Megan screamed in rage. “Let. Me. Out!” Each word was punctuated by a futile jerk at the board. She kicked angrily at the wall as she pounded on the wood. Exhausted, she almost slumped to the floor again, knowing she wouldn’t make it in time. The van would pass by and never even know she was inside, desperate to be free.
Megan’s head snapped up as realization dawned on her. The garage! She ran stumbling through the kitchen. She almost slipped on the linoleum but made it the garage door and pawed at the knob. She was nearly hyperventilating and couldn’t hear if the van was still outside. She slid between Dalton’s Jeep and her little econobox in a rush to get to the big aluminum garage door. With no electricity, the door would just pull up.
Megan snatched at the handle on the door and nearly wrenched her arm out of its socket. It didn’t budge. A wave of pain shot through her arm as she recoiled from the handle like it was a venomous snake. The door was jammed.
Megan stared at the garage door, exasperated. The house didn’t want to let her go. Slowly her eyes grew wide and she cursed her stupidity. Glancing up past the handle, she saw a rectangular shaped protrusion halfway up the door. It was connected to two metal rods that spanned the door horizontally. Of course! Dalton had manually locked the garage door on his return from the failed supply run.
Megan wrapped her hands around the cold, dry metal and twisted it to the left and it did not budge. Turning it the other way met with success as she heard the satisfying sound of the lock opening. She leaned down and tugged on the handle, rewarded by the result she was hoping for—the door began to rise. She let it go up about halfway and glanced outside, free of barriers between her and the rest of the world for the first time in ages.
Megan had been prepared to run screaming to flag down the driver, but looking out on the scene past her lawn, she realized that perhaps her grand vision of escape had been a mistake.
Things could be worse.
That was what Dalton had said to Megan when this whole mess started. He had been trying to raise her spirits and kept on trying to until the end. He wanted her to survive, wanted her to keep on fighting and find a way out of the hell they were in. Now, despite her efforts to entomb herself in the bedroom they had slept in, made love in, and lived in, she had finally woken up. She was somehow still willing to fight after all this time; not just for herself, but for her husband’s sake...because once she was gone, who would be left to remember him?
So when she saw the scraggly looking man standing on top of the blue minivan, looking away from her as he stared at the top of the hill, she realized that despite how terrible he looked and how dire her circumstances were, things could be worse.
Swallowing hard, Megan stepped out into the sunlight.
“Hello.”
George and Jason
Part 1
I originally crafted the story of how George and Jason came to be together so that it was inserted in the tale right after Jeff and Megan were stuck in the school parking lot, surrounded by the undead about to destroy the minivan. But given the fact that their tale is quite extensive, my fear was that by the time it was done most folks would have forgotten all about Jeff and Megan’s plight. So instead, I bring it to you here, and hope that gives you a better appreciation of both of these critical characters.
The sandy haired man took a swig from the bottle of lukewarm water. He glanced briefly at the image of ice capped mountains on the label and grimaced at the taste. At least it wasn’t hot, although he wouldn’t gripe if it was. But a visual of a mountain stream filled with pure, icy cold water was a stretch. His world was not filled with breathtaking vistas and bracing winds. Instead, there were dark, confining walls and thick, muggy air.
“Ahhh.”
The sound was exaggerated and the marketers of Mountain Ice would have appreciated it...if they weren’t all dead. In fact, just about everyone they’d pitched their product to was dead too. So the sarcastic sound of satisfaction was pointless. George didn’t care, because just about everything was pointless these days.
He stood in the dark back room and tried to push away the depressing thought. It was damned hard, but he had to believe it was still worth the effort. He was in one piece, even after everything he’d been through. Be grateful for the little things. It was his mantra these days.
George cut an impressive form. At six two and slightly over two hundred and forty pounds he was thickly built and muscular. The graying at the temples and creases in the skin around his eyes might convince some that he was past his competitive prime, but when they saw him move they would likely backtrack on such an assessment. George was naturally athletic, but as he’d hit middle age he discovered he had to work twice as hard to keep up with the kids half his age.
George wondered why he still bothered. Exercise seemed rather pointless anymore. Old habits die hard. He knew it was true enough, but that wasn’t all of it. So he went through the stomach crunches, push-ups, sit ups, and anything else he could do in the silence of the dark and dusty rooms of the church he was stuck in, knowing that as he tried so hard to exhaust his body, he was trying even harder to keep his mind occupied.
George surveyed the crowded back room. It was a storage closet in the place he’d called home for over a month now. Cardboard crates and cartons were stacked up against the far wall; corrugated sentinels guarding the abandoned building against the onslaught of dust bunnies and silverfish. Several boxes had been torn into and emptied of their contents. George sighed as he did a count of what remained. He was sick and tired of the sticky sweet juice boxes and stale cheese and peanut butter crackers stored for the daycare and kindergarten programs the church had run. He relished the occasional water bottle, but soon the case of Mountain Ice that they’d been rationing at one bottle a day would be gone.
For what might have been the thousandth time, he sighed and shook his head. How did it come to this? He nudged one of the half-filled boxes with his big toe and resisted the urge to kick it against the wall. This was all they had left.
George walked out into the gymnasium. The daylight shining down through the skylights was a godsend. All the doors and windows on the first floor were blocked up or covered with plywood and cafeteria tables. The light felt good, but didn’t cheer him up. Whether George was in the gym or one of the few other areas he could roam freely in the building, he felt as if he were in perpetual darkness.
George mouthed a silent prayer for the strength to get through another day as he walked across the hardwood floor. It was one of dozens of little prayers he uttered these days. He hadn’t been a devout Christian before the plague. Sure, he believed in God, but attending church was something he did on autopilot. It could salve a guilty conscience, demonstrate devotion, or set a good example for his daughters, but it had mostly been a façade, a convenient cover-up for someone who couldn’t be bothered to care anymore.
It had shocked him when Helen decided to convert to his religion years ago. George was not gung ho about the idea, but she insisted. When Roxanne was born, religion all of a sudden became that much more vital to Helen and she pressed George to become more active in the church. In his mind it felt as if he wife was steamrolling him, but he loved her too much not to cave to the pressure. He had to admit that without Helen’s religious zeal his children might have grown up clueless about God and faith in general. She made sure they were baptized, went to Sunday school, and took communion...the whole nine yards. George sat back and watched, content in knowing that his wife had taken on that mantle of responsibility and was doing a bang up job of it.
Now, in the aftermath of the hell the world had become, he’d been “reborn”. The pillars of the world had crumbled and that’s when the praying started. It came in a rush—there was no gradual transformation. George comprehended the error of his ways and that changed him irrevocably. He would recite prayers on an almost hourly basis, and they had an element of gratitude in them—he thanked God for tolerating a last second convert. Perhaps that was why he was sti
ll alive: he’d been given the chance to repent his sins and to atone for his past mistakes.
George’s mind switched gears, thinking about the boy for a moment. They were trapped in this place together, but the pre-teen was so distant it felt as if he were somewhere else entirely. George had tried to get Jason to warm up to him, tried to get him to talk or even pray, but the kid cared little about God or anything else for that matter. That was no surprise, but was still frustrating. All they had was each other, but Jason acted as if even that was too much to deal with.
The boy had been that way ever since Jennifer had given up on him. That was when George had accepted responsibility for Jason, but it was clear the damage caused by her decision had been profound. Those cannibal bastards roaming around outside couldn’t have ripped him apart any more thoroughly. Jason had been gutted, just not in a physical sense.
So George prayed alone.
George prayed for the boy, he prayed for both their souls, and he prayed for guidance. He prayed for strength and the ability to avoiding going insane. He also prayed for mercy and forgiveness. But mostly, he prayed for his wife and two daughters waiting for him back home.
George basked in the bright sunlight and tried to appreciate the warmth it gave off. His footsteps echoed as he walked across the gym. There was no rush to get to the door. These days there was little need to rush anywhere.
George resisted the urge to open the closet housing the basketballs so he could take a few shots with one. Working up a sweat would be great—it might even take his mind off of everything for a bit. Unfortunately, the dead were right outside. If they heard him, his struggles over the past month would be all for naught.
It was luck that had gotten him this far. All sorts of it: bad luck that the world had gone loony tunes, good luck that he had made it to the church with Jason alive and dumb luck that they had survived this long.
He would have run long ago. To hell with the walking corpses outside, he would have risked them and all the dangers they posed. They were frightening, those rotting mockeries of life, but more so, they were sad. When George looked into their eyes they seemed lost. They no longer knew who or what they once had been. They weren’t too sharp and he was certain he could slip past them if he was careful. The volume of abandoned vehicles on the road was staggering: he could have his pick of ones with the keys still in the ignition and enough gas to get him all the way home.
He would have done it already, had it not been for Jason.
* * *
There had been four of them originally: Jennifer, Al, Jason, and George. They had escaped the shelter together when things had gone bad. The high school was filled with refugees just like them, all crammed into the gym—a thousand or more at least. So many, in fact, the soldiers had to funnel newcomers over to the elementary school across the street. At first the refugees were mainly locals; residents of Gallatin and the surrounding area urged to head to the local shelter and wait out the chaos there.
Things had been easy for the early arrivals. There was plenty of room and a belief that the troubles outside would be resolved quickly. It was when people started pouring in from all over the region that the sense of optimism faltered. They brought with them stories of the city’s doom.
The Guardsmen did a good job of getting everyone settled and even squelching rumors of how things had gone from bad to unbelievably worse in the space of just a few days. Not just in Cincinnati but everywhere. But despite their best efforts, every new group brought with them horrific stories that spread like wildfire. Tales would spread from cot to cot, group to group. There was little else to do in the cramped gymnasium except to gossip and the only topic to gossip about was how bad things were out there.
George had been tossed unceremoniously into the shelter and knew no one there. With no family or neighbors to powwow with, he gathered what information he could by spying on others’ conversations. The city was burning; it was dying before their very eyes. The dead were coming back to life, attacking the living and transforming them into similar monstrosities.
The undead were everywhere. At first, reports were that they’d been contained. But outbreaks which started in some of the more blighted neighborhoods around the city spread rapidly. The National Guard would cordon off one area and an outbreak would be reported elsewhere. There appeared to be no way to pinpoint a source contaminant in the city at all. Someone would be bitten and then flee to another part of town. They would die, reanimate, and start the cycle all over again.
Nothing the military did seemed to make any headway and despite the best efforts to house refugees and protect them, everyone stuck in the Gallatin High School was getting the sense that there was nothing anyone, including the military, could do to stop this plague from engulfing everything.
The stories that came in were hard for George to swallow at first, but the volume of them wore him down as they did everyone else, until it was hard to deny what was happening. There were comparisons to Auschwitz and the battlefields of Vietnam. Dump trucks filled with corpses stacked like cordwood were driven through the city’s neighborhoods as soldiers in hazmat outfits dragged dead bodies out of houses and loaded them up. Crematoriums were set up around the city to euthanize or dispose of those who had been infected. ‘Emergency Virus Centers,’ were also set up—people could take those who were sick there to be treated. But the ‘treatment’ had a tendency to make a person disappear. Families and even churches had taken to hiding those who had been bitten, despite the government’s rather rapid enactment of laws calling for the execution of those offering safe harbor for the infected. Promises of a cure, or of genuine treatments, saturated the airwaves at first, then tapered off as everyone stopped believing them.
Newer refugees arriving at the high school made it clear that shelters and the small areas surrounding their locations were the only places the government had control of anymore. Everywhere else, rioters and looters made it impossible for the military to differentiate between the undead and those who were just angry and desperate. There were still pockets of resistance against the inexorable march of the dead—citizen militias banding together and barricading themselves in apartment complexes, office buildings, and other makeshift fortresses. Others chose to lock their front doors and turn off their lights with the hope that death would pass them by. But even the most optimistic newcomers to the shelter admitted that most of those people had fared even worse than the National Guard troops committed to defending them.
The shelters were supposed to be beacons of hope. That’s essentially what the soldiers with the bullhorns said as they drove up and down the streets. It was what the government had claimed on television and radio. They were places citizens should go to insure their safety. George did not want to be here, separated from his family, but he did believe he was safe there, at first. Until he saw how some seeking sanctuary were treated. Those who had been bitten were forcefully separated from family members who naively believed all were welcome. Those who were docile or already in a state of shock would accept this, believing that the best possible treatments were being made available to those that had been bitten and they would be reunited with their family members once they had been vaccinated, or whatever it was the government doctors were doing to them. Others weren’t so understanding. In those cases, things tended to get ugly, fast. Fights would erupt in the hall where newcomers were processed and inspected for wounds and infections. Family members would scream and attack soldiers tasked with the responsibility of loading the infected onto the trucks to be sent away...to where, no one was ever told.
It was clear that most of the soldiers were losing the battle to stay impartial and focused on their duties. George knew that as National Guard troops, most of them were locals. They had grown up in the area and knew a lot of the people they were sending off for ‘treatment’. He could not imagine how hard these assigned duties were on them.
The shelter became something akin to a small city; people were jammed in shoulder to sh
oulder, attempting to live whatever lives they could under such horrid circumstances. George witnessed transactions for drugs and sex, theft, and acts far more foul. He felt helpless and that all hope for the human race was lost.
That was when George began to pray.
It wasn’t hard to surmise that it was like this the entire world over. The virus had first hit overseas, in several different areas of the globe, seemingly overnight. No one could figure out where it had started. It then hit North American with cases reported in Toronto, Canada and Monterrey, Mexico. Before the borders could be sealed, there were cases reported in Baltimore and Denver. The National Guard moved in quickly, imposing rules and taking over from the civil authorities. The army was next: men and women returning from war zones in Iraq, Afghanistan, and U.S. military bases all over the world. The President recalled all troops to the Homeland in one fell swoop. But by then, the country was already in the grasping fist of the plague. Martial Law or its equivalent had been enacted in every corner of the globe, but there was nothing but complete and utter anarchy.
It was not the fondest of memories, thinking back to those days in the shelter, but the longer George remained stuck inside the church he and Jason were hiding out in, the more his mind kept reliving everything that had led up to his arrival there.
The sad part, the truly saddest part of it all, was that it could have been avoided. He had been staying at a local hotel and knew he should have left the moment he realized that the plague that had been sweeping the globe had arrived in his little corner of Ohio. Even later, when the hotel manager had come knocking at his door telling him he had five minutes to pack his belongings and get out in front of the hotel where a squad of National Guard soldiers were waiting, he should have run.
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