“What the hell are we supposed to do now?”
“Okay, stop Steve. Think. There has to be a manual override in the office in case there is ever an outage. We just have to get in the office.”
The door was locked. We didn’t want to make any noise but we had to get into the office. I found a nearby rock and banged it into the window but the glass did not break.
“Damnit!”
“Give it to me.” Steve said as he grabbed the rock from me and slung it at the window as hard as he could, shattering the glass.
We both immediately looked down towards the horde to see if any of the dead had turned their attention towards us. We smiled at each other as it became apparent that none of them had turned this way. Sadly, we had failed to notice the four dead walking towards us on the access road from the east. I should have noticed. I had once tested 100% for peripheral vision, but when you are focused only on one area instead of all your surrounding that peripheral vision is useless. The now glassless frame was just big enough for me to crawl through without cutting myself. Steve ran back to the gate and waited for me to release it.
After a few minutes I found the manual release and pushed it.
“That get it Steve?”
“Yup. Closing the gate. Let’s finish this and get out of the heat.”
I grabbed the lock for the gate from one of the drawers and unlocked the door and went out to help Steve finish closing the gate. I stopped almost immediately in my tracks as I saw in what seemed to be slow motion a scene that I will never get out of my head and has caused many years of nightmares.
Steve was pulling the gate as fast as he could, but the gate seemed to be stuck. This didn’t strike me as odd despite closing the gate every night. Finally, the gate moved, and Steve began closing the gate. As he was getting close to closing the gate a walker suddenly appeared out of nowhere and bit into Steve’s side. He let out a horrific scream and was able to push the zombie away before slashing across its head with his machete. Another walker went at him as he was coming up but he was also able to get that one.
I finally woke out of my slumber and ran to join him in dispatching the other two. We were able to close the gate and get it locked. Steve was cursing under his breath and in obvious pain. He looked at me with both fear and determination in his eyes.
“Are there any more coming?”
I first looked at the interstate but saw the dead still walking in their lines to the west. I looked up the road from where the four dead had come and didn’t see any others then looked to the east and didn’t see anything.
“No, nothing.”
“Okay, we gotta unlock and open the gate and pull the four bodies in and either bury them or burn them. If the dead catch their scent they will be on us in no time.”
“Steve, I’m sorry.” I was just staring at him. I knew what had happened. I knew there was no coming back. And it was all my fault. I hadn’t paid enough attention. I hadn’t kept him safe. This was all on my fault.
“I know, but there’s nothing that can be done now other than getting rid of these bodies.” Steve still had the look of determination on his face, but I could see the fear in his eyes. What I didn’t see was blame or hatred.
I unlocked the gate and opened it and we pulled all four bodies into the area and then reclosed and locked the gate. We decided the quickest thing to do was to burn them. I ran up to the house and grabbed a lighter and lighter fluid and ran back down to Steve and the bodies.
By this time Steve had already turned white as a ghost but helped me pile the bodies up and burn them.
The spot where we burned those bodies is still there to this day. It is a reminder of that day. We both knew that Steve was going to die but even so, he made an odd request of me.
“I can’t help you anymore in life but there is something in my death that can help you.”
“How so?”
“We’ve both read how all of this happens. Now you actually get a chance to watch it happen and figure out how to end me once I die and come back.”
“Steve,” I said in shock. “What are you asking me to do?” For some reason I couldn’t comprehend what he was saying to me, or maybe I just didn’t want to. Was he asking me to let him suffer through the pains of slowly dying? I just didn’t understand.
“There are handcuffs in my car, don’t ask me why. Get them and lock me up so that you can keep an eye on me. Don’t try to save me because I can’t be saved. But just watch me so that you will know the signs if this ever happens again. After I die and eventually turn, figure out the easiest way to kill me.”
So, that’s what I did. I got his handcuffs and locked him to the balcony upstairs so that at the very least he could look over the valley and sat with him for five days as he slowly died. It was five days that I will never forget because we actually enjoyed our time together. I watched everything from beginning to end.
At the beginning Steve just had a high fever and had the chills. He said it felt like he had the flu. It hurt him to move (not counting the bite on his side). In the next couple of days his throat swelled up as well as his armpits. While this was going on he also experienced diarrhea and vomiting. Neither one of us realized it at the time but his condition leading up to his death were more closely related the bubonic plague than the flu. After three days he started developing boils on his skin that leaked constantly.
Over those days we talked about all the different ways that the dead had been portrayed through all the media. Our least favorites and ones that made no sense is in some the dead somehow became almost superhuman with incredible strength and speed. It made no sense that a body that was dead somehow became better and stronger. From what we witnessed in the horde and in town our notions were proven correct. The dead had actually become weaker and slower after rising. Their strength was the horde. If it overwhelmed someone or a group there was nothing that could be done to survive, outside of brute force.
On the fifth day Steve looked at me and said that his time was nearly up.
Trying to lighten the mood I said, “Well it’s about bloody time. I was starting to get bored.”
“You were getting bored? I was literally dying from boredom. Ba dum dum.”
Without even thinking I said to him “I love you, son.”
“I know.”
“And you are no Han Solo.”
We both began laughing hysterically at this.
“Damn,” he said. “I just realized that there will never be another Star Wars film made. That sucks. This world deserves to die.”
“I couldn’t agree more.”
“I love you too, dad.”
Finally, the moment was on us and we both began crying, I pulled him into my arms and felt him breathe his last breath. After about ten minutes I slowly lowered him to the floor of the balcony and walked into the house to get a butcher knife. I couldn’t have been gone more than five minutes but when I got back to the balcony his head slowly rose up and for the real first time I saw the face of someone risen from the dead. His eyes were glazed over and pupils were almost completely gone. I walked over to him and knelt beside him. He attempted to grab at me but with one arm chained up he was unsuccessful. He attempted to bite at me but I stayed an arm’s length away from him.
Slowly I placed a hand on top of his head and shoved the knife into his skull right below his ear. His body fell limp almost immediately and his eyes closed.
I buried him that night behind the house and said a few words in remembrance. He was and would be the only risen dead I ever buried.
I now know that the whole experiment was wasted. Those five days with him were wonderful as we just enjoyed each other’s company. But as I have said nothing from that experiment lead me to anything groundbreaking. I’ve seen people die within minutes, I’ve seen it take hours for the dead to rise. And as I stated earlier the key is killing the brain. It doesn’t really matter how you do it.
At least I enjoyed a few days with a close friend and
someone I considered a son.
CHAPTER II
For the next few months, I couldn’t really tell you how long (it’s not that I lost track I just didn’t care), I got to work on the little projects around the house that needed tending. The electricity finally went out for good a few days after Steve died so I needed to build the turbine to hopefully create my own electricity. To be honest I wasn’t convinced I could build it or that once it was built it would work. With Steve there it probably would have taken a few days. Without him there it took weeks. For the first few days the heat absolutely killed me. I had to take breaks almost every half hour. During the day the temperatures would easily get into the hundreds, which meant the house was at the very least in the 80s. Since hot air sinks, I spent most of my time upstairs. It was still hot as hell but not nearly as much and cooled down quickly at night. Oddly enough, after a few days of struggling through the heat it stopped bothering me. I don’t know if I had adapted to it or simply just didn’t care anymore. Possibly a combination of both.
I really wasn’t seeing as many dead as I had thought I would (entertainment; always had a way to make people think that those situations would be just as bad in real life). Outside of the day the horde passed through I would see one or two a day, sometimes upwards of ten, but never more than that. One thing I had always wondered when watching zombie movies or reading books or comics was how did the dead know which way to go. It was too much to believe that they were behaving in migratory patterns.
I took extensive notes watching the dead when they did show up, but I didn’t notice anything that suggested any sort of pattern, at that point. I remembered the horde the day Steve died had been generally going in a westward motion but keeping to the paved roads and for some reason avoiding the median in between. I didn’t really understand why that was happening. All those bodies were dead. The only thing functioning was something in their brain that caused them to be able to walk, attack, and eat. I didn’t really see a verifiable pattern from the horde, but I noted it anyways.
In the time that I was working on getting that turbine finished during breaks I would watch as the dead filed passed the area. Something occurred to me during these early days that I still hold onto even today. Though they had a partially functioning brain that worked their limbs and of course their mouths for eating, not much else seemed to really work on them. Their eyesight was minimal at best and their sense of smell was almost nonexistent. The only other faculty that seemed to work was their hearing but only at close distances. They didn’t seem to have any sense of direction. I theorized that was the reason I never saw that many hordes, they just seemed to go from one place to another. I think in the early days that struck me odder than anything. Nothing seemed to go the way that all the movies, books, and comics said it would.
***
It was probably during the third week of getting the turbine finished that I first noticed the following. I had taken a break to just kind of walk around and loosen my stiffening muscles. It was an unusually cool day with a nice breeze so I decided to walk around the area. As I approached the gate I saw five walkers meandering through the road that ran in front of the community. There was a man and woman who both looked in their forties, a girl that was probably near college age, and two younger children (a boy and a girl). I was almost entirely sure that it was an entire family.
As I watched them I thought of all the families that had been affected by this, whatever this was. Some families had been completely lost like this one, while some families had lost members and probably had to take out the dead of the family. Still there were families that were completely separated and most likely would never hear from or of each other again. In the real world we couldn’t all hope to have happy ending like the Grimes did at the beginning of The Walking Dead series. I digress.
As I watched them meandering down the road I wondered how much it would take before they even noticed me. I don’t think in these days I had a death wish or didn’t want to be alone anymore. I honestly think that the scientific curiosity just overtook me. I naturally decided that the first thing I needed to do was see how well they could hear. I had noticed in the video from St. Louis when this all started that it had taken a few attempts before the dead Curtis had actually even acknowledged his friend.
“Hey.” I said in a normal voice. Nothing happened, none of the five even glanced in my direction. So I decided to yell just a little bit louder.
“Hey!” I shouted. Still nothing. It kind of shocked me that at that level they still had not responded or turned in my direction. So, I naturally decided to yell at the top of my voice just to see what would happen.
“Hey, you goddamn motherfuckers can’t you even sense fresh meat!!!” I waited. Yes, I went a little overboard with my screaming, but hey, when you want to get someone’s attention you go all in or you go home.
Finally, the teenaged walker turned towards me and stopped. The other four kept trudging along. I waited, wandering what would happen if she actually started to walk in my direction. Exactly how safe was I behind this fence. Just then I had noticed that the air had gone completely still and I waited. It had to have been about 30 seconds, but the teen zombie finally turned her head away from me and starting trudging again.
“Well, shit.” I said. I noticed a good size rock on the ground next to me and picked it up. I had never really played sports as a kid so as a began my wind up I was hoping to at the very least to get close to one of them. I threw the rock and much to my surprise and a little excitement I hit the teen walker right in the back of the head. As it bounced off of her she didn’t even seem to notice. However, the second it hit the ground that little dead body turned on a dime and began – growling? I guess that’s what I would call it. She began growling where the rock had landed and digging at the rock.
That’s when it happened. That’s when the lightning in a bottle went off in my head. The reason they had gone after Steve wasn’t because they could smell him or even hear him, or hell for that matter, sense him. They were attracted to the sound of the gate grinding against its gears. They had moved toward that sound and just happened to come across Steve.
Grief immediately came over me. Because we had taken all the stories about zombies at face value we believed that the gate needed to be shut right then and had in our panicked action drawn the dead to us. They were already passed us by the time we had gotten to the gate. If we would have waited just a few minutes we could have closed the gate in peace and Steve would still be alive today.
Without pause I began to weep as anger came over me at the same time as my guilt. I picked up more rocks and began throwing them at the dead as hard as I could. The other four had come back to the teen zombie and were growling at the rocks coming at them. Without thinking I ran over to the gate, unlocked it, and opened it and ran towards them with my machete.
“Come on you motherfuckers! You want something to eat. Well here I am. Come on goddamnit. Come at me!!!” I yelled as I ran at them. Just as they had looked at me and realized that a meal was there I had already slammed my blade into the teen one and quickly had taken out the two kid dead. That only left the mom and dad who were now approaching me.
“Come on! Eat me!” As I completely cut off the mom’s top portion of her head. The dad actually was able to get to me but I was able to push him off of me and stab him straight through the head. I began screaming and panting hard at what I had done as the adrenaline had completely taken over my actions.
Something grabbed my leg and I looked down realizing that I hadn’t actually finished off the teen. At that point anger completely took over me as I cut off the zombie’s hand and immediately began delivering blow after blow to the girl. It was once again dead after my first hit, but I hadn’t noticed. I dropped to my knees and began hacking at every part I could find. Yelling, screaming, and crying all at the same time. I finally stopped hitting and gave out one final primal scream at the top of my lungs. I know what came over me. It was my fault.
I had lost my only connection to humanity, because I didn’t think. I hadn’t been rational. I hadn’t taken the five seconds to stop and think about what we were doing. If only I had rational, if I had only worked it out. Steve would still be here. The dead that day were already passed the open gate. There was absolutely no need for us to put a rush on getting the gate closed. I had killed him twice. Once because I didn’t stop and think and second when I had to put down his dead form.
I sat there for maybe thirty minutes overcome with grief and just crying. When I finally got ahold of myself I went back into the compound and grabbed a lighter and the lighter fluid. I moved all the bodies and body parts into a pile, doused them with the fluid and lit the bodies on fire. I walked back to the gate, closed it, locked it and went back to the house. I got upstairs and fell down the bed and passed out.
Looking back on it now I realized that I had never properly grieved for Steve and realizing that he didn’t actually have to die caused that grief to take over. After a few hours I woke up. The light had begun to fade on the day. I got up and went out onto the balcony. The fire was out but the pile was still smoking. I went downstairs and out of the house. I went to the gate, unlocked it, opened it and walked over to the pile of burned bodies.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know how you originally died and I guess it doesn’t matter. With your bodies now returned to the earth I hope, wherever you are, you have found peace.” Despite myself I laughed. “It’s kind of silly, hoping you have found peace. I do wonder though; did you experience anything after your bodies came back to life? Was there anything of who you were before you died still in there? I doubt it, but I thought at the very least someone should have the opportunity to say goodbye. So, goodbye.”
I paused, thinking how ridiculous everything I had said just sounded. For some reason, though, I just felt the need to tell them goodbye. For whatever reason the smell of burned corpses didn’t bother me. I did remind me of what they had done during the Black Plague in hopes of keeping the disease from spreading (I was a historian after all, in my former life).
The Dead Chronicles (Book 1): The Dead Chronicles Page 3