Survivors in a Dead World
By Gary M Chesla
March 2016
The zombie apocalypse started one year ago and for all intents and purposes, it had also ended one year ago.
It was over by the time anyone had realized it had even started.
What remained now was little more than a dead world.
Most of the cities and towns still stood and the streets were buzzing with activity, but what was missing was the living.
There were small groups of the living that hid among the dark decaying buildings that once made up the cities.
But the cities, along with everywhere else now belonged to the dead.
The groups of the living that remained were small and were getting smaller with each passing day.
Soon the dead would have the world all to themselves.
But the few that had managed to survive continued to struggle and live.
Why??? Even they didn’t know.
Maybe it was because another day in hell was better than the alternative.
Carrie Jenkins, a young attractive redhead and the traffic reporter for WTAE TV in Pittsburgh had always felt she was just another pretty face in a man’s world.
When the apocalypse came, a pretty face in a man’s world took on a whole new meaning.
After a narrow escape from the dead, she found herself hiding in the old abandoned Mercy Hospital building in Pittsburgh.
She also found herself there, surrounded by nine men.
“Some things will never change,” she thought.
After his parents had disappeared, Jim found himself hiding in of all places, his old elementary school. He had not had a pleasant experience in elementary school. Every room in the school held another unhappy memory. He had just graduated from high school and had hoped to never set foot in a school again.
Now he was back at his old elementary school surrounded by a dead town crawling with the dead.
With his food running out, he had to make a decision. To make things even harder, his two younger sisters were with him, sixteen year old Debbie and six year old Monica.
It became even harder when Jim thought he would have to decide which of his sisters would live and which one would die.
Ricki and his brother Denny survived the first wave of the dead, only to find themselves locked up in the Fairfield Community Center with a group of lunatics. They had to find a way to escape the dead, but first they had to escape from the lunatics. Their chances of doing either were not very good.
Chapter 1
Wump! Wump! Wump! Wump! Wump!
Carrie Jenkins guided the small helicopter above Carson Street and followed the street down over the south side of Pittsburgh.
Carrie had been the traffic reporter for WTAE TV in Pittsburgh for about three years. It was her first job after graduating college. Being able to fly a helicopter had made her the perfect person for the job. All the other traffic reporters in Pittsburgh needed a pilot to fly them over the city so they could report on traffic jams and accidents around the city. The fact that she was attractive and could also fly the helicopter on her own made her the perfect choice for the position. With all the belt tightening and budget cuts that were going around, the station could get two employee positions covered for the price of one.
Carrie knew she was being taken advantage of and should have demanded a higher salary, but she was just happy to find a job. Traffic reporters were a dime a dozen. If you had a pretty face and could read, you could be a traffic reporter. She had always wanted to work in TV and usually the traffic reporter position or the weather girl were the entry positions for girls with a pretty face. The problem was there were just too many pretty faces to compete with.
When they found out that she could also fly a helicopter, she was sure the man interviewing her saw dollar signs reflecting in her blue eyes.
She never realized that when she was little and traveled with her dad on some of his business trips, that when she had asked her dad to let her fly the helicopter that it would one day make it easier to get her dream job than the four years she had spent at the University of Pittsburgh studying communications.
Her dad had laughed at her, but he would sometimes let her sit on his lap and work the control stick. Of course his hand would be on the stick under hers holding on tight.
Many times he held on white knuckle tight.
When she was a little older he arranged for her to take flight lessons.
After all it was a man’s world and she needed every advantage she could get.
Even with all the changes that the world had gone through over the last year, as far as she could tell it was still a man’s world. A year or so back, the world went to hell.
“Went to hell,” Carrie had laughed to herself, “was putting it mildly.”
The world didn’t exist anymore. Sure some bits and pieces of the world had survived, but for how long? There were no people left, at least none that were still alive. Sure the streets below were jammed packed with staggering bodies wandering aimlessly, but they were no longer any people. What they were now was the million dollar question. Of course money didn’t exist anymore either. Sure there was plenty of coins and paper money. If you could manage to fight your way through the hordes of whatever they were staggering around on the streets, the banks were full of money, but why bother, it was worthless. Even if it still had value, there was nothing to buy and no one to buy it from.
WTAE TV still existed, at least the TV studio or the building was still standing the last time Carrie had flown the helicopter out that way, but there were no people there, just those gross things that wandered around everywhere now days. All the TV and radio stations including WTAE had stopped broadcasting over a year ago.
With no traffic to report, other than another large horde of the dead making Liberty Avenue unpassable, it was the same every day. Besides, there was no one to listen or care.
When the virus hit the city a year ago, it spread like wildfire. In a week it was over. All communications ended about the same time. Carrie assumed the rest of the world was like Pittsburgh, but she really didn’t know and at this point she no longer cared. She had her own problems to worry about. If she didn’t find a way to survive the rest of the world could be a paradise, but that wouldn’t help her any.
When the world went to hell, that’s also when her life had become a nightmare. She had thought being a girl in a man’s world was rough. Being a girl out on her own in a dead world where laws and respect no longer existed was a real nightmare.
She found herself in a world where if anyone wanted something, they just took it. There was no one left to tell them they couldn’t do that, unfortunately for her.
Carrie tried to force all of that out of her mind now. She was amazed she had even managed to survive.
Before this all happened she had been popular with an active social life. She learned early that a pretty face was both good and bad. But in the new world, soon experience taught her that all the things that had made her so popular before now made it almost impossible for her to survive.
Fortunately those times were short lived. The people that ran around like animals, taking whatever and whoever they wanted was short lived, literally. The dead soon eliminated those people along with everyone else.
For the most part now, all she had to worry about was the dead. The dead and of course, finding something to eat.
Six months ago, by pure luck, she had stumbled into Mercy Hospital on The Boulevard of the Allies. She wasn’t looking for medical attention, God knows she could have used it. At the time she was trying to get away from the fifty gross smelling, slimy decaying things that were intent on having her for lunch.
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br /> Inside the hospital she was saved from her fate by nine guys that also had managed to find a safe place to hide from the dead, there at the hospital. The men were just a combination of guys that had been lucky enough to find themselves hiding in the same location. They pulled their skills and efforts together to try and survive. A doctor, a mechanic, two business men and five students that had no idea what they wanted to be when they graduated college.
Of course what to do after college was no longer a decision they would have to worry about.
They took her up to the tenth and top floor of the hospital. The tenth floor was the only place they could find where the dead couldn’t get to in the large overwhelming numbers that was impossible to defend against. Some still managed to get up to the tenth floor, but the few that reached the tenth floor were easily taken care of by the nine men.
Carrie was sure other people had tried to hide in the top floors of the many Pittsburgh skyscrapers, but they were all probably dead by now. Mercy Hospital had one advantage that the other tall Pittsburgh buildings didn’t have, hospital food.
Yes hospital food, the food that patients had complained about for decades had finally come to be appreciated. Unfortunately the men had informed Carrie that the hospital food had run out a week before she arrived.
At the hospital, Carrie found herself in a familiar situation, sitting in a room surrounded by men. She felt grateful to be once again in the company of the living. From what she could tell from her last six months around town, they were probably the last nine people still alive in Pittsburgh.
But with everything that had happened she thought at the time, “Some things never change.”
She once again found herself in a man’s world. But it wasn’t the man’s world she had worked in at WTAE TV. Fortunately it wasn’t the man’s world that had developed after the world had gone to hell resulting in a lawless free for all.
But here she was once again a pretty face in a man’s world. Even after a year without makeup, she still thought of herself as pretty. The look on the nine staring faces around her seemed to confirm her self-assessment. She had started to wish she looked more like her homely cousin, Cindy. But as she looked at the nine faces around her, she knew that after a year of these men living in hell, even looking like Cindy wouldn’t make her situation better.
Carrie began to feel uncomfortable as the men started to strike up small talk. Who was she? How did she get here? How had a pretty girl like her managed to survive? What did she do before the plague? She knew where it would all lead.
It reminded her of so many nights fending off lame pickup lines at the Paradise night club in the Strip District.
Only then she could call a cab and go home. Here she was stuck or worse yet, at their mercy. She would only be going where they said she could go and would do what they wanted her to do. She had been through this all before.
After endless small talk, small talk that had all nine men staring at her intently, she started to think about running for the stairs. When the men started looking at each other, sharing a glance that only they knew what they were thinking, or an idea that they thought was known only to them, Carrie could feel her stomach start to churn. She wasn’t a mind reader, except when it came to men. Their minds were easy to read. When it came to men, the range of their thoughts was limited to only two subjects and there weren’t any football games for them to discuss anymore.
When they all jumped to their feet and told her they wanted to take her up on the roof because they wanted to show her something, she slowly stood and started to back away. That line was older than her grandparents.
After the day she had had, she wasn’t interested. A few of them were cute, but there were nine of them.
She had always liked to have her fun but she had never been into the group scene, at least not willingly.
When the men started walking towards the door that would take them to the stairway and the roof, Carrie turned her head expecting to see the two men who would grab her by the arms and force her to go up to the roof.
She was surprised to see that there was no one behind her.
“These guys were either out of practice or they seriously thought she was dumb enough to follow them,” she thought.
“Come on Red,” the guy named Bob said. “You’re going to love this.”
“Right,” Carrie thought, “That was the typical male attitude. They were all God’s gift to women.”
The other eight men had already left the room. She could hear their feet clanking up the steps, the sounds or their steps echoing down the stairwell.
Bob looked at her for a moment and laughed, “It’s not a trick. I’m sure a cutie like you had to be careful, but if that was our intention,” he smiled, “well you can do the math.”
Carrie smiled and blushed. She could do the math, but something just didn’t add up.
“What the hell,” she thought. Now she was curious.
Bob was right. She would have never made it out of the room if they had wanted her here.
Carrie slowly walked and followed Bob up the steps.
She could hear the other men talking excitedly as she neared the top of the steps. Whatever they were excited about, as if she didn’t know, they weren’t trying to keep it a secret until she got up there. At least it wouldn’t be a sneak attack, but that thought wasn’t of much comfort. She almost couldn’t believe she was walking into this willingly.
She walked through the doorway and out onto the roof. After her eyes adjusted to the bright sun light, she saw the nine men standing around a small white helicopter with a big red cross painted on each side. They looked at her excitedly.
“Can you fly it?” Bob asked.
Carrie looked at the helicopter. She walked over and looked inside at all the controls. It was the Life Flight helicopter based at Mercy Hospital. She had seen it flying frequently around Pittsburgh when she was sent out to report on accidents on the parkway. Traffic around Pittsburgh was too congested to transport accident victims to the hospital by ambulance. During a life or death situation, every second counted. The white helicopter was a frequent sight that everyone in Pittsburgh was familiar with.
“Does it work?” Carrie asked.
Bob laughed, “I have it running. I’m a Ford mechanic not a helicopter mechanic, but an engine is an engine.”
Carrie looked at the blades and the control rods. They looked worn but otherwise fairly normal.
“I come out and start it every couple of weeks to make sure it still runs,” Bob said. “But none of us knows how to fly it. I tried moving a couple of levers to see if I could figure it out. After I almost rolled it over I decided not to try that again. If you can fly it maybe we can all get out of here. The food is all gone and we have been wracking our brains trying to figure a way out of here, but as you can see, no one can go anywhere around here.”
“How much fuel does it have?” Carrie asked.
“Fuel isn’t a problem,” replied Bob. “They have a fuel tank here on the pad so the helicopter can be refueled when needed. There’s no power of course, but it was easy to siphon what we need.”
“Have you been in contact with anyone?” Carrie asked. “Do you have a destination in mind?”
“No,” Bob replied. “The radio seems to work, but there isn’t anyone out there talking. I figured we could use the helicopter to get some food up here and then start just looking around and see if we can find a way out of Pittsburgh.”
The men all stared, looking her in the eyes excitedly waiting for her answer. That in itself felt strange. From past experience, her eyes were usually the last place a man looked. Most men’s eyes usually never even made it up that far. Usually, not even close.
That was six months ago.
Carrie found that living in a man’s world, at least here at Mercy Hospital wasn’t too bad.
When you were the only one who could fly the helicopter, having a pretty face wasn’t a problem.
Living with
nine men wasn’t a problem either when you were the only one who could fly the only means of getting food and escaping the city.
It was like she now had nine big brothers that would kill anyone or anything that came near her.
She would have liked to think it was because she was a girl, but she knew that had little to do with it, at least not this time. Being a girl didn’t hurt, but right now being the only one that could get them all out of Pittsburgh was what mattered most to all of them.
It was just too bad Bob wasn’t a helicopter mechanic. The helicopter ran and would fly, but after thirty minutes in the air, the engine would start to sputter and shut down.
Luckily they discovered that problem when the helicopter was idling on the roof and not somewhere over Pittsburgh.
Until Bob could figure out the problem, they wouldn’t be going anywhere very far from the hospital.
At least it gave them a way to get food. They would be able to eat until Bob found a solution to the problem.
“How’s our time Bob?” Carrie asked.
Bob checked his watch. He always went out on supply flights with Carrie. She thought at first it was to make sure she came back with the helicopter.
Bob had laughed when Carrie told him that.
“What if the helicopter breaks down when you are out?” he asked her. “Can you fix it?”
She shook her head no.
“I can’t fly it and you can’t fix it,” Bob smiled. “Understand? That makes us a team. We go everywhere together.”
“Fifteen minutes in the air,” Bob replied. “We have ten minutes of safe air time. Damn I wish I could figure out why the hell this thing dies after thirty minutes.”
“Let’s not use the word die, please,” Carrie smiled.
“Could it be the plugs or the wiring?” Tom asked from the back of the helicopter. “I had an old Chevy Cavalier that acted like that once. It would run for an hour and then just stop. The damn thing would strand me along the road. I don’t know how many times it did that to me. I liked the car, great gas mileage, but I got tired sitting along the road out in the middle of nowhere. After twenty minutes, it started right up and would run for another hour before stopping again. Any time I would go somewhere that took over an hour to get there, I had to plan on a twenty minute stop every hour. It was getting to be a real pain in the ass.
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