by Jack Stewart
None of this happed of course. The gate could hold back a battalion of tanks and I had locked the damn thing before I passed out from my shopping glut. I am sure there is another lesson about greed and conspicuous consumption here but…fuck you.
I dropped each of the inquisitive guests, then dragged their bodies far away out onto streets and made my way back up to my apartment. Good god, if I sprinter had happened by…best not to think about it. So I showered, cleaned off my gear, and went to bed to sleep off the shock and fatigue of the previous day.
And when I woke up: Christmas! Birthday! Gifts! Hullaballoo! I’d get all my fancy gear up here, try it on, and sort it all out. Good deal!
I spent the next few days sorting out my haul, trying on clothes, and putting away my ammunition. I placed everything neatly on shelves or in closets and realized that even with all the effort it took to get the stuff up here, I was going to need more. Food, water, ammunition, and anything else I could find lying around the city.
So I would shower, eat a dinner of canned stew, and go to bed early so I would be well rested for my next foray into the city then I was back out on the streets again scavenging, hunting the dead, dodging the living, coming back home, and getting ready for the next day.
And then the next one.
And the next one.
And the one after that.
Every day, I’d get up, get dressed, load up, and head out into the city.
Some days would be easy. I’d get more ammo or canned goods and get home with nary an incident. Other days I’d venture too far into the city and end up with a huge pack of shufflers chasing after me. And it was one of those days where I spent the majority of it running from sprinters going around and around trying to lose them. I had completely lost my bearing and the next thing I know I am standing in front of the Magic Fucking Kingdom.
I didn’t plan on ever going there knowing the Manson Family would be hanging out and violating stuffed Disney animals, desecrating Dumbo, or whatever else they were doing to get off. I hadn’t meant to go there. One minute I was running from another wave of severely decayed dead and then next thing I knew I was standing in the parking lot of Downtown Disney. The dead were closing in oh so slowly like a bunch of retards running a marathon from the east and west, so I hopped the fence and entered the park.
Thomas was right about one thing, the park was completely empty. I walked through the closed shops and around the silent rides. I could see a few signs that someone, maybe James, Pix, and Thomas, had lived here for a while, but it didn’t seem like anyone was here now. Then I heard someone banging and knew something dead was close by.
I followed the sound and could hear the grunting and moaning of the dead. I opened the door of a supply warehouse and what did I find? Pix chained to a post wandering in circles in her panties and a tee shirt. She was quite dead and far beyond the sprinter stage. Most of her neck and stomach were gone so whatever had gotten her had had a good long meal. I could just imagine James sitting nearby watching her get eaten, then having a little of the old “in out in out” fun with her, then leaving her to wander for a small eternity in this warehouse.
I pulled out one of the few un-silenced pistols I had put a bullet in her head. I did that out of some misplaced sense of mercy. I assumed that the park was empty and that it was the right thing to do. Assumed? Get it? And we all know what assuming does right? Right. Because exactly three seconds after I pulled the trigger, I heard a scream that let me know I had just made and ass out of myself. And of the sprinter that must have been nearby but was now tearing up the asphalt to get to me.
Fuck!
I quickly closed the door I had come in through then headed towards the opposite side of the building. A second later I heard the thing crash into the door I had just sealed shut. That was good news. I also could not hear a bunch of shufflers closing in on the warehouse. That was also good news. I hadn’t seen any in the park so maybe I’d catch a break. Then I heard the door crash in. No breaks for me apparently. I kept moving towards the rear of the building looking for an exit being careful not to get turned around, confused, or panicked. I spotted the exit sign in the back of a large maintenance bay as I heard the crashing and screaming of the sprinter racing around somewhere behind me.
Man that thing was pissed.
I found the exit to the warehouse and stopped. If I went outside, the thing would get out and track me down and scream at the top of its lungs to bring the shufflers into the park. If I waited here at the exit, I had a clear shot down the only path it could come at me from. Kill it and be done with this rodeo.
So I hunched down pointing my shotgun back towards the short hallway where the sprinter had to rush me from. I could hear it crashing through doors and knocking shit over as it closed in on me. And then, there it was. It had rounded a corner and overshot the hallway before realized it’s meal was just standing in one spot. It backtracked, came back to the hallway, and then…stopped. I had never seen a sprinter stop before. Freaked me the fuck out. I had also not seen a sprinter exactly like this one before either. Let me explain.
This one was dressed in clean clothes. She was wearing tight jeans that showed off a nice round ass but not too tight as to say “I’m a slut,” a form fitting, long sleeve tee shirt that covered her flat belly and large breasts, and a nice pair of Chuck Taylor Urban Combat boots. Even stranger, her long, platinum blond hair was clean and she had it done up in a neat ponytail. Now call me crazy but the sprinters I had dealt with since the outbreak were usually a mess: torn clothes, blood covered mouths, filthy, and generally a wreck. This one was well put together. Fresh. Fresh as spring harvest you might say. Nothing? Not even from the hyper-nerds? Losers.
Anyways this one looked as though she had bothered to change clothes and keep herself looking…um...tidy. She was clearly dead. Her skin was pale, her eyes that faded “my corneas are all scratched up and shit” color. Her lips were a nice shade of purple. She looked hot. And she just stared at me fucking creeping me out so I aimed the gun at her head and pulled the trigger.
Boom!
You know what that tramp did? She jumped out of the way! Fucking bitch! As though she actually had thought about what was about to happen and moved to avoid being shot. Thinking! Moving out of the way! Avoiding being shot! Now let me tell you one thing friends and family, if the sprinters were getting smart and starting to think things through, I was going to just throw in the fucking towel and have myself a shotgun snack. And by “shotgun snack” I mean blow my own head off for those of you who are too slow to pick up on my analogies.
Before the sprinter could get back up and make another run at me, I bolted out the door and locked it shut behind me. A few seconds later the sprinter was up and banging on that door like it was a…um…bongo drum? Read headed step child? Retarded stepchild! Like there was no tomorrow? Whatever. It was beating on the door really hard. Instead of running to the left or right which would just drag the sprinter along to a new, unlocked exit, I did the only smart thing I would think of that day: I ran straight ahead. And soon the pounding and screaming faded in the background then stopped altogether about the time I was passing through Tomorrowland (with a surprising lack of zombie exhibits, ha ha. Didn’t see that one coming did you Imangineers?!) and hitting Main Street. Well let me tell you friend, I did not stop running until I was up and over the perimeter fence, back into the streets where the normal dead wandered about, and away from whatever fucked up madness was taking place inside of D-Land on this very day.
So I found myself back in the city. The last group of people I bumped into before cutting off all contact with anything living or dead were the remnants of the police and military folks. These were the guys who had thrown up a wall around Burbank and managed to temporarily stem the tide of the undead.
Wallers. That’s what they called themselves: Wallers. Get it? Because they walked the wall of Burbank. Retreads, that’s what I called them. But they were heavily armed retreads so I treated t
hem nice and looked for the nearest route away from them.
They tried to get me to come with them. I tried to tell them, politely, to fuck off. They argued with me vehemently saying the Wreck was no place for a girl. I showed them the business end of my rifle. They finally got the message and left me alone.
One of the Wallers seemed like a decent person. Called himself Rutt (a strange name I know but these were strange times). As they and I prepared to part ways he said if I ever decided to come in, to look him up and he’d help me settle in. And by “settle in” I think he meant shtupe me since the age of consent was clearly no longer in effect.
Sicko.
So I started avoiding the living as vigorously as I avoided the dead and after more and more time passed it became much easier to avoid the living as they had mostly either been eaten, moved out of Los Angeles, or walled themselves in at Burbank.
So it was just me, the dead, and a few of those half dead freaks. Until the day I bumped into another family.
I tried to avoid them, I really did. But as I was heading home after a long day of scavenging, one of those freaky everlasting gob stoppers of a sprinter started yelling and going on about whatever so close by me that I had to make a quick detour into a nearby hotel. I checked that the main floor was clear then headed up to the top per my usual modis operandi when I heard the coughing.
That there should have sent me back out on the street lickety splickety but I didn’t have a rule yet for dealing with sick people (Rule Number Seven: Avoid sick people). So I followed the sound to the coughing and found a husband, his wife, and their sick little boy holed up in a room coughing and hacking their lungs out with a nasty case of bronchitis.
We talked, they told me their story, and I told them mine, then the boy died in the morning. He didn’t even come back which was a blessing to the parents who would be following him shortly. I stayed with them until they had both shuffled off, made sure they weren’t coming back, then headed out towards my own apartment feeling that I had at least been descent to the folks helping them out through their last days. At least they didn’t have to deal with this shit anymore.
I started coughing forty eight hours later. No good deed goes unpunished, right? Somewhere, Darwin was laughing. Fuck you, Darwin. I saw where this was going and decided that I didn’t want to die just yet (there has to be an invisible sun, right? The Police? No one? Geez.). So before the fever got rolling, before this thing laid me completely out, I pulled out my trusty map and looked for the closet hospital I could find.
Turns out I was just a few miles from the UCLA Medical Center. I would hot foot it over there, get me some antibiotics and hope that a) I did not kill myself by taking something lethal, b) the antibiotics would kill off whatever I had, and c) I could do all of this before the fever spiked and put me down for good.
I packed up as much water and soup as I could carry (even vegetable soup. Yeck!), loaded up on ammo, strapped on my axe, and headed out. I reached the medical campus with the fever burning me up, the coughs feeling like they were tearing my lungs apart, and the cramps reducing me to a shamble. In fact, the way I moved, I looked like one of the dead. So much so that the dead that were drifting around the campus seemed not to notice me. Bravo!
I found the campus directory, located the pharmacy, and headed towards a small building located on the southwest side of the campus. Looters had already been here and had probably taken all the narcotics, but if I was lucky the antibiotics would still be here and would fix whatever bug I had picked up from the family.
I pulled out the little pharmacology book I had picked up at Walgreens (no, a different one), found the section on antibiotics, and started hunting. I didn’t just fine one, I found them all, but best, I found amoxicillin. Specifically designed for respiratory bacterial infections. I gathered up a few bottles of the stuff and made my way to an outpatient building hoping it wasn’t chock full of dead people.
It was chock full of dead people.
But they mostly ignored me as I shuffled around looking for an empty room as long as I didn’t get too close to them. I found a room on the third floor that was neat and empty, bolted the door shut, and pushed whatever I could in front of it. I stripped down and crawled in between the cool sheets, popped open the antibiotics, and took my first dose then promptly passed out.
I slept. I dreamed. The fever burned through my body. I dreamed some more. Sometimes the dead were in the room. Sometime my parents. Sometimes my dead parents were in the room. I screamed a lot and in those few moments of clarity when I could drink water, pee, and take another dose of antibiotics, I could see the dead gathered around outside the door of my room. They didn’t get in otherwise I wouldn’t be talking to you. Duh.
According to my watch, three days passed and then the fever broke for good. I spent another two days drinking water and cold soup from a can until I felt my strength beginning to return and the cough tapering off. I would cough for almost a month until the infection finally cleared up. It was so bad I finally had to stay in my apartment. Nothing worse than sneaking around a bunch of dead then having a coughing fit. Very inconvenient.
So as soon as I felt up to it, I changed my clothes, packed up my gear, and headed out of the hospital. So here’s the strange thing, as I headed toward the campus perimeter, I spot this guy hanging from a rope out the fifth floor window of a building marked Medical Research, Human Trials Division. Weird, right?
I think oh, he was probably bit and knew he was going to become one of the dead and decided to end it in a really bad way. I could see him twitching back and forth. His brain was still intact so he was one of the technically undead. The drop must not have severed his spinal cord because his feet kept swinging back on forth.
I stood there watching him wondering if someone had thrown him out the window after he had become one of the dead as some type of sick revenge. I had seen it before. The living torturing, if that’s the right word, the dead until they got bored (the living, not the dead) and put the dead thing down for good. I didn’t know and didn’t care. I did know that I was too tired to put the Swinger out of his misery and had to get back home before I ran out of strength.
So I dragged my butt back to my apartment, washed the sweat and sick stink off of my skin, and crawled into bed. And there I stayed for the better part of a month recovering from the respiratory infection.
But the image of that dead guy kept haunting me. I’d dream it was me up there swinging from the end of that rope, birds pecking at my skin, forever choking until one day sometime in the future either my neck rotted and broke or the rope that held me did.
Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I felt strong enough to make the trip and headed out to the Medical Research, Human Trials Division building. I arrived at the campus, headed up to the fifth floor, and walked straight over to the window where the guy had hung himself or had been hung where I promptly leaned out and put a bullet into his head. I leaned back inside the building hoping that would put an end to the nightmares and noticed on the wall by the window frame the rope was tied to a message that said “Read this” with an arrow pointing to a journal sealed in plastic bag tapped to a metal case. I looked around making sure I was alone, then opened up the journal and read.
I read for a solid hour. I think I puked a few times. Finally I had to put it down. I picked it up and put the filthy fucking thing back in its plastic envelope. Now I knew why he had hung himself and if I had read his journal first, I would have left him there, undead, to rot for all time.
I popped open the case and looked at the rows upon rows of blood samples. The guy must have nearly killed himself before…uh…killing himself getting as much blood as he could out of his veins. I closed the case back up. So it had started here in this very place. I wouldn’t find out until much later that it had started in many places at once. I looked around the lab spotting the cooling units that had long since stopped cooling. I popped them open an inside were more vials with little biohazard signs. T
he virus that started the whole thing? Maybe. I couldn’t tell. I took one of the many notepads scattered about I began writing what I saw, what floor I was on, and the building’s street address. Someone would want to know about the guy hanging out the window, this lab, and whatever the fuck these eggheads were doing here. For me, I just wanted out. So I grabbed the case, the journal, and my gear and hit the streets.
I went back to my place and I read this guy’s entire story from the time he was infected by the staff in the Human Trails facility to the day he hung himself after taking as many samples of his own blood as he could and storing them in the case that I had taken with me. It gave me nightmares for weeks but that didn’t matter. The journal and what this guy had done no longer mattered. The dumb fucks who injected him no longer mattered. The millions upon millions of dead no longer mattered. Life, it seemed no longer mattered. Only one thing to do then. Fix myself a shotgun snack.
And I tell you, I was on my way to do it when the Big One hit. You know, the huge earthquake that everyone had been predicating for nearly a hundred years? The one that would cause L.A. to fall off into the ocean? That one? Well, let me tell you, God certainly has a sense of humor because he chose the middle of the Zombie Apocalypse to let it shake. And shake it did.
That quake shook the entire basin for nearly ten minutes. I watched as my building rocked and rolled from one side to the other. It seemed like an eternity. I scrambled back away from the windows and watched as one after the other of the older buildings in downtown collapsed and fell. I watched as vast plumes of smoke climbed into the sky as new fires broke out. I thought that any minute my apartment building was going to crumble down to the street and bury me in a heap of rubble so deep I’d never be found. I have never been so terrified. Not even when the dead were chasing me. Not even when the living were chasing me.
At the end of the Big One I realized two things: one, I wanted to live and two, I was going to get the fuck out of L.A.