiled slightly at that, but the fear didn’t leave his face. “Yes sir.”
I watched as he walked toward the exit. I realized in that moment I really didn’t know what to do with myself. How to protect myself. What to do. The fear had completely taken over and I needed to tamp it down. Whatever was going on classes were still going to be expected to continue unless an emergency was declared. I took a deep breath, cleared my mind, and walked up the stairs to my next class.
***
I had hoped that this was all a bad dream or at the very least was something that could be confined to the major cities. With the dead rising, however, none of that really matters. Especially when there doesn’t seem to be any real cause for the apocalypse. The saner part of my mind hoped that in Stantonsville we had at least a couple of days before it got to us. As it turned out it really didn’t matter where a person was, a large metropolis or a small town. The dead apocalypse had started, and it wouldn’t end anytime soon.
What I didn’t know was that the dead apocalypse had already come to town. Karla had been killed by her dead husband that night. Sheila was killed the next day in her dorm. Almost all the girls in her dorm were gone by the next night. The school system was the first to completely go as kids simply didn’t know what to do. I was at home when Steve had called me early the next morning to let me know about Karla, so naturally I didn’t go to school that day and barricaded my home.
I was living near the center of Stantonsville at the time, in a house that my parents had owned. I knew staying there I wouldn’t last long against any hordes of the dead as that area was already a heavy traffic area before the end and would remain so after the end. I knew I had to get out of that area, but I wasn’t really sure where to go. Either go up on top of Skylight which was the high point of the Stantonsville area and try to wait it out or just leave entirely. I just knew I had to go. So, I did what we all did during the days before the dead apocalypse to find out information. I got on the internet.
Very quickly I found a few houses in a gated community just off the interstate overlooking the river valley and the lake that were empty and up for sale. I pinpointed one house in particular due to its two stories looking out over the area. From there I felt I would be able to watch the end with at least a nice view and be able to tell if danger was coming my way. My biggest fear was that because it was a gated community I wouldn’t be able to get in.
So, I began gathering up what I thought I would need to survive for some time after the end. It occurred to me while packing that I didn’t have a clue what to take with me to what I hoped would be my new digs. Spending my time deciding what to take with me I realized that I wouldn’t ever get to teach again. A profession I absolutely loved, I would never get to do it again. That one thought, in the middle of everything that was going on filled me with the greatest grief.
Huh. A thought just occurred to me that in writing down everything that happened at least to me I am teaching again and preserving some of the past for you to read now. I wonder … will I even be alive when the first person reads this? Will anyone even know who I am? Will it even matter?
While I packed I kept the news on in an attempt to stay up with what was going on. By this point, though, no more reports were coming out of the major cities. New York was the first to go dark, followed quickly by LA and Chicago. D.C. surprisingly lasted longer than any of the major cities. An old joke about zombies skipping D.C. because there were no living brains due to the ineptness of the government seemed to actually be playing out. The reason it stayed solvent for so long after the dead hordes began attacking is because most of the government was moved underground into bunkers. The only way the disease (as they were calling it at that point) would make it down there is if someone not knowing they were infected got locked down there. Because humans apparently don’t learn much from all the media we have that exact scenario played out. Unfortunately, with everything I have learned it is even more likely that everyone that went into the bunkers already had this “disease”, but it just took someone actually dying for it show its ugly face.
I do need to point out that most of this I learned much later. The last report out of D.C. that I saw before all media went dark is that our leaders were safe. I found out (much later) that by the point that report came out many of our leaders were already dead and the federal government no longer existed. But as human nature can lead to much worse behavior when governments fall we weren’t informed of that. It was felt that it would only cause even more unrest. It didn’t matter at that point, sadly.
I do need to clear up some things about what was going. I call it a disease simply because that’s the only thing that comes close to describing what it actually was. Though it turned out that the best (worst) way to get the disease was to be bitten or scratched, it wasn’t the only way. But, being bitten or scratched made the disease spread much faster. Once bitten or scratched a person would get extremely sick, almost resembling the flu but much closer to the bubonic plague in symptoms. The person’s temperature would go up into the hundreds and stay there, the fevers would never break (so it literally felt like you were burning from the inside out), the person would develop boils and bumps all over their body. Finally, the person would die. There doesn’t seem to be any specific timeframe from the time the person died to when they became the risen dead. None that I have ever seen and I have seen it quite a bit.
Something else, before I move on. Despite what all the media had predicted would kill the dead they weren’t exactly correct. The best way to kill a zombie is to destroy the brain (which was standard). But you don’t necessarily have to stab the brain or shoot the brain in order to kill the brain. Fire works just as well. So does electrocution (as I would find out). That alone cost us more of our living than it should have. How many months and years were wasted trying to kill the dead with conventional methods. Also, time is a great way of culling the dead. Once the body has completely deteriorated the dead might still have a functioning brain (as functioning as it can be) but it no longer has a functioning body. So that in itself means that we as humans can come back.
I digress, though. I gathered all my belongings and packed up to make my move. As I was leaving Steve pulled up next to me and started shouting.
“It’s already here, man! What the hell are we going to do?”
“First of all, stop shouting. I’m right here. Secondly I know it’s already here that’s why I’m leaving.”
“Where are you going?”
“Not far, just past the interstate away from this mess.”
“Can I come?”
“Steve. What about your family. Why don’t you go to them? If you have family, you need to go to them and be with them.”
“Mr. Thompson…” In my years of having Steve in my class he had never called me Mr. Thompson. It was always Prof, Thompson, or Professor Thompson. The starkness that he said it should have stopped me cold, but my mind wasn’t quite sane at that moment. Instead I decide to just let him call me by my first name.
“Liam.” I said to him.
“Okay,” Steve said “Liam, I have no family. I came to school as an orphan. You’re all the family I have.”
His admittance had floored me. In all the time I had known him I wasn’t aware that he was an orphan and that he had no one, like me in a way.
“Follow me. It’s not far, we should be safe where we are going.”
Had I known what would happen I would have told him no and that he needed to go find his friends and be with them. Somehow, I know that he still would have ended up with me and that he would have been my responsibility anyways, and I hate that. Fate had led him to me and eventually I would fail him. I curse what happened to this day and it will never leave me. This is also why I will die alone. No one needs to be with me, I don’t need to be looking out for anyone but myself. That’s the way it must be. Though I would meet other people after the apocalypse Steve meant more to me than anyone else, because I knew him before and he was with me at the beginning. No one else can say that.
We drove the short distance to the gated community. I was a little shocked when we pulled up and the gate was standing wide open. As we pulled into the community I noticed that all of the houses were vacant. When the housing bubble burst in 2008 many of these houses were less than a few years old and very expensive. This area never fully recovered. I found the house that I had found online. It was vacant but fully stocked for showing purposes. We pulled into the driveway and got out. I went to the front door expecting it to be locked and was very surprised to find it unlocked. I walked into the expansive house and found the electricity working. I walked into the garage and opened the doors and told Steve to pull our vehicles in.
As Steve was getting everything unpacked I turned on the television not to find the national news on but the local news out of Little Rock on. The entire east coast had gone dark (outside of DC). There were no more reports coming in from any of the major cities. The military had attempted action in Miami and suffered critical losses.
“They never learned from all that material did they?” Steve asked as he walked in.
“They never looked, Steve. All those stories were fiction. There was never any need to prepare for something like this and certainly not take military action based on fictional zombie stories.”
“What if all those stories had a common beginning and were actually based on a true event that occurred?”
“I think that’s very possible, Steve. Look we are going to be here for a long time. I think we owe it to ourselves to get as many history books as we can find and study up on this. If these stories are based on one common event, we should be able to find it.”
Steve looked at me with scared eyes. “Do you think we’ll be alright here?”
“I think so as far as the dead go. There is only one true way into this community and that is through the gate, which can be closed and locked. They may come from behind but I wouldn’t expect many from that direction as there just isn’t a lot of housing in that direction. We can take care of them easily. Should be able to, anyways.”
“What about being safe from surviving humans?”
“That’s a different story altogether. All these stories have one common theme when it comes to the living. The bad ones typically are taking from and killing those who have something to offer. We just won’t have anything to offer. People can come and live in these other houses, but we won’t be a community. We will stick to ourselves, offer help if we can and not offer help if we can’t. We will give people an option, abide by our rules or move on.”
“Do you think that’ll work Liam?”
“We don’t have much of a choice do we Steve?”
“No.” Steve got up to look around the house some more.
I stood up and went upstairs to the balcony and watched as the sun set, not only on the day, but the last day of human civilization as we knew it. Things were going to get really bad really quick and there was absolutely no timeline on when it would get better, if it ever would. The one thing I knew at that time was that mother nature would take back what was hers a lot quicker than humans would regain a footing in the world. My only hope was that when humans did regain that foothold we would have learned a lesson and treat our world a little better. You see, this wasn’t something sent to us from a god above but from nature herself. She let us know in a very real way that we can’t rule over her forever.
***
Over the next few days Steve and I set about making sure that we had plenty of provisions so that we could last some time in our new little fort. We gathered as many history books as we could find. We even bought a couple of guns, more for hunting purposes than protection. We bought some bows as well so that if we needed to hunt silently we could. Even though the dead apocalypse had made it to Stantonsville it made very slow process after the initial onslaught. The highest concentration of the hordes was around the schools and the hospital (naturally). This made getting around somewhat more difficult, but we still managed.
By this time air traffic had been shut down around the US for almost a full week. The skies during the day were remarkably clear but nothing near the clarity that it is now.
One thing that surprised me was the interstate. I had expected it would be full of people trying to get away. By the tenth day it took most of the day to count just a handful of cars going in either direction. While we did shut and lock the gate at night we didn’t yet have a reason to keep it closed and locked during the day. We hadn’t even seen that many dead walking around. At night, though we could hear the low hum of their moans coming from town. Fires had cropped up around town but most of it seemed focus around the area of the hospital. I had actually thought that maybe all of this had been overblown and it wasn’t going to be all that bad in our neck of the woods. By the 21st day I would live to regret that thought.
***
&nbs
p; It was a typical late spring day for the area: very hot and very humid. We had lost electricity the day before and had been discussing ways of cooling ourselves or figuring out how to get electricity back. The easiest methods that we could think of were either solar or wind. We could do both but we had decided that wind would be the easiest to harness. They had just developed a new way to capture wind power without using huge turbines and without blades. Before we had lost electricity we had downloaded everything we thought we would need to build our own turbine.
As we were discussing this we heard a faint moaning sound. We knew the sound; it was the sound of the dead. We had heard it every night since we had moved into our new community. We were startled because it was in the middle of the day and we were able to hear it so loudly. That told both of us that they were close to us.
We ran up the stairs and onto the balcony and looked out over the area.
“You see anything Liam?”
“Nothing, Steve. Can you tell what direction the sound is coming from?”
He didn’t answer and he didn’t have to. He was looking at the interstate towards the east. I looked in that direction and not for the first time felt the fear factor in my mind take over. Something was different this time. It was much closer. It was much worse. Something inside me told me that this would change everything.
It was a horde. And a huge one. They were numbered in the hundreds easily and they were trudging along the interstate all moaning and just walking. It was like watching the slowest parade in history. Something struck me odd. They were all on the interstate. They weren’t in the grass that surrounded the interstate or in the middle area that separated the east and west bound lanes. They had separated into two separate groups and were going in generally the same direction. West.
“I think it’s time we shut and lock that gate Steve.”
“I couldn’t agree more.”
We quickly ran down the stairs, grabbed our machete’s off the hall table and ran out the door and all the way down to the gate. It had previously been a powered gate so I wasn’t all that surprised to find that the gate wouldn’t budge manually.
The Dead Chronicles (Book 1): The Dead Chronicles Page 2