Days With The Undead (Book 1)

by Snow, Julianne

  I looked into her sweet face and promised that I would never do anything but keep them safe. My answer appeared to have appeased the twins and they settled right in with us.

  The approach to Seattle was unnervingly quiet. No Undead on the roads. No cars or trucks or vehicles of any kind clogging the arteries into the city, or even out of the city. The landscape was just too pristine for my liking… It was almost as if the Undead hadn’t touched this area, which was impossible. The absence of any debris or walking corpses could only mean one of two things had happened: the entire city was Undead and waiting around the next bend in the road for us, or perhaps Seattle was completely devoid of the Undead.

  In the end, the city was an all-together different site to behold.

  Seattle had been fortified like something you would see in a Hollywood blockbuster. Something set in medieval times. In the early days after the outbreak, some government official or enterprising individual with some political clout must have had concrete barriers erected twenty feet tall all around the city limits. Where they had gotten the barriers, I couldn’t even imagine. How had they managed to get the walls up so quickly?

  It was like the last bastion of humanity in a dying world, and it was amazing.

  Someone had gotten the message. The city could be alive and well on the inside of those walls. People could be alive and thriving; lots of people. Our prayers had been answered. We were excited and relieved at the thought that we might be able to stop running. There was just one really big problem… There didn’t seem to be any way in or out. We crisscrossed the roadways looking for an entrance or anything but all we found were concrete walls blocking our way at every avenue.

  Looking for a way in was dangerous. We were losing precious moments on each thoroughfare and side street that we tried. And with each passing moment the mysterious black Hummer could have been gaining on us, easily finding a way to box us in with all of these blocked streets.

  An entrance into the city could end that hunt altogether so we felt the search was worth the risk. It was also potentially a stupid endeavor. The Hummer could have exited from that entrance we were searching for. For all we knew, the people behind the barricade could be bad, for lack of a better word. Not able to find an entrance, our only choice was to keep moving forward.

  Maybe it’s best that we didn’t find an entry point. I assume that people were alive and thriving inside those walls. There really is no way of knowing. On the other side of those concrete walls could be approximately 617,000 Undead just waiting for someone to let them out. Or there could be just as many living people waiting for the Undead to starve and die a pitiful second death. Anything at this point is possible.

  Having made our way completely around the city’s limits, it was apparent that the new Seattle was meant to impenetrable. Driving away from the wall on Interstate 5, you could just barely make out the figures standing on the top of the wall. Proof that the city was alive. The only question was for how long… How long could a city survive without the ability to come and go for needed supplies?

  At this point, we know one thing for certain; coming inland has benefited us. We have lost our tail for the moment but in this unpredictable climate of constant change, we could pick them up again at any point. The unknown factor of that cannot be avoided and as a result we’re just going to have to push towards British Columbia and hope for the best.

  Day 24:

  Lily and Liam have been doing well but they’ve been getting restless cooped up in a car for this long. Add to that their stay in the washroom and these kids were crawling the walls, practically screaming to get out. Four and a half year olds are apt to play but we have no toys. Our game playing skills were being sorely tested as well. Admittedly, we were finding it difficult to keep up with them.

  Once back in Canada we started to see that things were different, more normal… Well, normal-ish. We avoided Vancouver even though I desperately wanted to see if my parents had somehow managed to survive by staying indoors. The chance was slim knowing my father - but there was still a chance.

  Instead we took the TransCanada Highway north from Choate, thinking that we would then get onto Highway 97 and continue north to Prince George. Depending on what we encountered in Prince George and what kind of plan we had decided upon, we could go either west to Prince Rupert on Highway 16 or head east. Our main objective was to get free of the Undead and to find a place where we didn’t have to always be constantly on the move.

  We did find it very odd that while we did not see any of the Undead, we didn’t see any living people either. But it still felt weird. There was no evidence that the Undead had even been here, that the area we were travelling through had even been touched by the infection. No cars clogging the roads, no evidence of any fighting. No telltale debris from a showdown with the Undead. It was like everyone had just simply vanished.

  It’s amazing how your priorities change when you’ve got young ones to think about. It’s possible that we will still need to try to get on the water and travel to a remote town in the hopes of finding a place highly isolated and untouched by all of this. But then a town only accessible by water or air may not provide complete isolation from the Undead. And it’s also going to need to be resupplied which makes every trip into a larger area more dangerous. Is there any place besides Seattle that is still safe out there?

  The Undead will eventually walk every open inch of land, of that I have no doubt. At some point, maybe not right away, but eventually, they would find the haven that you had created for yourself. Finding a safe place was the goal for us. It always had been; we just needed to make sure that wherever we chose to stop, it was the best place to do so.

  Lily and Liam had definitely had enough of their forced confinement and since we hadn’t passed a single Undead since leaving the U.S., we decided to throw caution to the wind and make an unscheduled stop. We chose a quiet little town called Lac la Hache on Highway 97.

  Old habits die hard and still being our cautious selves, we pulled over to the side of the road beside a park and waited for a long length of time, blowing the car’s horn just to see if we could entice any Undead to send us on our merry way. Not a single one showed up after forty-five minutes. It was just so strange that there didn’t seem to be anyone or anything about.

  We warned the twins that they would have to stay very, very close to us at all times. That even while at play there could be danger. They seemed to inherently understand this and were buzzing with nervous energy. We drove up on the lawn of the park (I dare a police officer to give me a ticket), and got out of the Escalade. We made Lily and Liam stay back with Max at the wheel while we checked out all the outbuildings and surrounding areas. We’ve learned that you never could be too careful.

  Once the coast was clear, the twins burst from the car and ran to the playground equipment. Their laughter filled the air and it was the sweetest sound to hear. Their joy was infectious and the rest of us couldn’t help but laugh along with them.

  Soon we forgot about everything but the kids and the sounds of their laughter, the way that they would chase each other up and down the slide. The crunching sounds their shoes made on the pebbles covering the playground area as they came down the slide and turned to run around to go right back up to the top. We were suddenly like four proud parents all vying for the right to say “Look at my kid”…

  We were stupid. We should have been watching.

  We had no idea they were there until they were right upon us. Thank God that Liam happened to notice the man coming up behind Bob. It was by the grace of God alone that he managed to move just as the Undead was about to lay his greasy, putrefying hands on him.

  And suddenly it was like we were surrounded.

  The car seemed like it was kilometers away, with too many of them between us and it. The really stupid thing was that none of us had opted to stay with the car, thinking we were safe. Have I mentioned the word stupid yet?

  Lily and Liam were screaming at the t
op of the jungle gym, afraid to come down. I don’t blame them one bit; I was afraid to be on the ground and I had a gun! We started to line up our shots, hoping that we had brought enough ammunition with us for all of the Undead steadily streaming toward us. One by one, they started to go down. The diminishing number was motivating; we began to believe that we could and would get through this.

  I happened to turn around at one point, realizing that we could be setting ourselves up for an ambush from behind. We were all so consumed with fighting those in front of us that we had forgotten to cover our backs. There were some Undead coming at us from behind our position but they were so far back that they were not as imposing an issue as the ones in front of us.

  As I glanced at the playground equipment to make sure that Lily and Liam were still safe, I was terrified and angry to see what had once been an old woman, her clothes hanging off her bloody and decomposing body, trying to pull itself up the slide. The twins had not yet noticed her. Their attention was fixed on the horde in front of us. A quick shot to the head dropped the corpse on the slide, her body making that unforgettable plastic squeal as it came to rest at the bottom. Too close.

  Soon, those closest to us were all clinically dead, but in the distance we could see more of them finding their way towards us. Time to get to the Escalade and get the heck out of dodge.

  Lily and Liam were an entirely different kettle of fish to deal with. The stress of the Undead and the subsequent shootout had them frozen at the topmost part of the playground equipment. And by now they had noticed the crumpled form of the old woman slumped at the base of the slide. Minimal coaxing wasn’t getting them down and we didn’t have the time to wait for them to let go of their white knuckled grip on the wooden structure.

  Max had pulled the SUV closer while Ben and I had gone up to bodily pass them down to Bob who was waiting to put them into the Escalade.

  Lily readily dissolved into my arms and was quite easy to pass down to Bob. Once in the car, she crawled into the back and hid under one of the blankets. Liam was proving to be a bit more difficult. His fear had made him almost catatonic and as a result his grip was vice-like.

  Ben and I couldn’t get his poor little fingers unclenched from the blue metal railing. He was going to be in some serious pain from this but before we could worry about that we needed to get him off that structure and into the safety of the car. After what seemed like hours but was surely only seconds, we finally freed his fingers and passed him down to Bob, his body still as rigid as a board.

  Ben and I were making our way back down the jungle gym when we heard Bob call out. Looking over the side at the car, we could see Bob trying to shake something off of his leg. Liam was standing on the ground staring in horror at something on the ground and Max was exiting the car with his gun drawn.

  One of the Undead had managed to survive a slightly misplaced head shot and had crawled across the lawn and under the car where it was presently biting down on Bob’s leg. The fear welled up in my body as Max helped pry it off and then gave it one final bullet, its permanent second death. Bob scooped up Liam and put him awkwardly into the car. The rest of us all got in and Max drove the Escalade quickly out of Lac la Hache.

  Turning to Bob, I shakily pulled out my gun, not wanting to say goodbye to my friend but knowing it was now inevitable, and asked him how he wanted it done. Would he rather do it himself before he became one of the Undead? Or did he want one of us to wait until after he was one of them?

  The choice was his.

  Bob just looked at me and smiled… Then he tapped his prosthetic leg, resulting in a hollow metallic sound, and said that the Undead hadn’t gotten him just yet.

  It was our laughter that filled the SUV at that moment. And relief…

  Liam wasn’t as convinced as the rest of us when it came to Bob. He had plastered himself up against the window in the back of the SUV as far from Bob as he could get. We knew they had an understanding of the Undead from Lily’s recollection of their flight to the service station. In seeing Liam’s reaction to Bob, it was plainly obvious that he had figured out the information that would keep him alive; getting bitten meant death.

  Knowing that we would have to calm him down, we took a moment to stop the car in a deserted area. Bob got out of the Escalade and called out to Liam in the back. Liam’s attention had remained intently focused on Bob so when he lifted his pant leg to reveal his prosthesis, you could see the confusion play out on his young face. He visibly relaxed but didn’t speak. That would have to be enough for now.

  Day 25:

  When we got to Prince George we decided to go west towards Prince Rupert and the coast. After the incident at the playground, we concluded it was still best for us to get off land and find ourselves an island or a highly isolated town free from the infection. It was just proving too dangerous to stay on the road.

  Thankfully, Lily and Liam were silent in the SUV. The events of yesterday had branded them with a new found respect for the outside world. It was a shame that at even at four and a half years old, they had been forced to grow up right before our eyes.

  Lily had bounced back faster than Liam, to a degree; she was able to laugh and smile at the silly little jokes that we told them, though not with the same abandon that we had once witnessed. Liam was only just coming around now, having spent the majority of the night steadily observing Bob and locked in a world of his own.

  No amount of talking or bodily reassurance could get through to him in the beginning and Ben thought that it was best for us to just let him be for the moment. No use in trying to snap him out of something that he might not have been ready to snap out of yet. It was just better to let him come around on his own once his young mind had dealt with what he had seen… If he dealt with it. We were all so worried and so relieved when it looked like he was coming back to us.

  We got to Prince Rupert and immediately wished that we had not wasted our time. The entire city had been burnt to the ground. Everywhere you looked there were the remnants of buildings and cars. All that was left were foundations and ashen debris. Even the harbor was destroyed. Nothing was left but a few burned out hulls of boats floating in the surf. To see the destruction and the desolation was depressing. You just felt like giving up, like throwing in the proverbial towel. How much more of this could we handle?

  We turned around and headed back toward Prince George. We had no other option as there was only one road that came into and went out of Prince Rupert. In our minds we thought that getting to Prince George would somehow give us a new option. That somehow, once there, we would know what to do. The obvious plan was to keep going but at this point we just didn’t know where to go anymore… We knew going to Alaska would be a mistake because once there, you were out of options and it would be very, very cold. And we didn’t have the gear to survive the weather even the summer.

  I know a lot of people out there believe that the Undead are affected by the cold and that they cannot survive in those temperatures. However, I have seen the footage on YouTube in northern Russia and Mongolia and I don’t for one second believe that the cold slows them down in any way.

  Heck, I’ve been to my own lab in the first day after the outbreak and I know the cooler and then even the deep freeze did nothing to help restrain the Undead that the police had managed to capture and bring to us. What they thought we were going to do with them, I have no idea…

  It was useful to be able to observe the Undead in the very beginning. To see what they could endure, what conditions they would be able to withstand. I remember a colleague that got too close and learned the hard way what the Undead were willing to do. At least I got out with my life.

  I’ve thought a lot about why the cold doesn’t affect them. The only conclusion I can come to is the fact that they are not freezing up because they constantly move. Always pursuing the living. In nature, if you get stuck out in the extreme cold, your body will start to shut down. Stop supplying blood to the extremities, keeping just the vital func
tions alive.

  The Undead don’t have blood circulating through their decomposing bodies. They don’t have the need to keep vital functions alive because there are none. So as long as they stay on the move, the muscles that are slowly breaking down in their bodies will still respond.

  The cold may help us in the long run because any crystals that form in their tissues may help to break them down faster but in the end, I believe it will take them a long time to freeze completely solid and stop moving altogether. A truly scary thought is this: if cold temperatures delay decomposition does that mean that some of the Undead will never rot away?

  On the road back to Prince George our plans changed drastically.

  Coming around a blind curve before the town of Houston, we met with a fear from our not too distant past. The Hummer that had been following us had somehow managed to track us down and now they were barreling down on us, playing a sick and twisted game of chicken. I had the misfortune of driving at that exact moment and I didn’t quite know what to do. All I knew at that point was that I wasn’t going to be run off that particular stretch of road and definitely not by this SUV.

  I didn’t care that the Hummer was bigger than us or that whoever had followed us must really want us dead. All I cared about was the fact that I was tired of being on the run. Tired of being chased by the Undead. Tired of being pursued by the unknown around every bend. These jerks had picked the wrong survivor to mess with…

  I gritted my teeth, placed my hands at ten and two, and accelerated.

  I could hear the voices of my group around me but I was so locked on the task at hand that couldn’t make out what it was that they were saying. I knew Lily and Liam were there and I prayed to God to forgive me if they got hurt. My anger and frustration were fixated on the road ahead of me. On that Hummer.