I nodded. “How many people worked here?”
“A hundred?” she answered with an uplift of her voice to turn it into a kind of question, and then shrugged her shoulders. “Something like that.”
We walked slowly towards the open doors of the factory building. Overhead the sky was sullen with dark clouds the color of old bruises. They hung low against the ground, heavy with pending rain, pushing a skirt of cold air ahead of them so that I shivered.
The factory had the eerie menacing feel of a haunted house. Cobwebs hung like a veil from the open doorway and the rafter beams within. Overhead lights swung gently, pushed about by the gusting breeze. The sound of the wind through the empty shed was like a low lamenting moan.
I scuffed my feet on the oil-spotted concrete floor and kicked up a layer of grey dust. The ground was spattered with dried splashes of blood. I took a deep breath and the taste of something rotting filled the back of my throat.
“Okay,” I said. “Tell me what happened here.”
Laura turned in a slow circle, her eyes roaming around the remains of the abandoned factory. Either she was re-familiarizing herself with her surroundings or she was doing exactly what I was surreptitiously doing; checking the darkened corners for undead…
“I was on a break, hiding in my special spot so no one would bug me,” she confided.
“What were you doing?”
“Watching TV on my tablet.”
“You were watching the news?”
“No,” Laura said. “My favorite show… when suddenly I heard people around the factory starting to scream. They weren’t happy screams like when you’re cheering your team, they were screams of fear and panic and then of pain.”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing for the first minute,” Laura confessed, and wrung her hands. “I… I thought it was a joke at first, you see. I had been a fan of everything zombie for years. I thought my co-workers were messing with me because I was forever talking about a zombie movie I just saw, or a zombie book I was reading.”
“That minute you hesitated, Laura… it could have cost you your life too.”
“Yes,” she said heavily. “I still think about that, Mr. Culver. I wonder how things would have been different if I had taken those first screams seriously. Would I have been attacked and infected? Could I have gotten away sooner and maybe saved some people..?” Her face began to crumble, and her eyes welled with unshed tears. I saw her shoulders shake. Then she took a deep breath and trapped her bottom lip between her teeth as though she were physically restraining herself from crying.
I looked away and for a long moment I found the dust on my boots absolutely fascinating. When I sensed Laura had composed herself, I glanced up.
“Tell me what happened,” I said softly. “From the moment you went to investigate the sounds of screaming.”
“The first thing I heard were voices – people calling my name like they were frantically looking for me. That was when I started to feel the first premonition of danger. It was after the initial screams. I started to think that maybe a disgruntled employee was shooting up the place, in which case I was best staying put where I couldn’t be seen. But there were no gun shots. Just screams and then more screams. I heard another one of the guys I work with calling my name. He was frantic. I could tell he wasn’t acting. That was when I first understood that this wasn’t a prank, and it couldn’t be a shooting. It had to be something else… serious.”
“So you went to investigate?”
Laura nodded. “Everything went from frantic screaming to chilling silence, all within the matter of sixty seconds. I had heard people running. Now I couldn’t hear anything. I looked around a corner and the first thing I saw was one of the men I work with. He was leaning over another guy, helping him. I called out.”
“And…?”
“I said, ‘Hey, Tom. Is Steve okay?’”
“What happened?”
“Tom looked up and turned his head towards me. Tom was eating Steve.”
“What?”
Laura shook her head and then her whole body shivered as if she were in the grips of a fever. Her eyes became haunted, and turned dark. “Tom’s mouth and chin were dripping blood. He was gnawing on the side of Steve’s face. I could see the white of Steve’s jawbone. The flesh of his cheek had been torn off and was hanging in a flap of loose flesh. I could even see some of his teeth.”
“And this Tom guy?”
“His eyes were wild,” Laura gasped and shuddered again. She hugged her shoulders with her hands, and it wasn’t from the cold. I could see the hectic leap of her pulse in the line of her jaw and then the corner of her eye twitched in a nervous spasm. “He had hold of Steve by the throat. There was blood all over his hands and his face. He was snarling, grunting. He looked up at me but his eyes… they weren’t human! There was nothing there except madness. He threw back his head and howled.”
“And you knew these two men?”
“Yes,” Laura’s voice had dropped to a harsh traumatized whisper. “They were friends of mine…”
Laura looked like she was ten seconds away from falling apart. I took my notebook from my pocket and hastily wrote down everything she had told me. Then I went for a slow walk around the perimeter of the old factory, going carefully, checking the shadows out of superstitious dread. It was that kind of place – logic told me the undead affected by the ‘Affliction’ were a thing of the past, but that corner of my brain given over to fear was pounding a warning beat in my head. I heard rats scurrying into the deeper darkness and retreated. Laura stood rooted to the spot. Her eyes were vacant.
“What happened then?”
Laura frowned, like perhaps her recollection was hazy. There was a long silence. I waited.
“The workplace was filled with tools – things that could be used as weapons. There was a box of screwdrivers a couple of feet away on a workbench. I picked up the longest one I could find and held it like a knife.”
“You attacked Tom?”
Laura glared at me like I was insane. “No!” she shook her head. “I started backing slowly away towards the factory doors. Tom… or the thing that had once been Tom… left Steve’s body and came towards me.”
“What condition was this Steve guy in at that moment?”
“I don’t know,” Laura shook her head. “There was blood everywhere. He… he might have still been alive. I’m not sure. He was just lying there, very still on the factory floor. He wasn’t moving.”
“Okay,” I made a point of keeping my voice soft and monotone. “So what did the other man do?”
“He came towards me,” Laura’s face turned pale as marble, the blood draining away from her features. “He was still snarling. He gnashed his teeth together. There was a sliver of raw flesh in his mouth. He was chewing on it as he came closer.”
“But you escaped.”
There was another fraught, tense silence.
“I killed him, I think,” Laura whispered at last. She turned her head away and the words came in gasped little bursts. “He rushed at me. I had the screwdriver. I was screaming at him, but he kept coming. I stabbed at him. I got him in the arm. I felt him wrench away, but then he came back like nothing had happened. I screamed again and then stabbed the screwdriver into his face…”
“And you killed him?”
Laura turned back to me, cuffing brusquely at tears that were running down her pale cheeks. Her lips were trembling. Her voice sounded strained, as if each word caused real pain. “I think so,” she muttered. “He went over backwards and the screwdriver was torn from me. The handle was sticking out of one of his eyes…”
A TV journalist would use this moment to ask something bland and redundant, like ‘how did you feel?’
I said nothing.
Laura walked away, and for a moment I thought she was heading for the open factory door – fleeing the scene of her horror. But then she stopped, staring out at the gloomy light so her body was a dark sil
houette in the doorway.
“I thought it was some kind of reaction to the chemicals we were using at the factory,” Laura’s laugh was hollow – the sound of an echo. “Isn’t that crazy! I knew the ‘Affliction’ had been spreading across the country, and yet my first thought – my instantaneous reaction – was to assume this was something isolated, caused by the fumes from the injection-molding factory.”
“You think you were in denial?” I asked.
Laura shrugged her shoulders again and slowly turned back to face me. “Maybe,” she did not sound convinced.
We left the factory and went out once more into the bleak brooding afternoon. The sky looked on the verge of breaking apart into a torrential downpour. The air was moist but fresh, and I felt a lift of relief at being outside once more. We walked slowly towards my car.
“So tell me about your daughter, Emily.”
“What do you want to know?”
I made a curious face. “Why didn’t she come with us?”
Laura shook her head with worry. “Because she won’t leave the apartment,” she explained. “She hasn’t set foot outside the front door since the afternoon the ‘Affliction’ swept through town. That’s why we’re still here, Mr. Culver.”
I frowned. “You’re resentful?”
“No,” Laura said. “Not at all. She’s fifteen. What happened traumatized her terribly. No,” she said again, this time more firmly. “I’m not resentful. Emily just needs more time.”
I said nothing for a moment. We had reached the car. I looked back one last time at the dilapidated façade of the factory. “How do you feel?”
It was a blanket question – the exact question I had denigrated earlier for being bland and redundant. Laura could have taken it in any context she wished.
“Like the last person in the world,” she said.
It sounded prophetic – doom laden. It was perhaps the saddest thing I had heard anyone say since I had begun these interviews. I started back along the road into town. The world was unnervingly silent. Nothing moved. There was no sound. We were utterly alone – the last people alive for miles and miles… and miles.
“When Emily is better…” I began, “Do you think you will still stay in Eagle? Or will you strike out, looking for other survivors?”
Laura did not hesitate. “We’ll head north,” she said with a determined thrust and lift of her chin. “Maybe we’ll go as far as Canada. I don’t know. But we won’t stay here,” she gestured at the bleak skyline with her arms. “There’s nothing left. It’s a ghost town.”
It was a five-minute drive from the factory, back to Laura’s apartment complex. I parked behind the burned out shell of a hatchback. Litter drifted on the chill breeze and a rat scurried past along the edge of the sidewalk. The silence was oppressive and unnatural.
“What did you do when you escaped from the factory, Laura?”
“I went to the local Walmart,” she said.
“For protection?” I sounded incredulous because I was.
“No. For supplies,” she explained. “I knew by then what was happening. The entire town seemed to be on fire. The madness of the ‘Affliction’ spread so quickly. That’s what shocked me more than anything. I couldn’t grasp how fast it spread. Even driving with the accelerator flat to the boards, I couldn’t outrun it. When I parked in front of the Walmart, there were already a dozen houses on fire and people running for their lives in all directions. There was screaming, shots, shouting… the whole world went to hell in less than an hour.”
“Where was Emily?”
“At home,” Laura visibly seemed relieved. “She had come home from school early that day. I called her from the car and told her what was happening.”
“And she was waiting for you when you arrived back here?”
“Yes. We unloaded the car with everything I had looted from the store. Luckily our apartment is on the first floor.”
“Do you still have a car?”
Laura nodded. “It’s in the parking lot.”
I stepped back into the middle of the road and stared back at Laura’s apartment complex. It looked like it had once been an old school, converted into housing units sometime in the past. There were three levels of windows. On the upper floors much of the glass had been broken. I could see the tail of an old net curtain gently flapping in the breeze.
We entered the building. It was dim and gloomy, made worse by the lowering afternoon sky. There were upended shopping trolleys cluttered in the foyer amidst a jumble of overturned furniture: desks, tables, chairs and even a bookcase. I looked a question at Laura and she gave me a lopsided, almost apologetic, smile.
“Emily,” she shrugged her shoulders. “We barricade the entrance every night with whatever we can find… just in case.”
“In case of the ‘Afflicted’? Laura, the contagion burned out almost two years ago. There are no infected left.”
She nodded. “I know that, Mr. Culver. And you know that. But my fifteen year old daughter wants to feel safe,” a sharp edge crept into her tone. “Do you have a problem with that?”
I shook my head. Fear had burned through the tiny village of Eagle when the ‘Affliction’ had infected its inhabitants and turned them into blood-crazed undead monsters. But the fear was still here, living and lingering in the mind of a teenage girl – and perhaps her mother too. For all of Laura’s bravado, there still lurked below the surface symptoms of the very same anxiety. Maybe for the survivors of that dreadful Apocalypse, the fear would never ever go away. Perhaps it was the ongoing legacy of a trauma that could not be erased by logic.
Laura cleared a narrow path through the obstacle of furniture for me and then carefully replaced it all until we were standing in front of her apartment door.
“How well do you think you were prepared for the Apocalypse?” I asked. For some reason I was whispering.
Laura shrugged her shoulders and fumbled in the pocket of her jeans for her keys. “I certainly felt that the amount of post-apocalyptic books I’ve read gave me an advantage,” she said. “And I was a machinist. I’m mechanically minded. It’s helped since that day with basic repairs – things that needed fixing.”
“Did you have any weapons here at home?”
“A couple of sharp hunting knives and a claw hammer,” Laura said. Her face became very dark and serious. “I still sleep with the hammer under my pillow…”
Laura unlocked the door and I stepped into a small apartment. It was almost dark inside. There were two candles burning in the kitchen, their sickly yellow light just enough for me to see the pale face of a young woman, half hidden behind a bedroom door. The girl’s eyes were huge with fright. Laura called out – and the door closed quietly. The girl disappeared.
“She won’t come out,” Laura seemed more relaxed now we were inside her apartment. “She’s built her bedroom into a fortress. The windows are boarded and covered with blankets to keep out the light, and we fitted three locks to her door.”
“She’s okay?”
“She is now that I’m home,” Laura said. She dropped down into a sofa with a weary sigh and propped one long leg up on a nearby low table. The apartment was meticulously clean, but cluttered. In every corner and along every wall was an eclectic collection of mis-matched furniture.
It was a home.
I picked up one of the candles and brought it across to the low table. I sat in a chair across from Laura and we stared at each other in the soft light, with the wavering glow highlighting the features of her face and darkening the hollows around her eyes into black sockets. She scraped her fingers through her hair and then unfastened the top button of her shirt as though to allow herself at last to breathe.
“How did you survive?” I asked quietly. I looked around again. It seemed quite incredible.
Laura shook her head with a slow bewildered kind of wonder. “I honestly don’t know,” she admitted. “When I got home with the supplies, the first thing Emily and I did was to barricade the door
and the exposed windows with furniture. Everything we could physically move became an obstruction. The food I had looted from Walmart was enough to get us through the first couple of weeks. The power went out, of course, but I had a small gas burner with some old camping gear.”
“And the ‘Afflicted’?”
“They rampaged through the town,” Laura said. Her voice changed into the eerie flat haunted tones of someone retelling a ghost story. “And we could hear them upstairs. Those first twenty-four hours were like living through a nightmare. Neighbors were screaming – blood-curdling screams. We heard shots fired, the sounds and shouts of panic and fighting. It went on and on…”
“But never came to your door?”
“Once,” Laura said. “It was during that first night. It was late. There had just been screaming and several gunshots fired from one of the apartments above us. A few minutes later we could hear heavy footsteps. Emily and I were crouched by the front door, behind all the furniture. We were too scared to breathe. Then someone started pounding against the front door. Hard punches; not like they wanted help. It was like they were trying to break the door down. I was shaking. Emily was too. We kept quiet. The furniture shook with the vibrations through the door. They tried the door handle and then barged against the door. It held. Eventually they went away. The next morning I crept cautiously out into the foyer. There were two dead people at the bottom of the stairs. They were the bodies of a couple of elderly ladies who lived on the third floor, and there were streaks and smears of blood all over our door.”
“And since that night?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing at all?”
Laura shook her head. “The following night we heard scuffles and scrapes, but they didn’t sound close. I had to press my ear to the front door.”
“What do you think it was?”
“Animals, maybe.”
I looked surprised. “What made you think that?”
Laura let out a long slow breath. “Because the following morning the bodies of the two old women in the stairwell were gone. I followed the streaks of blood. Someone, or something, had dragged them away. I prefer to think that it was wild dogs – something like that. Because to think it was anything else, Mr. Culver, quite frankly is more terrifying.”
The Enduring: Stories of Surviving the Apocalypse Page 12