In Hiding: A Survivors Journal of the Great Outbreak

by Michael Elliott

  What we couldn’t see until we reached the side ledge was that were still several Zeds on that side of the building. Anne fired and missed and that was when I heard a second shot just as I saw one of the Zeds eyes explode. That was when I noticed Paul had moved along side of the building to help support Anne. The two of them were firing as fast as they could reload but very few shots were actually finding their target.

  To my surprise the woman stopped for a brief moment and then she just picked up the child and started to run. She was moving fast and she ran right past three zombies before they even saw her and not one of them got a hand on her. I was running along the ledge of the roof, right along side of her, watching and hoping she would make it. Another shot and another Zed was down. The weight of the boy had started to slow her pace from what I could see and another Zed still stood between her and the back of the building. Another shot, it missed. Then Anne fired and the Zed dropped, like a puppet that had just had the strings cut.

  She finally turned the corner with the boy still slung over her shoulder. She made a break right for the box truck that was still parked where it had been days before. The back end of the truck was facing us and it was parked on a slight angle. She put the boy down on the ground and covered his mouth again as they started to moved slowly down the passenger side of the truck to get a view of the back doors.

  Paul fired a bullet straight down at one of the Zeds that had been blocking the receiving doors. I saw the top of its skull explode as I looked down. There were still several of them in front of the doors and Paul and Anne started firing randomly into the crowd trying to make a path for the poor woman and child. That was about the time when we realized that we had never come up with a signal to let the others know when to open the doors. If they opened them too soon or too late it could lead to disaster.

  Shannon took off down the ladder trying to tell them to hold off until they were given a sign. That sign was when Ray would run down the stairs shouting to open the doors. He left down the ladder and waited for our signal to start running to the back doors. I stood there and watched, waiting for the woman to make her move.

  I could see that a few of the Zeds that had been following her were starting to come around the corner. She couldn’t wait too much longer and Paul and Anne were struggling to clear the Zeds from just outside the door. We were running out of time. I looked down to see two more Zeds collapse to the ground as Anne and Paul continued to fire. Then I looked back to see the woman and the look on her face told me exactly what she was going to do. I still remember that look. She was going to go for it.

  She grabbed the boy’s hand and took a step away from the side of the truck and prepared to run right for the doors. Just as I got ready to yell to Ray to tell them to open the doors I saw the boy fall flat on his stomach. He started to scream and cry and I thought that he had simply tripped. That was until I saw the arm reaching out from underneath the truck that had a hold of his leg.

  The boy kept trying to crawl away but he was dragging what looked like a rotting torso behind him. That was when I noticed that the torso was what was left of that poor truck driver and he had a firm grip on the boy’s ankle. The woman grabbed the boy’s arm and tried to pull him to safety but the thing just wouldn’t let go. The screaming was attracting plenty of attention and some of the zombies that had been near the doors had found something far more interesting then what was inside the building.

  They were all closing in and that was when I noticed that Anne and Paul had stopped firing. They were both starring down the riflescope trying to get a clear shot at the Zed that had a hold of the boy. The woman finally let go of the boy’s arms and then ran to where the driver was and started to stomp on his arm. I couldn’t look away. I didn’t even look as Paul starting shooting again or even glance over at what he was shooting at.

  While Paul was shooting he starting yelling something at Anne, but she was busy complaining about how she couldn’t get a clear shot. After the woman stomped on the Zeds arm several times he finally let go and the woman reached down and picked the boy back up onto his feet. She grabbed him by the arm and then she started to back away from the Zed that was still crawling after them. Then I heard the scream.

  That was what Paul had been shouting about. It was what he was shooting at. Two sets of arms wrapped around the woman’s body almost simultaneously. I watched in horror as one Zed bit down into her shoulder and the other drove his teeth into her arm. Blood poured out of the wounds all the while the boy just stood there watching.

  Anne fired a shot at one of the Zeds but it struck it in the shoulder and had little effect. More and more of them started to pile onto the woman as she slowly dropped to the ground. She quickly vanished out of sight underneath a growing pile of zombies that reminded me of vultures on a carcass. But the worst part of the whole thing was that she continued to scream for much longer then I hoped she would.

  Paul and Anne both fired shots into the pile but that was pointless. Then just as we all realized that we had been too caught up in watching what was happening to that poor woman we saw a Zed dressed in a beat up suit grab a hold of the boy. I was so terrified that I couldn’t even yell out even though I desperately wanted too. I just froze and watched in shock as that zombie drove his teeth deep into the young boy’s neck. So much blood poured out so quickly that the boy didn’t even have time to cry out. That was when I heard the last shot fired.

  That shot had found its target. The head of the young boy snapped back as the bullet passed through his brain. He fell to the ground and then vanished underneath a pile of Zeds just as that woman had. She had stopped screaming. I was still just watching.

  Paul had fired that shot. The look on his face told me that. I understood why he had done what he had and trust me everyone else understood as well. He spared that boy from being eaten alive. He spared him from coming back as one of them. But the reasons don’t make it any easier to see or to live with.

  Paul dropped his rifle on the ground and shook his head in disbelief. It was Anne who walked over and gave him a hug. He took it really hard, but I think he knew deep down it was the right thing to do. It must have been extremely difficult to pull that trigger. I can’t imagine what was running through his mind when he finally decided that it was what needed to be done.

  I watched in silence as more and more Zeds tried to push there way through the pile to get at the bodies that were buried beneath. That was when I saw the receiving doors open and Cody and Trevor emerge shocked to see what was going on. Sandy yelled down to them to get back inside and lock the doors. They never said a word as they retreated back into the store.

  The rest of that night was incredibly quiet. Kerri and I explained to those who had been downstairs what had happened. I could see that Ray was getting choked up as we described what had happened to that little boy. It was just as hard to talk about it, as it was to witness. Anne led a few of the others in prayer, and well Paul had vanished somewhere probably to be alone. I couldn’t blame him because I wanted to be alone as well.

  I spent the rest of that night on the roof with a bottle of whiskey and my thoughts. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to sleep anyway, but I figured if I could drink enough there was at least a chance I might pass out. It wasn’t the best idea but sleep was sleep. It wasn’t just what I had seen that afternoon. It was the fact that I had just seen first hand how hard it was to survive out there. We hadn’t seen another person for days and then finally when we did see other survivors they were ripped apart right before our eyes. My hope was dwindling and I had started to realize that my family was most likely dead at that point.

  I was hoping that the booze would dull my thoughts and maybe wipe away the memories of everything I had seen that day. Deep down I knew it wouldn’t work. It would never work. Another night of terrible memories was inevitable. Another day of this nightmare was all but guaranteed.

  DAY FIVE

  The morning of the fifth day was much like the mornings that
had preceded it. I was hung over and spent most of the morning in a fog trying to decipher what had been a bad dream and what was simply an awful memory. I would have loved to spend the entire day in bed, my old bed, not the pile of blankets and pillows I had on the break room floor. But I knew trying to sleep was futile. Paul and Anne were busy trying to get everyone back to work and re-focused on moving supplies to the roof. However, it didn’t go very well. That was because pretty much everybody was exhausted and feeling sluggish. I have to admit that doing any form of manual labor that morning wasn’t anywhere close to being at the top of my list of things to do.

  But after a long night too think about what had happened and what little part I played in in it, I did decide that there was something that I needed too do. I wanted Anne to teach me how to shoot.

  I don’t have children. I never really wanted them to be honest. But what had happened to that child had really stuck with me. Not being able to help in any tangible way had left me feeling worthless and I never wanted to feel that way again.

  I would never know if that was his mother or just someone who had found him in the streets and decided to look after him. But it had me thinking about my family, about my mother and how scared she must be for her children. Not knowing where they were or if they were still alive. I guess that was if she was still alive. I don’t know if not knowing was any better or any worse. I still had hope they were alive and safe somewhere. But the odds were that they were all dead and well, I don’t like to think about it.

  It was almost impossible and still is too some degree to comprehend that your entire world was gone. To believe that everyone you ever knew was dead or a monster was enough to make you give up and quit fighting to survive. On the other hand it was just as dangerous to hold out hope that they were all alive somewhere out there. I felt that line of thinking was only setting myself up for unbearable disappointment. But worst of all, the thing that hurt the most was the guilt.

  Like so many others I had a hard time understanding why I was so lucky, why I had made it when so many others hadn’t. Guilt was the worst of it all. It wore me down and made it near impossible to focus on anything else. The only thing I could do, well at least what I tried to do, was bury it deep down inside and try to move past it. Luckily for me that was something I was good at.

  However, a few of the others didn’t share my gift for burying their emotions. They were upset, angry, and depressed and worst of all they wanted to talk about it. That was the last thing I needed that day, or any of the days for that matter. I didn’t understand how sitting around discussing just how bad everything had become or how doomed we all were, was productive in anyway.

  So I tried to keep my opinions to myself and just sat back and shut up. I listened to everyone share his or her ideas as to what had gone wrong and who was at fault. I still think that trying to blame a disaster of this magnitude on one thing is irresponsible. There had to have been multiple failures for things to get as bad as they were. It wasn’t like one thing happened and all of a sudden the world was like it is today. I am sure that there was plenty of blame to go around and that most of the failings probably happened long before we ended up here.

  I mean when you look at what was happening early on when nobody was sure exactly what we were dealing with and people were unsure of what to do. If the world would have just taken the situation more a little more serious in the early weeks and months maybe this all could have been prevented. I mean you would think someone, somewhere along the line would have been able to understand how this spread and how to stop it. I know ignorance and denial helped it spread and I know that trying to treat the infected instead of eliminating them played a large part, but I still couldn’t understand how we let this happen.

  The one thing, I mean the one thing that really bothered me. The biggest thing that I never fully understood was how it spread so fast considering the infected ate their victims. I mean the cannibalistic nature of the virus alone should have slowed the spread. I always wondered why most victims didn’t simply become meals instead of reanimating and adding to the infected ranks. Maybe at a certain point the infection spread through the body and the flesh became too contaminated for even the Zeds to eat. I noticed that they never ate their own. I still don’t have answers. It’s all just an opinion and I can’t really prove any of it. But opinions and ideas are all I really have left anymore.

  But the more everyone talked about the virus the more I realized how little we really knew. How it started was the greatest mystery of all and from everything we had seen and heard on the news there appeared to be no evidence of how this whole thing began. But because there were no real answers we were left to fill in the void of information with our imaginations. Each person had their own idea of where it had come from and some of those ideas were more reasonable then others. Strange bacteria from a meteorite, terrorism, government experiments gone terribly wrong. I doubted that any of those theories were right. I mean Trevor actually believed that some extremist group had released some chemical into the world’s water supply. I didn’t know how to tell him what was wrong with that so I just let it go.

  A select few in my group actually believed that it was God punishing the world for all of its sins. I didn’t touch that one with a ten-foot pole because there was no need to get into that debate. Cody spent way too much time trying to convince me that it was a new weapon created by the Air Force that had been released by mistake. I still don’t know what caused it and I’ll probably never know, but the only thing I did know was that something had made the impossible become possible and I only hoped that smarter people then me were working on fixing it.

  Out of all our pointless discussions the only good that came of it was a decision to keep someone on the roof at all times. Kind of like a watch, where we would all take shifts staying on the roof and keeping an eye on our immediate surroundings. We needed to keep a look out for other survivors who might come around or even in the slight chance that a rescue helicopter or something flew overhead.

  Other then that we wasted most of the time arguing over how we could get others into the store if it ever came down to it. We debated if it was even worth letting others in if they managed to stumble upon the store. Trevor was against it and he made a few valid points. It was very dangerous opening any of the doors to get someone inside. We had been lucky so far and Trevor thought that opening the doors for anyone was extremely risky. I didn’t join in that debate either. I didn’t think it was worth fighting over something that didn’t seem very likely to happen anyway.

  When all of the conversations wrapped up, the time came when Anne finally agreed to teach me how to shoot. However, I wasn’t the only one who was looking for a lesson. Cody and Kerri had also expressed an interest in learning how to shoot as well. I guess they must have felt as useless as I had during that ordeal. So while Paul and Adam assembled a barbeque at one end of the roof, the four of us started our training at the other.

  We were careful not to waste too many bullets on practice because we had used a good chunk of our supply the day before. I thought we still had plenty, but Anne told me we would need every last bullet if we ever had to fight our way out of here. I believed her.

  Anne made the decision to use real targets for our training. The Zeds. It was a far cry from the woman who thought they were just sick and could be saved once a cure was found. What a difference a few days had made. But she had shifted her line of thinking, and I truly beleive it had a lot to do with seeing what they did to that child. They were monsters now and they had lost their right to exist in her world.

  She walked us through everything, from how to hold the rifle to how to load it. She showed us all the little details that people like me didn’t know about. I have too say, I was pretty impressed at how well Anne handled various weapons. I had no idea that she had hunted with her father and brothers and that she knew how to use almost any type of gun or knife, and how to use them well. I just hoped that I could learn a thing or tw
o from her.

  We took turns while Anne gave us instructions the entire time. After each shot there was a long teaching period before we took our next turn. By the end Cody and Kerri had improved and I was still for lack of a better word, terrible. I was able to hit the four Zeds that I had targeted, but I was never able to hit them exactly where I was trying too. But at the very least I had grown more comfortable handling the rifle.

  When the lesson was finished, I remember walking along the ledge of the roof, looking around for nothing in particular. What was around us was so amazing and so unbelievable that sometimes I couldn’t help but just look out in disbelief. But as we walked around the back ledge of the building Anne saw something on the ground below. It would just be another terrible image that would forever be burned into my memory and haunt my nightmares.

  Anne pointed down at the pavement and showed us something that I can only describe as disturbing. I saw what she was looking at almost immediately but I still wasn’t sure exactly what it was at first. Then it hit me, and it felt like something had kicked me right in the stomach. What we were looking at was the woman from the day before, well at least what was left of her. Most of her midsection was missing. Both of her legs were nothing but bone and a small amount of tissue and muscle that seemed to be holding them together. Her head and most of her arms seemed to be in tact and worst of all her head appeared to still be moving.