by Kypers, Ryan
As Chelsea drove, we passed everything along the abandoned highway. Numerous stores that lined the highway were inactive and dark. The once bright and bustling highway, rated worst highway at one point in time was completely empty, abandoned and desolate.
“We’re coming up on the waffle house,” Chelsea said in the quiet car.
I looked over as we passed the large yellow waffle sign, “That’s where we went on our first date. Do you remember when I ordered you the cinnamon swirl pancakes?”
“With that creamy sugar sauce that goes on top of cinnamon buns?! YES!” she threw her hands in the air for a second before reclaiming control over the steering wheel. She let out a light sigh, “Those were so good. Definitely a solid choice at first date.”
“Well, you know that I always make the best decisions.”
“Excuse you,” Chelsea said, staring me down.
Suddenly the radio piped up, “Guys, less road head more paying attention to where you are driving!” Daryl’s voice called. “You are swerving all over the place!”
Chelsea’s eyes moved back to the road, and we both laughed. The light mood died quickly though, as signs for route three started showing up the farther down the highway we drove, but the signs were not normal signs.
“Zach, are you seeing this?” I asked through the radio.
There was a moment of silence before he spoke up, “Yeah. This is creepy shit.”
The signs for route three were there, plastered on the overhangs above the highway, but they were not the normal green signs with a white three atop them. Cardboard was plastered over any other signs that could lead away from route three. In very dark and large letters, the cardboard read: MEADOWLANDS MILITARY SAFE ZONE.
“Zach, this leads us right to the meadowlands football stadium, right?” I asked.
“Yeah, it should lead right into New Meadowlands Stadium. Do you think that is where the military took your parents?”
I looked at Chelsea who kept on driving, face straight ahead, “Maybe. But if they were so close, why not just come to get the rest of us? The meadowlands are only about a half an hour from my house. That isn’t a long drive at all.”
“Maybe something bad happened,” Chelsea added. “Maybe they were rushed by the contaminated, or there might have been an outbreak.”
“But I don’t think that would lead them away from it. Why not just clear the area of the contamination or quarantine it?”
“Maybe they moved to a different safe zone,” Zach said. “I think that we should check it out.”
“What?” I practically yelled into the radio. “That’s too risky. What if the safe zone was attacked by the contaminated? If the military can’t control them then how could we?”
“Look, all that I’m saying is that it could have a lot of valuable information, including any other safe zones and maybe some information on the Contaminated Resistance Unit,” Zach said.
I looked over to Chelsea, “What do you think?”
She looked in thought, her eyebrows scrunched inward, “We can scout it in the cars. The contaminated can’t get to us in these. Once we clear the area we can search it,” She said as we entered the ramp onto route three. “If it is abandoned, the military probably left some information on where they were going to any stragglers or those who discovered the place. Zach is right, there could be very useful information there.”
“Alright then,” I said to Zach through the radio. “We do it cautiously and carefully. First sign of danger and we’re out of there.”
Zach responded with a car horn beep as we made our way down route three.
We reached the stadium in a matter of minutes. It was not too far down route three and the extra signs guided us directly to the safe zone. Each passing sign became creepier as it went. One was torn half down with a blood stain following it. Another sign was littered with bullet holes. The last sign was ripped to shreds, blown apart by what looked to be a high explosive or tank shot. Something definitely went down, and it did not make the feeling in the pit of my stomach any better.
The parking lot was mostly barren as expected, but there were signs that life once stayed here. Collapsed tents were common to find, mostly near the numerous outhouses in the parking lot. Garbage had been blown all over the grounds, though whether it was recent or from the last football game played here was impossible to tell. A few motor homes were still parked, signs of a once bustling tail gaiting community, but all of that was now gone.
We began to drive aimlessly through the parking lot, navigating around fallen tents and inconvenient curbs. After two laps, we decided that it was safe enough, the lot anyway, for us to get out and investigate the stadium.
“No guns,” I said to Zach when we got out of the cars near the main gate. “We don’t need a whole crowd of former football players turned contaminated chasing us down. I don’t’ think that we would win that.”
“Fair enough, though I’ll have one gun on me just in case,” He replied, holstering a gun in the back of his pants. “Only for severe emergencies, I promise. Scout’s honor,” he said, holding up two fingers for the Boy Scout salute.
“I didn’t know that you were a Boy Scout,” Chelsea said.
Zach shrugged his shoulders, “I’m not.”
I looked ahead. The main gate was a huge black structure of steel bars that receded into the main building. They were almost completely open, about a quarter of the gates sticking out on each end. The military must have forgotten to shut them in their haste to leave the stadium.
The sky began to let off a light rain onto our heads as we entered. There was no electricity working any part of the stadium as far as I could tell, thusly we were forced into walking up the immobile escalator, which was just a set of inconvenient stairs.
We came to the first level, where the expensive seats were, right at field level. I never had the chance to purchase such tickets as they were extremely expensive to buy for a college student with a part time job giving a mere average twenty hours per week.
The little boy in me took hold as I stood at the entrance of the first section of seats. They were a standard dark green, lining all of the rows with less than two inches between each seat. The stands at 1b looked out onto the bright green turf field right at the thirty yard line. I practically skipped down to the very front of the stands, looking over the wall as if someone was going to Lambeau Leap right onto my lap.
My hands were stretched out over the dry guardrail. Realizing that it was raining outside, I looked up. Across the top stretched a huge canvas that covered the entire stadium. It was nothing thick, as the stadium was not a normal dome but was wide open. The cover was thin, letting in a decent amount of dim light but keeping the rain out all the same. It must have been something that the military decided to do because of the emergency at hand. It reminded me of the old Roman Coliseum.
“Over here, guys!” Chelsea called down the main walkway.
I looked over to see Zach walking by, and I joined him. “What did you find?” Zach asked.
Chelsea was waiving near an open door held open by a wooden wedge. “I think I found the command center or something like that,” She said, gesturing inside. “Come see this.”
Zach and I followed her into the room. It was not a large room, slightly larger than an average high school class room. The walls were cinderblocks painted a cream color with pictures and cork boards decorating them. Each different board was filled with papers, numerous different documents attached per pin. A thick metal desk with a fake wood top sat on the far side of the room, also littered with papers and other documents. Round tables and the chairs surrounding them comprised the remainder of the room. The blue plastic chairs were scattered across the floor as if the people who once occupied them had left in a hurry. A black chalkboard in the corner of the room was smeared in certain places, leaving the remaining bit somewhat unreadable.
“I would say that this was the command center,” Zach said. “Other than the obnoxious amou
nts of papers, it also has a good positioning near the entrance allowing the high authority the ability to deliver quick action to any situation.” Zach pulled down a document off of a cork board and looked over it as he spoke, “Of course this would put those with power at risk as they would be the first responders and organizers, but in a situation with the contaminated attacking a refuge for a few thousand people, that is needed.” He placed the document pack on the cork board and stuck it with a tack.
I walked over to the desk and shuffled over some papers. The documents were vast and detailed. One had the approximate count of the total refuges, twenty-seven thousand. It also had separate piles of clipped papers with the names and identification numbers of each individual refuge. The military wanted to be sure of who was in their camp, and who may have been considered a threat. They must have been attacked by the Contaminated Resistance Unit more than once and were taking every precaution against them.
A manila colored folder was sticking out of the side drawer of the desk. I pulled it out, revealing the title at the top: CONTAMINATED. I flicked open the folder to be met with a series of black and white pages filled with words and penciled in notes at the margins. As I flipped, a page with the anatomy of the front human body came up followed by one of a side angle and the backside. Different colors swirled around the picture of the transparent human as if someone was using a highlighter to show a path. Much of the spine in each picture was covered in a bright pink highlighter along with bits of yellow in the head and stomach.
“I think I found something on how the contaminated work,” I said to Zach and Chelsea. My eyes moved across the sheets of paper. Chelsea and Zach’s presence appeared at each of my shoulders, looking onto the papers before me. “Look,” I said as I pointed at the spinal column in each photo. “According to this, Zach’s theory is correct on the placement of the contamination in the human body. This thing, the parasite virus, it is controlling its host through the nervous system by implanting itself in the places with the greatest influence over other nerves.”
“Here,” Zach reached over my shoulder and pointed at the paper. “You see the note on the margin there? It says: the parasite virus lodges itself in the nervous system. It was initially hypothesized that the parasite virus would make its home in the host’s brain in order to have universal access to the host’s movements. This would have resulted in the parasite virus telling the brain what to do followed by the actions of the host. Instead, the parasite virus has found a way to skip the step of telling the brain what to do. It has focused the majority of itself into the spinal column to have direct access to the host’s movements. Due to the lack of response time needed by signals sent to the brain, the parasite virus is able to control all actions immediately, making the contaminated act as a super human with better reaction time.
For example, when a person is using a pen to write, the brain receives information based on the visual and physical cues that it receives from the responding nerves in conjunction with the writing. The brain analyzes what is happening and formulates a response on how to move the hand and pen. It then tells the body what to do followed by the body’s response. Due to the parasite virus located directly in the nerves, it can skip a large part of this process because it does not have to tell the body to move as it is the body. The parasite virus also appears not to fear any danger to the host, creating a very plausible realism that the parasite virus is completely unaffected by any pain.”
We were all silent for a moment, taking in what Zach just read. If what the paper said was wholly true, then the contaminated were a sort of super human. It now made sense how the contamination spread so quickly and violently. The host to the parasite virus was simply better than normal humans. If it was placed in an area where there was little resistance and little knowledge of the effects caused by the parasite virus, then it was completely understandable as to how the contamination spread.
“I don’t know about you guys, but I didn’t understand half of what that guy wrote,” Zach said.
Chelsea threw her hands up and began pacing around the room, “You read it! Please tell me that you at least understood the main concept.”
Zach frowned, “Of course I understood most of it. I’m just trying to say that he could have written it in English instead of science. The lack of remaining people in the world should inspire him to gauge his audience I think.”
I waived Zach off and closed the manila envelope. I returned it to the desk, the room still quiet from the knowledge that we just received.
“Check this out,” Chelsea said, holding up a printed map in black and white. “It shows the safe zones from two weeks ago.”
I walked over to Chelsea and looked at the map. It was a black and white representation of the continental United States. Certain areas were circled while others were a circle with a line in them. Detroit, parts of Nebraska, the Dakotas, Raleigh, some of South Carolina, and Jacksonville all had circles around them. Dallas, San Fransisco, Washington D.C., Atlanta, New York City, and Boston all had circles with slashes in them.
Looking at the key in the corner told me the story. All of the places with just a circle were suspected safe zones with light contamination. Any zone with a circle and a slash through it indicated a lost zone. The map was flooded with circles and slashes, far more that outweighed those cities with just a circle. The dead zones ranged from the north of the country all of the way to the south and greatly outweighed those areas with just a circle let alone any safe zones. The destruction of the country was complete. There was almost nowhere on the map safe from any full contamination, and the map was from two weeks ago which meant that it probably had gotten worse since that very map was printed out.
My eyes glanced back to the key in the corner of the map. There was a star. Next to it indicated a ‘civilized zone.’ I imagined that the civilized zone was a place with order and some resemblance of a past society driven out from its natural place of life by the contaminated. There were three stars on the map. One was located in Houston, Texas. That made sense. Everyone knows that every single citizen and child in Texas owns a gun. It was probably the safest place on earth. Another star was in Seattle, Washington. This one baffled me. Maybe the contaminated just did not want to make their way north to the colder climate. Regardless of the reasoning, it seemed that Washington was a place that was safe from harm. The final star was placed on Kansas City.
“Seems like this is the final bit of proof that we need,” I said to Zach, pointing at the star on Kansas City. “Though we do have options.”
Zach shook his head, “Not many options though. Kansas City is by far the easiest for us to get to, though the Texas climate would probably be the most ideal place to settle.” He shook his head, “No. if we need a backup plan, I say that we go to Washington. This way we can pick up our friend near Denver and continue on our way.”
“Not a bad plan,” Chelsea said. “The only problem is that I don’t plan on Kansas City to be empty. In fact I won’t believe it.”
“Agreed,” I added. “Alright, we have been here for a while longer than I would like. I think it is time we were off,” I said, stashing the map and census papers into my pack.
Zach nodded and made his way toward the door. He opened it and peeked out before closing the door with extreme haste. He held his back on the door, holding it shut.
“What-“ I began, but was cut off by Zach’s hand clamping over my mouth.
Chelsea appeared at my side, bat in hand. Zach stayed at the door, his own bat at the ready but his body unmoving. I reached over and gripped my wrench tight.
Under the crack of the doorway I saw shadows moving in the dim light of the stadium, but they did not disappear. The movement kept going, darkness dancing against the small opening as a hissing and spitting rang out from the other side of the door.
This abandoned refuge was still harboring refugees, and they were hungry.
Chapter 24
I could tell that they were circling, the
contaminated. I knew these motions before, the circling and hissing: the feeding. There must have been a wave of hunger throughout the contaminated to bring them to this point. When we entered the stadium, there were no signs of nearby contaminated and no corpses appeared inside of the stadium. The contaminated must have been hungry and were starting fresh.
A bellowing roar and raspy hiss echoed through the entire stadium above that of the chanting group. A kill must have been made. The feasting began. As I imagined, the larger of the contaminated were getting the first bite to eat for themselves, as none of the smaller contaminated were going to fight them for the food as they would have wound up the meal. This feast was quick though, only lasting a few seconds before the noise died down and the circling began again.
The kill must have been quick and on a smaller contaminated. The larger one would eat the smaller contaminated right up, as if it was a bite sized snack. I imagined the leg of the torn apart contaminated lying on the ground, acting as bait for the next one to jump into the pile preparing for the inevitable feast.
This was bad, and everyone knew it. The chanting and panting and hissing was right outside of the closed door, and we all knew that the event would not end any time soon. I was unsure of how efficiently the contaminated were able to use doors with handles or knobs, but these swinging doors had a simple push to open mechanism on the contaminated side, something that they could accidentally open.
Another eruption came from the opposite side of the door. Another kill. This time the feasting grew more violent. Some of the smaller contaminated must have gone for a bite to eat against the will of a larger one, thusly resulting in the smaller contaminated’s death and continual feasting. The roaring coming from the other side of the doors was so loud that the smaller pieces in the door mechanism began to vibrate lightly. Something was smashing against the walls and floors as the feeding continued. More contaminated must have jumped in, hoping for a piece of the feed.