by Won, Mark
Copyright 2018
Written by Mark Won
Haven from Hell: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse
Part 1: A Farmer’s Son
Chapter 1: There’s No Place Like Home, A School Uprising, and Why Tree Houses aren’t Safe
The stupid alarm clock went off just like it was supposed to. Time to go to school. The only part of that which I really enjoyed was Future Lit. The rest was easy enough for the most part but not really worth the effort. I remember wondering what the point of it all was. Maybe I would have felt differently if they’d taught a class on scientific farming. I had my future all planed out, and that plan didn’t include algebra or essays.
Of course, that was before the whole world was devoured in a maelstrom of death and destruction.
My brother, Eric, had made it plain that he had no interest in the family farm. That left me. I knew a lot of guys that were just dying to get away from the farm. But not me. I loved it there. I got to work outside all day, spend lots of time with my family, and do something not stupid with my life. Owning a farm was like being a small business owner, I figured. So I was glad to stick around and help Dad out.
Mom turned on the vacuum cleaner so I knew that I had better get moving. It was a sure sign that breakfast was ready and that she was losing patience with us layabouts. Both dogs, Butterscotch and Chocolate (a couple of hounds), started barking at the vacuum. Even I couldn’t sleep through that racket. I guess that was the point.
Downstairs, I took my place at table, waited for Mom to shut down the machine, and Dad to say grace. Mom asked me, “Where’s you’re brother?” What kind of a question is that, anyway? I mean, really, how many options were there? Had to be careful how to phrase the answer though. One cocky eyebrow and I’d catch the blame for being late, same as him.
“I think he’s upstairs still.”
She didn’t look too happy about it. The last thing I wanted, first thing in the morning, was a homily on being my brother’s keeper. I was relieved to be off the hook when Dad interrupted with his customary, “Let us pray.”
Ten minutes later, after my second helping of eggs, toast, and bacon, Eric finally showed up, sat down (careful not to look Mom or Dad in the eye), pretended to say a quiet grace, and commenced to stuffing his pie hole.
Mom asked him, “Is Beth coming over for dinner, Sunday?” Mom and Dad both liked Beth. She was a sweetheart. If I hadn’t been dating Anna back then I might have asked her out, myself. She was only a year older than me.
“Nah, I dumped her. She was too churchy.” That was my bro. Right to the point and forget about the fallout. He knew that would irritate the folks and he said it anyway, just to be a jerk.
It was chilly outside so I grabbed my jacket before Mom could lay into him and said, “I gotta go. Can’t be late.” Not my smoothest escape but good enough.
Eric had graduated the year before and had already put everyone and everything in his rear view mirror. His big plan was to get a piece of paper saying he’s a B.S. in economics or business or whatever. He would have taken anything that offered the greatest benefit for the least effort and that would’ve kept him off a farm.
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Our school was the biggest thing about Deercrossing. Kids were bused in from halfway across the county. In Northern Wisconsin that’s about what it takes to fill a two story building. We must have had nine hundred kids there and 30 classrooms. It probably should have been built farther south, in a more central location, but the schoolhouse was built way back in the day when there was talk of more roads cutting through the government’s forest. Also, I heard a rumor that a politician’s nephew used to live in town. So, lucky me, I could ride my bike to school.
“Hey John, better hurry.” That from Anna, greeting me in the entrance hall. She’s hot. I have no idea what she saw in me and I don’t care. When God gives you a gift, you take it.
I said, “I got a late start. Want to watch a movie tonight?”
“What movie?” Like I cared. I didn’t plan on spending too much time watching anything but her. Preferably while curled up on the couch right next to her. With nobody else in the room if I could manage it. Better make it her folk’s house. Or better yet, her room.
“Pick one and I’ll download it. Will your folks mind?”.
We talked about movies while we walked to class. We could have talked about anything and I would have been happy. I just liked to hear her talk. That was the last real nice memory I have from right before the Changing. After that nice memories kinda got scarce for a while.
Anna and I were in first period Social Studies when the Change started. Everyone around us started to froth at the mouth, their eyes rolling up in their heads. Even our teacher, Ms. Dolty, seemed affected. Pencils, pens, notebooks all clattering to the floor while everyone stood rigidly, swaying slightly, like some kind of seizure. It only lasted, maybe, fifteen seconds, tops. Then things started to get violent. Anna and I were still in shock when they started reaching for us.
My flight reflex kicked in right about then. With no time left to think I grabbed Anna and ran into the hall. It was lucky we had seats right by the door. The last thing I saw in the schoolroom was my friend Hector getting pushed out the second story window while our former classmates were grasping for him.
We got about thirty feet when the mob started pouring into the hall. They saw us and started a low quiet keening while gnashing their teeth. Very bad. We made it to the stairwell ahead of them. They seemed sluggish. I even saw a couple of them trip over one another. Good thing, too, because the situation was no better on the ground floor. The only thing that saved us was Mr. Fagan getting ripped apart by the mob, off to one side by the lockers. It made for quite a distraction. Hell, I was running for my life and I was distracted. I was pretty sure what I was seeing was impossible. There’s just no way for a bunch of kids to literally tear a man limb from limb. But there it was. The cannibalism didn’t help my focus any, either.
Anna got me moving again. Did I mention her excellent survival instincts? I love that about her. With the mob behind us and the mob ahead we were in bad shape. If you’ve ever seen a school full of bored anxious kids on the day before summer vacation, one minute after the last bell rings, then you know the kind of wall to wall crowd I’m talking about.
There was another stairwell off to the right and up we went. I noticed something then, about how they moved. Thy didn’t seem to like stairs much. The ones below us kept tripping trying to climb up, and the crowd above us just fell down the stairs in our general direction. All that clumsiness bought Anna and I some time, but our situation was hardly tenable.
The stairwells in my school all had windows in them, but they were intentionally situated to high for students to mess with. ‘Desperate times call for desperate measures,’ my Dad always said. I hopped up on the guard rail at the landing switchback and started pounding the glass with one hand while trying to hold on with the other. I punched for all I was worth and the glass shattered outward. I jumped back to Anna and bodily threw her up and out. With no time left I tried to follow, feeling hands grabbing the loose folds of my pants. Kicking, I fell forward halfway through the window. By the hand of Providence a piece of glass snagged my jeans so they tore, allowing me to slip and kick free of the dead hands reaching for me.
I remember making sure that I’d sent Anna through feet first, so she could land safely. I fell headlong onto the turf. With my hands outstretched I was able to minimize the damage but, hey, you try falling ten feet on your head, see how you like it.
When I woke up I saw Anna over me. Still fuzzy and in no pain I thought I was about to have a real
nice dream. Then I saw Hector kneeling by my other side, and it all came rushing back. Hector wondered how I was doing. Anna just kept telling me to get up. I ignored him, but her advice was sound as a dollar. Especially since I could see four or eight of those horrors shambling after us. By the time I was up and moving my double vision had cleared, and the crowd shrunk to a more reasonable number.
In fact, the entire membership of the group pursuing us was constituted of the very same horrors that had been grappling with Hector. I learned later that they had fallen out with him, and he had landed on one of them. The other four all broke various leg bones upon landing, while the one he landed on had cracked its skull badly on the pavement. That one hadn’t gotten back up, but the rest had stumbled to their feet and were staggering after us. To keep away from them I didn’t need to run so much as stumble with purpose.
I was afraid that whatever had happened during first period had happened all over town, so my new plan was to get home fast and check out my family. We led the shambling horrors along the wall of the school, staying low so that none of those things would see us from the ground floor. That’s how we kept on until we got to the bike racks. Then we took off. Hector headed off toward his own house and I went with Anna to her folks. Her house was closer and I’d hoped to borrow a car.
I remember noticing that there weren’t very many crazed people on the street. That was how I thought of them at the time: crazy people. When I looked back at the school I saw that there were still plenty of gnashing horrors at the second story windows but none were pushing through. I got the sense they didn’t like jumping. Then I heard breaking glass and saw the first floor windows break, and out poured the horde. Just like that it was time to pick up the pace.
We biked past the Olstead place where they had a big tree house in the front yard. There, we saw a couple of those grasping monstrosities (I was quickly coming to think of them as less than human) trying to reach up to the lower branches. Both had face, chest, and hands covered in blood. Neither could figure out how to use the ladder. Little Louis, a neighborhood kid, was hanging out the window of the tree house swinging a bat at his would be pursuers, hitting nothing. Then I realized that the blood covered horrors were his parents. I also remembered he had a little sister.
I couldn’t just ride past. I told Anna to get home, and that I’d get Louis. “I’ll catch up once I have him,” I told her.
She looked at me like I’d grown a third eye or had an ear piercing. She just said, “What’s the plan?”
We kept it simple. She rode past ringing her bike’s bell and they (stupidly) followed her off. I rode up and said to Louis, “Come with me if you want to live.” It just goes to show that not everything Hollywood has ever produced is crap. Or, if it is, at least some of it is useful crap. Anyhow, he was down that ladder faster than gravity. I put him on the handle bars and asked him if the monsters had killed his sister. All he said was, “They ate her.”
What do you say to that? I tried, “I’m so sorry” but I don’t think he heard me. Then we headed for Anna’s home.
Because Anna had not wanted to lead a couple of cannibals directly to her doorstep, she had taken a round about way home. That allowed us to meet just as I rode up. I knew what she was thinking: maybe her parents were changed. Maybe they were worse than dead. Maybe they had eaten somebody. Before she could do anything stupid I beat her to it.
Ditching the bike (and Louis), I ran to the door and threw it open. Instantly, I was greeted by the energetic barking of Peewee the Pekingese. Inside, I was pleasantly surprised to see Mr. and Mrs. Herst loading a scoped hunting rifle and a pump shotgun. They were standing in front of the TV listening to breaking news of violent cannibalistic riots happening all over the country, all over the world. I was less pleasantly surprised when he rounded that shotgun on me. I did a passable imitation of a statue for about eight thousand years before Mr. Herst said, “John? Where’s Anna?!” while lowering the barrel of the gun.
Anna chose that moment to push past me, run inside, and throw her arms around her parents. Louis followed, sniffling. He seemed content to go over and pet Peewee. At first I thought he was holding back tears, but on second glance I realized he was sick with some kind of cold. It occurred to me that was probably why he wasn’t at school when all this started. Then I remembered Eva, Anna’s little sister. We had a one room Elementary school in town. She was in second grade.
Mrs. Herst all but begged Anna, “The school won’t answer. Do you know where your sister is?”
I had a real bad feeling about this. I piped up, “Go to the Elementary School, save anyone you can. I’ll take Louis home, check on my parents, and call you.”
While they were bugging out I went over to the wall phone and called home. There was no answer.
I got Louis back on the handlebars and started peddling home. It was about a twenty minute ride, barring incident. As it turned out, the world ending as I knew it counted as an ‘incident’.
Chapter 2: Homeward Bound, Ford, and the Farmhouse of Death
The crowd of horrors in the street had grown considerably in just a short time. Weaving through their grasping arms while balancing a ten year old on the handlebars was growing increasingly difficult. There were gunshots sounding out all over town. I needed a new strategy quick or we weren’t going to make it.
I tried heading down what passes for ‘back streets’ in an unincorporated village, and that helped to a certain extent. It seemed that the shambling horde preferred level macadam over bumpy dirt. The ones I encountered seemed even more off balance than before, when caught on an uneven surface. Of course, my balance was none too good either. I wished I had a mountain bike instead of that street model hand-me-down. The glass cut on my leg was still bleeding, the temperature was dropping, and one leg of my pants was flapping in the breeze.
No matter how many dirt paths and back ways I might cut through we still needed to get past the North Bridge. Actually, it’s located on the west side of the hamlet, so I don’t know why it’s called that. Both banks are woody and steep where they’re not thicket covered swamp. The stream wasn’t much to speak of, only about ten yards across and not too bad for fording. We all called it a river. Can’t ride a bike through it, though. At least I couldn’t. I tried once when I was a kid.
I tried taking a parallel path to the river until I came to the bridge. My intention was to cross quickly, but I was stymied by the only traffic jam I’d ever seen. It seemed everyone from the nearest metropolis of Lawarenceville (a raging community of over 4000 souls) had driven over forty miles for the express purpose of choking the one bridge I needed.
See, the thing about North Bridge is that it’s not so much a bridge as it is termites holding hands. Good enough for your average convoy of hunters in pickup trucks out to try their luck. Not good enough for a school bus. Not even close to good enough for a couple of overweight eighteen wheelers jammed together side by side.
One must have been trying to pass when they both got stuck. Or maybe they just thought it was a two way bridge. The crash looked like it had taken out part of the floor of the bridge, on the right side, leaving a sizable hole. There were four cars all crashed into the backs of the semis. Behind the crashed cars there were another fifty or so cars all jammed real close together.
The only bright side I could see, as I peeked my head around an old oak about two hundred yards away, was that they were all headed in the direction I wanted to go and none had made it. Who wants idiots like that in the neighborhood?
Because of my backwoods approach I’d not seen the accident or traffic build up. It had taken me over an hour to get that far, and the only way home was forward. I lived on a dead end street. Our road wasn’t even technically a road from the state’s point of view. It only served about eleven farms (depending on what you want to call a farm). There was no other way.
Another thing I noticed was that all the ‘people’ I saw stumbling about the traffic jam weren’t people. They were zombi
es. Back then I’d never heard the word used, but since that’s what we call them now I might as well use it.
There seemed to be about eighty of them. Since they were happy enough to stay there, I was happy enough to leave them. It made me wonder if they all changed at the same time that everyone went crazy at school. And if so, if they didn’t know it was coming, then why did they come to my bridge before it all happened?
Back then we didn’t have any idea about which places suffered The Change first, last, in between, or not at all. Or how some places had higher percentages of Change. Sometimes seemingly random, sometimes based around family units, sometimes based on other things. Or why so many just died from it straight away without actually Changing. Or why some of the Changed became zombies and others turned into ghouls and others into ogres. Or why some people seemed fine until they died and then Changed. Or why sometimes a bite will kill or Change a man and sometimes not.
I guessed the convoy must have assembled after it understood a threat. Maybe they thought moving to a remote area would be safer. Then they crashed and everybody got out of their cars to do something about it. While they were trying to get reorganized the same thing that happened at the school must have happened at the bridge. That was my best guess at the time, but who knew?
I turned around and just about jumped out of my skin. There was Louis. He’d sneaked up on me so he could have a look at the road. I told him, “We can’t go that way. We’ll have to cross the river.”
“But I can’t swim,” he replied.
What kind of ten year old can’t swim? “Don’t worry. I’ll teach you. It’s fun.”
Back away from the road and down a steep slope, I had to leave my bike just above the soggy ground by the stream. We went some distance until I was sure that nothing from the bridge could see us moving through the water. In spite of my promise to teach Louis to swim I just put him on my shoulders and waded across. The water was as cold as a witch’s tit and still frozen along the banks. I almost slipped a couple of times, but the water, still as it was, never reached above my chin. We climbed out and headed up hill. We were both running out of steam by then so we rested when we reached the top. Louis fell asleep. I envied him.