In Hiding:
A Survivors Journal of the Great Outbreak
By Micheal Elliott
Copyright©2014 by Michael Elliott
All Rights Reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Table of Contents:
The First Entry
Day One
Day Two
Day Three
Day Four
Day Five
Day Six
Day Seven
Day Eight
Day Nine
Day Ten
Day Eleven
Day Twelve
Day Thirteen
Day Fourteen
The Last Entry
THE FIRST ENTRY
I am not exactly sure where to start. I mean, I really don’t know how to put everything I’ve seen into words to help you understand just how bad it was. I guess it makes sense to start at the very beginning of all this, but even that I have a hard time wrapping my head around. You see I don’t think anybody actually knew where the outbreak started. It wasn’t like there was a patient zero or country of origin that we knew about. It was like it just magically appeared out of thin air and before we knew it, or should I say accepted what was happening, it seemed like it was everywhere.
All the things I took for granted, relied on, or just accepted as being there and holding the world together, vanished far quicker then I ever could have imagined. As of now, there are no more laws, there are no more rules, and last I heard the governments of the world are barely holding on.
People, well at least a good percentage of them, have started to turn on one another in what I would call a desperate attempt at survival. Even more unbelievable, the thing responsible for breaking our spirits and that had us questioning our sanity is what this plague has turned the people we once loved into. What has happened here is unimaginable and I still have a hard time understanding how it’s even possible. My name is Jake Frattin and I have survived the Great Outbreak so far.
What I am writing here is an account of everything that has happened to me during those first days of the so-called Great Outbreak. It is a record of everything that I have seen and everything that I have been through. I am writing it all as I remember it and believe me when I say that I remember it all in great detail. What I have been through isn’t something that I will ever forget. Trust me when I tell you that the things that I have seen will stick with me for the rest of my life.
How I got here? Luck I guess. I mean the day I found my way here feels like an eternity ago. But I really should start with what happened at the very beginning of this mess. Before anyone had even deemed this an official outbreak. Before the around the clock news coverage began and the police and military were out in the streets. I should start when the first signs of this started to surface and as crazy as it all seems, how they would lead to the darkest period in human history to date.
The Great Outbreak, or so they called it. That was the name every major news outlet settled on I guess. It was only days before I arrived here that they made the decision that this crisis warranted a title. But in truth, the warning signs had started to appear long before that. I would say that it was probably about seven or eight months ago when the first reports started to emerge from different parts of the world. Of course at that time we didn’t realize what we were watching or what it would lead too. After all the first reports didn’t seem to be anything out of the ordinary and like so many others, I simply chose to ignore them.
The decision to ignore those warning signs as long as I did is probably the single most reason I am where I am today. That same decision made by authorities and countless leaders during the early stages of this is most likely why the world is in the state it is today. I still have a hard time understanding why or how it spread so fast. But to be fair, I don’t exactly have all the facts.
But I should really get back to the beginning and the first reports that I was aware of. The first related story that I can remember came out of Japan. A businessman was arrested after assaulting a young couple one evening. He followed that up by severely injuring three police officers when they tried to restrain him. Some of the witnesses described the man as wild and deranged. I naturally assumed the man was just high on something.
The next report that caught my attention was a series of bizarre murders in a remote area of India. I mean some of what I was reading about those just didn’t make sense. So I didn’t give either of them much thought at the time, but it’s funny how I remember them now.
They were just like the news stories I heard almost every day and they came with what I thought were reasonable explanations at the time. Whether it was drugs or a case of misidentification there was no reason to think they were something bigger then what they appeared. Even if there was an interview with an eyewitness, they always had a hard time describing exactly what they had seen. That was probably because what they had seen made little sense to them. Just as it made little sense to me the first time I witnessed the effects of the virus.
As it turns out, those stories should have been the early warning signs of what was to come. But it wasn’t just that those reports were easily lost in a world of twenty-four hour news coverage and instant Internet updates. We chose to ignore those stories because what they were suggesting was just so unbelievable.
They sounded like people being attacked by zombies. Now almost everyone has seen the movies or at least has a basic understanding of what a zombie is. Almost everyone also knew that zombies weren’t real. So when stories on the web started to surface describing what sounded like zombies attacking everyday citizens, almost everyone immediately dismissed them. I know I did. Besides, at that time there was no real evidence that those reports were connected in any way and it was just hard to believe that any part of them was true.
It was a few weeks after those initial news reports that a few individuals on the Internet started piecing it all together. They started to connect the dots long before any of the governments or mainstream media would. Initially their reporting and ideas were ridiculed and deemed a work of fiction by people with too much free time on their hands. But those of us who looked at it closely could at least see that there was a pattern emerging. Something big was going on. The problem was that nobody knew exactly what it was.
There were terrifying stories of people dying and rising again. I easily dismissed those. But then I read one unbelievable account about a pack of cannibals moving through rural villages in Western Pakistan. It would have been easy to dismiss that as well, but when I saw it on the national news one evening, it became a little harder to ignore.
Then it seemed like overnight it wasn’t just a story on the Internet anymore. Similar things started to show up on the news and in the papers. Don’t get me wrong. I still wasn’t buying the theories of zombies walking around killing everyone who they crossed paths with. So that was when I started to dig a little deeper for answers, hoping to find some reasonable explanation for some of the strange things I had been reading about. All the while my life just went on and I pretended it was nothing to worry about.
Honestly, around that time I had actually convinced
myself that it was a hoax of some kind. People had faked things like this before. Maybe not to that level, but that made more sense to me then the alternative. I mean to actually believe that any of this was real. How could I? How could I or anyone else for that matter believe that there were zombies out there? So a few more weeks passed and I just assumed that an answer would eventually come.
A couple of weeks later it did. Countries around the world started to acknowledge that there was some truth to those strange reports. They announced the discovery of a new virus, a viral strain the likes of which we had never seen before or at least that’s what they told us. For most of us here in America it seemed like we finally got the reasonable explanation we had been waiting for. It quickly turned into another overblown news story. It was SARS again, it was H1N1, and for most of us it was just another overreaction by the CDC and World Health Organization. I assumed they were preparing us for the worst like they always did. But the worst was something we usually never saw here at home. It seemed like sooner or later it would all just go away.
Then about a few weeks later, it happened. The first confirmed cases in America were reported. Even at that point it didn’t seem like anything to be overly concerned about. A few isolated incidents, it wasn’t like our medical facilities couldn’t handle it we told ourselves. It wasn’t really until the first video and images of what the virus did to people, what it turned them into, what it made them do, did people really start to worry.
I can still remember the first video that I saw. A friend of mine had emailed me a link to a video on an Internet site. It had been recorded on someone’s smart phone from somewhere in Ohio if I remember correctly. But that’s beside the point. The person with the phone started filming a situation in a restaurant after one of the infected pushed their way through the front door.
He looked like a normal guy at first, except for his clumsy and jerky movements. There was that and something that looked like a giant stain that covered the front of his dress shirt. His face was pale, but from what I could see he didn’t look like the monsters that I had been reading about. Anyway, as the man walked through the restaurant he stumbled all over the place. You could hear the people recording the video laughing at him as he knocked over chairs and bumped into tables. They thought he was drunk.
It was a woman that first ran over and offered to help him. She was a waitress and she went over to try and support the man before he knocked anything else over. But before she even finished asking if he was okay, the man bit down into her neck. Blood went everywhere as he pulled his face back, taking with it a huge chunk of the poor woman’s flesh. That was the point in the video when everyone started to run away. Then as the video went blurry, the only thing I could hear were people screaming and the sound of gunshots.
My first instinct told me that it couldn’t be real. I thought it was just a clever new marketing campaign for a new horror movie trying to capitalize on the latest threat to humanity. That was until the same video started to show up everywhere. In the weeks that followed it seemed like there were new videos and pictures coming out every day. More reported cases closer to home and more footage then I cared to see and it made me realize that it was almost impossible to deny it anymore. The outbreak was real and now it was here in the United States.
As the evidence started to pile up that the outbreak had arrived. I could see the changes in society all around me. People on the streets were wearing surgical masks and gloves, nobody shook hands anymore, and if someone coughed everyone around them took a few steps back as if they had the plague or something. I remember reading about how medical supplies and gun sales were shooting through the roof as panic started to set in. As much as people didn’t want to believe what was happening, most of them were scared enough to start taking precautions. At that point, I could have never guessed what was to come.
I found myself addicted to the news and like so many others I spent my evenings planted in front of the television with my laptop open waiting to see what would happen next. I think I was looking for some kind of guidance, some idea of how to protect myself from the virus. Those answers would never really come. The only thing I could find was opinions and theories and there was no shortage of those. Most of the experts seemed to have agreed that we were dealing with a virus, but they admitted they didn’t understand anything about it. But the less I knew the more I watched. The more I watched, the more I read and the more time I spent searching for answers. I remember just wanting someone who was qualified to walk up to a podium and tell me what it was and what I needed to do about it.
News shows were filled with those so-called experts debating all the various issues. Was it terrorism? Was it air born? What were the early warning signs of infection? Was the government doing enough to protect us? As the weeks passed the debates continued all the while the number of reported cases in America increased dramatically. There were several more cases being reported in Maine, North Carolina and Florida. Then the first cases were confirmed in Massachusetts, New York and here in Pennsylvania. The outbreak was spreading and it was spreading fast.
The United States responded by shutting down all international flights and then began to recall military units from abroad. That was when I knew something much bigger then another SARS or Swine Flu was happening here. Around the world other countries closed their borders in a vain attempt to try and control the spread of the outbreak but even that didn’t seem to stop it.
Soon after that sporting events and concerts were cancelled or postponed until further notice. Schools and Universities cancelled classes and closed their doors. That was about the same time when the National Guard and other Military units started showing up in most of the major cities. Officially they were there to set up medical camps outside of hospitals to help with the overflow of people. Well, those infected with the virus didn’t exactly walk into hospitals seeking treatment. Instead, all kinds of healthy people flooded emergency rooms and clinics insisting they were sick. Waiting rooms were packed with people afraid they had contracted the virus and demanding some kind of cure. Most of them were just scared, they weren’t sick, at least not yet.
But the National Guard was there for another reason as well. Secretly they were there to protect the people from the infected and prepare for the worst case scenario. They started responding to emergency calls to back up police and emergency personnel. They were also there to try and round up and quarantine any of the infected and do it as quietly as possible.
They tried to hide it, but they couldn’t keep it quiet for long. We saw the footage on the news. We saw all of it happening on live television. Once word got out of what they were doing and what they were trying to hide from the public, well things took a strange turn. There were actually groups of people who started to protest against the mistreatment of those who were infected with the virus. We had heard the stories coming out of other countries about the use of excessive force when it came to dealing with the infected. But here in America it actually drew outrage from various groups of people.
Looking back now it seems absolutely ridiculous. But it’s easy to forget that back then most people didn’t see the infected as monsters. They saw them simply as people who were sick. At that time it was difficult to hear stories of our own soldiers firing on American citizens, or hear stories of them being rounded up and brought to camps. They were still family members, friends, and neighbors at that point. So I watched people protest on the news while the world went to hell.
I was still going to work in those days. I am not sure why now that I think about it. Maybe I was trying to maintain some level of normalcy in my life. Maybe I just never truly believed things would get as bad as they did. I mean I would still go out for drinks with friends and do things like that. We all tried to go on like nothing was happening. Of course the outbreak was all we could talk about. It was the only thing anyone was talking about and that was probably because it was the only thing on the news anymore. In fact most television shows weren
’t even being broadcast at that point, making room for around the clock coverage of the outbreak. Funny thing is that despite all of the airtime, there were still very few actual facts.
I mean the only real warning I can remember hearing was to avoid anyone who was showing signs of being ill and to stay alert. Great advice. Yet, despite all the evidence of what was happening out there most people were still having a hard time understanding just how serious this whole thing had become. I heard that some people actually tried driving family members that had been infected to the hospital. Knowing what I know now, I can’t even imagine what that ride must have been like. No matter how many times people saw the videos or the pictures, I don’t think that anyone really understood the true severity of what we were dealing with at the time.
But that would all change with the Columbia incident. Columbia, South Carolina was where the entire country finally had a chance to see and understand what we were up against. A local newscaster was reporting from in front of one those medical camps that had been set up by the National Guard. She was in the middle of her report when all hell broke loose behind her. Doctors, nurses, soldiers all began running out of the main tent. The cameraman had the perfect angle to catch everything as it unfolded behind the reporter. What followed them out of the tent was a few dozen of the infected. They all reminded me of that guy from the video in Ohio. As slow as they moved and as clumsy as they looked, they still managed to grab a hold of some of the medical staff. They caught a few of them and dragged some of those poor people to the ground. Then it looked like they were biting them. It looked like they were trying to eat them.
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