Apocalyptic Beginnings Box Set

by M. D. Massey

  That was the sound of his worst nightmare the past few months. Mom and Dad and their incessant, demanding, infuriating repetition of that question. It was almost like they were afraid to let him out of their sight. As if he were still a five-year-old. In a mad stroke of irony, it was the one thing that made staying at his great-grandma Marty's house bearable. She didn't ask stupid questions.

  He’d run out of her house this morning as soon as possible, just as he'd done most of the previous three weeks, to find refuge among his kind online and do important things, like slaying the undead and e-chatting with his friends back in civilization. His home away from home away from home was the public library.

  “I'm going to the lye-bury, Grandma. See ya tonight!” He reveled in mispronouncing the word library, though not to antagonize his sweet old great-grandmother. He butchered it on purpose because his dad said his mispronunciation was a special broken word that was “more obnoxious than bloody fingernails on a chalkboard.”

  Shouldn't tell me your weakness, Dad!

  He knew his father's second most-hated word was nu-cue-lar power—but it was harder to fit into everyday conversation. So, as a sarcastic homage to his father, he continued the tradition. Today, Grandma only answered him with an affirmative nod as he walked out the door to relative freedom.

  Though it broke the unwritten teenage rule of time management—awake all night and sleep all day, like vampires—today he reached the library just as it opened at eight o' clock. He wasn't interested in small talk, or chatting up strangers, so he didn't care to know the name of the well-dressed, somewhat older woman who unlocked the doors and sat behind the counter every day, but she at least recognized him with a wave. He figured it was the blue jeans and soft-drink-logo shirts he liked to wear.

  “Good morning and welcome back. I didn't expect anyone today.”

  He didn't think to ask her why. He was anxious to avoid her and get to the computer area, so he could set up shop. He passed by with a hurried wave in her direction.

  When he arrived in the technology area, the computers were still off. He turned on the PC where he had taken a seat. While he waited for it to spin up, the woman came along and turned on the half-dozen or so other computers. He could see she had a frown on her face, but he kept his nose in his phone, trying to begin text conversations with his other friends who should be coming online. Normally there would be three or four of his friends from school—a cabal that would meet in one of their homes during the summer. He was now the outsider since he was staying with his grandma in the city.

  “Where is everyone?” he wrote to the lone avatar sitting on his screen. It belonged to Terrance, who had for some reason named his character “Share the Spirit” and used skins in-game with Olympic themes. Funny because Terrance never lifted a muscle to exercise a day in his life, though he was overly competitive inside the game world.

  “Dunno. You have the game loaded yet?”

  He wasn't in a rush to get things started since he knew he'd be at the library all day. As the computer came online, he logged into the server for World of Undead Soldiers, and leisurely prepared his units while he waited. His friends should be crawling out of bed and joining up soon.

  He sat there fiddling with things for another fifteen minutes. He and Terrance wanted to give the other guys a chance to link up before they headed into the wilderness. It was always harder to jump in on the run.

  At last, they made the call. The other guys weren't going to make it.

  He thought it was highly unusual all three were missing, but it was no reason to cancel the engagement. He'd go out by himself—lone hero style—rather than sit back at Grandma's.

  All thoughts turned to the battlefield as he and “Share the Spirit” were immediately “in it,” fighting for their lives with their reduced group of soldiers.

  His sense of time melted away as the game consumed him.

  An hour went by when he got some texts from JT, one of his AWOL buddies.

  ***

  “I got the guns. Where u want them?”

  “Dad?”

  “Oh srry Liam. That was 4 dad. Hope you guys are running 2. Like a real adventure!”

  “cya”

  ***

  Is this a joke?

  The texts showed up on his phone in one blast, as if they were delayed.

  He tried to reply but got a “network busy” message.

  He thought about asking Terrance for his opinion of those messages, but the computer game screen was frozen. Forced to observe the real world, he felt a sudden and powerful vibration. Some of the computer monitors rattled and a couple flashed off and back on. But the important thing was the connection...

  Losing the link to the internet rarely happened with modern technology and infrastructure, but when it did, it always happened at the worst possible time. A host of undead and supernaturals were arriving on his screen and the game world would continue running while his character stood there and died.

  “Crap!”

  He knew he'd said it too loudly in the library but looking around he saw no one he might have offended. There were no other patrons besides himself.

  Even the woman behind the desk was out of view.

  Suddenly, to his great delight, the screen unfroze. His character was still alive! He re-joined the battle, to the relief of “Spirit” who was getting his butt handed to him in the storm of creatures. Together, they stood a chance.

  His attention was once again focused on the screen, the outage already a distant memory.

  * * *

  2

  Another hour went by before he came back into awareness of what was happening in the real world. The lights began flashing as if the library was closing.

  Not how things were supposed to go.

  Without haste, he messaged Terrance in-game to let him know he had to drop out. The library was apparently shutting down early today. An expletive-laden tirade came back at him, suggesting he tell the library to stick something illicit in a dark orifice.

  With a chuckle, he stood up and stretched.

  Then the power went off, killing the dull fluorescents on the ceiling of the entire building along with everything else.

  His primary concern was that he was glad he exited the match cleanly. His character was safe in his stronghold until he returned to the game world tomorrow, next week, or next year. If the power went out while he was in battle, he would have lost all his loot and would have returned to his stronghold with nothing. It was a major downer to have to start from scratch.

  Instead of moving toward the exit, he texted Terrance an extended analysis of a portion of the adventure they'd just experienced. He looked forward to getting back together so he could check out some new weapons he'd picked up while they were fighting the beasts.

  When he hit send, he got another “network busy” message. He slammed his phone on the laminate table a bit harder than he wanted.

  This totally blows.

  Frustrated at the intrusions of the real world upon his game time, he stood up, grabbed his backpack containing the extra laptop he kept for those times when the library computers were filled with other patrons, and headed for the exit.

  When he arrived at the glass doors, he found the librarian on her feet, looking outward in silence.

  “Ma'am, what happened to the power? Is the libary—I mean li-brary going to be open tomorrow?” he said with a chuckle.

  Turning around, she looked at him like he was crazy. Liam could see she'd been crying, an unmistakable puffiness combined with smeared makeup.

  “Don't you know what's going on?”

  “Yeah, the power went out,” he said matter-of-factly.

  “Not that. I mean with the city. With Ebola. With zombies.”

  He looked past her and her drama. Everything appeared normal; he really couldn't identify anything unusual in his field of view. He noticed nothing out of the ordinary when he walked in this morning, so he had no help there. And zombies? That wa
s the craziest thing he'd ever heard. What would some random librarian know about zombies?

  “I don't see anything unusual.”

  “Don't you listen to the news? NPR? Anything?”

  “My dad says NPR is run by the government, so you can't trust anything they say.” He was content to believe his father on this point because the few times he did listen to NPR, he was bored to tears. His conclusion was anything that mind-numbing had to be propaganda.

  “Does your dad think the cable news, nightly news, and radio news is also propaganda?”

  “Well, actually—”

  “It doesn't matter. Do you have anyone taking care of you? Where are your parents? Can you get home from here?”

  He considered the many possible answers to those questions. He decided to keep his response as simple as he could.

  “I live with my grandma about thirty minutes from here.” He pointed in the direction he was going to walk.

  “You should take care of your grandma. Keep her from getting sick.”

  He looked again out the window and saw nothing to support the woman's claims. He saw the crazy look in her eyes, the smeared makeup, and her position in front of the door and absently wondered if she presented a threat to him.

  “My grandma is 104. She's probably sitting in her comfy chair right now knitting or crocheting or whatever it is old ladies do. I'm sure she's safe and sound—”

  And then to reassure his strange captor, “—but I'll go check on her to be sure, thanks for the advice.”

  He stepped back as if waiting for her to let him out.

  She took the invitation, unlocked the door, and held it open. Once he was through, she stepped out as well, locked it, and then raced to the lone car on the lot. He heard her complain to herself about how she wasn’t supposed to come into work at all today. In moments, she jumped in her car and went speeding down the street, opposite of where he was heading.

  He was left scratching his head.

  In no particular hurry, he began his walk. Even with the freakishly distraught woman egging him home, he didn't see anything out of the ordinary in the neighborhood; as his dad would say, she was a plain nut. He put in his ear buds and was comforted by a rock song almost as old as his father—Supertramp's “Take The Long Way Home.”

  Too bad I can't go to my real home.

  He thought of Grandma. He had told the librarian the truth. He was absolutely certain he knew what she was doing. The same thing she was always doing. The same thing she'd probably be doing until the day she died. Sitting in that stupid chair knitting, quilting, or whatever the heck she called it.

  Even though he loved the old woman, she was the most boring person he’d ever met.

  * * *

  3

  Walking back to Grandma's was a downer. He knew it meant the day would be spent in his dreary basement living quarters playing solo games on his laptop, reading, or listening to music. By no means would he spend the day on the same floor as Grandma and risk having to come up with things to say the whole time. Too much energy required. Just because he was on loan to her this summer didn't mean he had to be in her pocket the whole time.

  Ha! On loan. That's what his father called it. More like a prison sentence. A fifteen-year-old boy and his 104-year-old great-grandma had nothing in common as far as he could tell. Computers. The internet. Wi-Fi. Texting. He tried to explain all this to his technology-challenged grandma—he dispensed with the “great” in casual conversation—but she never seemed interested. Even showing her videos of fuzzy bunnies and cute little kittens evoked a “That's nice” but not much else in the way of conversation. He’d run out of ideas.

  He returned again to “Where's Liam?” She was a breath of fresh air compared to the inquisitions of his mom and dad. Where are you going? Who are you meeting there? Will there be girls? Drinking? Drugs? And on and on and on. The constant nagging was part of what drove him insane and helped contribute to the massive fights he'd been having with them. No doubt it helped expedite his banishment to Grandma's. A cooling off period for everyone involved. It had already been a few weeks, and he still hadn't communicated with the ‘rents. It was fine with him. His biggest worry was that he'd have to see them both on his birthday in a few weeks.

  One day at a time.

  His parents stopped paying for his monthly cell phone service as punishment for one of his exploits—he couldn't remember which—and they wouldn't even turn it back on as he left for Grandma's. Talk about cruel and unusual. But once there, his grandma insisted his phone be turned back on, so she could communicate with him using her standard telephone. He had to grudgingly thank her for helping him regain such an important piece of his technological repertoire. It linked him with Grandma, but more importantly, it linked him back up with his friends.

  When they weren't discussing their games, he and his friends were constantly talking about horror movies, TV series about zombies and similar supernatural thrillers. They all read the same kind of books too. He was interested in lots of genres of horror but capitalized most of his non-game time by reading the classics on the end of the world: The Stand, Earth Abides, Alas Babylon, and countless zombie stories. Of course, he and his friends visualized themselves as the heroes who saved the world. They even played video games where they could be those heroes. When they talked theoretically about what would happen if the world did end, most of his friends believed they would meet the fall of civilization standing up, facing the harsh new realm with a cool and detached form of heroism. They would be the guys taking out the zeds, zacks, or whatever. Chasing away the corrupt government. Exterminating the barbarian cannibals. And they'd naturally be coveted by buxom women.

  He was filled with bravado in front of his friends but privately wasn't so sure he was ever destined to be more than an extra when the movie version of the demise of society was filmed. Most books packed-in characters who defied all the odds to survive. Some had quirky skills that just happened to be what was needed at that particular moment—sort of like the old gardener who had used a spade for fifty years and could miraculously detach zombies from their heads with it. He knew that just didn't happen.

  He accepted he would probably be an infected loser when the end came. Books only show the heroes. Everyone else gets sketched into the background as mindless extras, though each one has a story as rich and detailed as the hero. As humans succumb to infection, either by malfeasance, poor clothing choices, or just dumb luck, they instantly transferred from the “important” column to the “afterthought” column in book after book.

  The guy who thinks he can shoot a crowd of infected at point-blank range.

  The girl who tries to run away only to stereotypically trip and fall.

  The unsupervised child who innocently lets the undead into the house. Those guys.

  I don't want to be those guys!

  At that moment, he heard gunshots from somewhere to his right. He yanked off his ear buds. He knew the sound from his time at the gun range with his mom and dad. You can't mistake the sound of someone banging out round after round from a gun. Then a second and third chain of rat-tat-tats started to hammer. Like it was a bank robbery or something.

  At least I'd recognize the zombie uprising before some librarian.

  Then a tornado siren began to howl—coming from the direction of Grandma’s street. He could also hear another one starting up somewhere behind him. Clear skies were overhead. The morning kept getting weirder.

  Unperturbed, he decided to drop into the little corner market for his daily infusion of whatever energy drink was on sale. It helped him survive the tedium of living at Grandma's. He'd need an extra or three if he'd have to hole up until tomorrow.

  Walking in, he could see a few patrons up near the checkout counter. They were all huddled around a small radio. He immediately recognized the grating voice of the President of the United States.

  “—you must stay in your homes to survive this crisis. I have authorized all governors to deplo
y the National Guard to their home states for the duration of this event. Local officials will follow this broadcast with instructions specific to your area...”

  He wasn't entirely listening. He tended to ignore politics and political “stuff,” such as messages from the president. His takeaway was that some disaster was happening somewhere and that those people should be doing something.

  He walked to the refrigerated section to grab the drinks he needed. The display lights were off—all power was off in the store—but the large front windows helped him see into the cooler well enough. As he was staring at the selection of beverages, he heard two people arguing in the next aisle, a man and a woman.

  “I told you the president was going to ruin this country! But did you listen? Noooooo.”

  In response, the woman made a sound with her mouth very much like she was throwing up. She then said, “You never did like him. Everyone hates the Socialists; that's why he can't get anything done for this country. You'd probably like to see this nation in ruins if it meant he got the blame for it.”

  He heard the words, amused at the couple's tone, but had no interest otherwise. More political nonsense he didn't need to absorb. Of more importance at the moment—what flavor energy drinks to grab. He pulled out what he needed and headed for the register.

  The attendant would not peel herself away from the radio. He held up a five to cover the two cans in his other hand and slapped it on the counter, then walked away. It wasn't something he'd do any other time, but he was getting frustrated at people acting so abnormal this morning.

  I don't have time for all this BS.

  When he returned to the light of the day, he stood near the front door as his eyes adjusted. He watched a man sitting in the passenger seat of a car parked almost in front of the store, drinking out of some kind of hard liquor bottle. He turned and looked at Liam with sleep-filled half-closed eyes, then faced forward again as if he were on a long drive. He felt embarrassed for the dreamer but had no desire to engage or even acknowledge him. He began walking toward home.