The Survivors Book I: Summer
By V. L Dreyer
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Credits:
Story by V. L. Dreyer
Edited by Holly Simmons
Cover Art by Alais Legrand
Graphic Design by Alyssa Talboys
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All material contained herein is Copyright © V. L. Dreyer 2013. All rights reserved.
The following is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental, or used in the form of parody.
ISBN 978-0-473-25629-6
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For more works by this author, please visit:
http://www.vldreyer.com
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Foreword
The Survivors series is set in New Zealand. In order to preserve the authenticity of the setting and the heroine's voice, this novel has been written in New Zealand English.
New Zealand English (NZE) is an off-shoot of British English, but the geographical isolation of the country has given rise to a quirky sub-dialect that is nether entirely British, nor Australian.
I have attempted to make this novel as easily accessible as possible for readers around the world by providing contextual explanations for most words. However, as the language variations are subtle and frequent, it is not always possible to do this.
A more in-depth article on the language used in this book is available on my website, where you also have the facility to ask me questions.
http://www.vldreyer.com
Chapter One
It seemed like a cruel irony.
I had survived the brutal end of civilization and watched our world fall from grace; I had stood by helplessly while all of my friends and family died, or were reduced to the walking dead, one by one. I lived on and yet now, a decade later, my salvation lay behind a worn, old movie poster for a film named Zombieland.
Crouched between a dumpster and a stack of decaying boxes, I stared at the faded, ruined poster, wondering at life’s morbid sense of humour. I remembered that movie. It had been a few years old at the point when the world ended, so it seemed strange to have it hanging in the window, but places like this backwater little town tended to be behind the times. I used to enjoy that kind of thing, back when I was a teenager and the world was still whole. The zombie fad had been so popular in 2013 – there were copies of The Walking Dead in the window, too.
If only we had known what was to come.
The virus that struck us down was nothing like any of those movies. There was to be no Dawn of the Dead for us, no 28 Days Later. I was eternally grateful for that fact, actually. My reality was very different to the fantasies dreamed up by Hollywood.
There was one of them in the DVD store across the road from me: An old man. I could just see him past the tatty photograph of Jesse Eisenberg, shuffling back and forth between the shelves. He wandered tirelessly, trying to organise his stock with hands no longer capable of gripping.
Some of the undead were still dangerous, but most of them were slow and heart-wrenchingly pathetic, like the little old man in the store. I’d take him over a fast-moving, angry movie zombie any day, even if it did break my heart to look at him. The difference came down to which one was more likely to eat my brain. Frankly, I liked my brain right where it was. The real undead weren’t interested in brains – or anything else, really.
There was nothing left on the shelves now; the old man had knocked all the videos to the ground long ago with his limp-fingered efforts, and then crushed them beneath his wandering feet. He was far gone after all these years. His flesh was half-rotted, and his eyes were unseeing. Only instinct kept him moving in his relentless, unattainable quest for perfection.
A lot of the infected seemed to retain the basic memories of their lives, but only the things that they had repeated so often that the action ended up deeply ingrained within their subconscious. The core of their personalities seemed to linger as well, but it was just an echo of the person they used to be.
That made them unpredictable.
I had seen a great many different kinds of infected over the years, and their behaviour seemed to vary depending on the person they were before death. Mothers still rocked the withered husks of their dead babies. Soldiers gunned down non-existent foes until the chamber of their weapons ran dry. Most of the infected just went on about their un-lives, oblivious, like that old man in the store. Even though his conscious mind was completely gone, he stayed in the place that he knew best, going through the same motions now as when he was still alive.
The old man must have really loved that little store. Ten years was a very long time.
The virus came from somewhere deep in Central Africa; a mutation of the deadly Ebola virus. They named this new strain the Goma ebolavirus, after the city where the first cases were found. By the time they'd decided on a name, it had killed a hundred thousand people and infected millions more.
The media nicknamed it Ebola-X, and that version stuck. It had more of a ring to it.
In the beginning, diagnosis and research was slow. The doctors, nurses and scientists studying the pathogen kept getting infected, no matter what they did to prevent it. Level four biohazard containment was not enough. Nothing was ever enough.
It was funny how much a kid like me learned about biohazard containment in those first few years. Not so much "funny-ha-ha" as "funny-horrifying", though.
The thing that made Ebola-X so terrifying was its virulence. It spread so fast that no one could hope to contain it. It had infected half of the African continent before the rest of the world even realised that it was a threat.
It was vicious and untreatable. What it did to the human body was horrific and irreversible; like other strains of the Ebola virus, it liquefied healthy cells. Unlike its ancestors though, the thing it destroyed first was the delicate tissue of the brain. Within hours of infection, the temporal lobe began to disintegrate, taking with it speech, memory and perception. The rest of the cerebrum followed soon after, leaving only basic motor function behind.
Eventually, the motor function went as well, but by that stage the body was usually starting to fall apart. Given enough time it destroyed the entire infected body, but it took years to get that far. Even a decade after the infection first hit us, there were still plenty of undead wandering aimlessly around the landscape.
Some of the victims died within hours, but others survived for many years after the infection erased their conscious minds. It had been almost ten years since the first reported case arrived on New Zealand’s shores, and nine and a half since they stopped telling us what the body count was. It was safe to say that most of the people that used to live here were dead.
I had seen a few other survivors over the years, but experience left me wary of strangers and I always gave them a wide berth. Resources were limited, and a lone female in a world without rules was easy prey. My sense of self-preservation told me to keep to myself, so I did.
For me, the worst part was that I didn’t know if the infected were conscious or aware up until the end, or if they felt any pain. I had no way to ask them. It still made me feel terrible to put them out of their misery, even after so many years. They were human beings, or at least they had been, and no one deserved to suffer like that. Somehow, killing them felt like an act of mercy.
Before the roar of the media shrank to a whisper, they told us that there was a small percentage of the population who had been born with a natural genetic abnormality which made us immune to the effects of the virus. The only thing separating me from that poor old man was one tiny twist of fate. I was still infected, but my immune system had the rare and precious ability to fight it off. I had no idea how long my immunity woul
d last, though. The virus could mutate at any time, leaving me defenceless.
Einstein was wrong. God did play dice, and I was lucky enough to roll high this time.
The virus was aggressive and indiscriminate; it was in the water, the air and was even carried by some of the animals. For the people who weren’t as lucky as me, transmission was unavoidable. If you were near an infected, and you were not immune, then you were going to die. It was just a matter of time.
Within a year of the first reported case, a billion people were gone.
There was no cure.
There was no antivirus.
There was no hope.
After so many deaths, there was no one left alive to study the virus and look for a cure, at least not as far as I was aware. Perhaps there was a bunker somewhere full of scientists working diligently to try and find a solution that would preserve humanity from extinction, but if there was, they didn’t invite me. I wasn’t surprised. I was eighteen years old when the plague devastated my world. Just a useless kid, I hadn't even decided what I was going to do with my life. Now, I no longer had the choice. I was a survivor, and that was all I’d ever be.
The infected man in the store, he had been a person once, too. A good man, probably. An innocent man. In my imagination, it was his life’s dream to retire to this little town and spend his twilight years running that tiny store.
I wondered if his wife was dead, too. His children. His grandchildren. Thinking about it made what I had to do so much harder.
I couldn’t just leave him like this, though. It wouldn't be right. There was no way for me to know if he was in pain, but it sure as hell looked like he was suffering. No one would want to spend the rest of their existence shuffling around mindlessly until their legs finally fell off. As one of the lucky few that won the genetic lottery, I had an obligation to free him from his torment and let him move on to whatever came next.
With silent care, I slipped my backpack from my shoulders and set it on the ground at my feet, then paused to check if anyone had seen the motion. Nothing else moved except me. Me, and my decomposing friend across the street.
I rose to my feet and crossed the cracked roadway in a dozen quick steps, drawing from my pocket the single most effective weapon in my arsenal: A small hand taser. In most cases, it was enough to put down one of the infected once and for all. Why a non-lethal weapon was lethal to the pseudo-dead, I really didn’t know, but what I did know is that it was quick, bloodless and hopefully painless – that was what was important to me.
I thumbed the switch to the on position as I entered the store; the taser crackled to life in my hand, ready to discharge its high-voltage payload. The clerk did nothing. He just stood there, helpless, shuffling the one lone DVD case left on the shelf back and forth with a limp hand.
"Hey," I called softly, hoping to draw his attention. "You okay, buddy?"
Of course he wasn't, but I had to be sure in case the old man wasn’t really undead. Sometimes a survivor just went completely off his nut. It happened occasionally in our short and brutal existence. The old man just stood there, staring off into space, oblivious. I let out a soft whistle, trying a different frequency to get his attention.
That time, it worked.
His head rose and turned to look at me with blind eyes, worn over by cataracts long before the virus compounded his problems. His brow knitted into a frown, and he opened his mouth as though to speak but no sound came out.
I cringed. He looked so much like my grandfather, who died when I was a little girl. Even after all these years, I still remembered holding my Poppa’s wrinkled old hand as he lay on his deathbed, gazing up at me with those sad, blind eyes. In retrospect, I could take comfort from the fact that Poppa didn’t have to watch the world crumble into ruin, but that didn’t ease the pain.
Slowly, cautiously, I circled around the old man. His head jerked side to side, seeking the sound that had drawn his attention.
Most of the infected weren't really dangerous. I’d yet to see a strain of the disease turn them into violent monsters, like the ones in the movies. They were stripped of their awareness but they still resembled the people they’d been in life. A gentle person was still gentle; a violent one was still violent. The virus stripped away the laws of civility that once helped them to fit into a neat and well-ordered society; it erased from their minds the rules that kept them from giving in to their natural impulses.
"It's okay, buddy. I'm just going to put you to sleep." I kept my voice low and calm; like animals, the pseudo-dead responded more to tone of voice than the words themselves. "I'll make the pain go away."
He didn't turn to face me or even move from the spot, but just stood there shuffling his limbs listlessly. One of his hands moved absently in mid-air, shifting a non-existent video case towards a better imaginary location, while I stepped carefully over the real cases that were scattered all over the floor. Crushed plastic and cracked discs crunched ominously under my feet, like dry old bones picked clean and left brittle in the sun. There was nothing left of them to salvage, they were damaged beyond repair by the old man’s shuffling feet.
The taser made a soft crackling sound when I pressed it to the nape of the old man's neck; he collapsed like a sack of potatoes at my feet. I knelt beside him to check, but the old man was already gone. To Heaven, I hoped, or whatever came next. Anything was better than lingering in purgatory while your body rotted away around you.
I hung my head to reflect and to offer a silent prayer for the old man's soul. Although I was raised as an atheist, spending so much time surrounded by violence and death made me wonder if there was something more. I hoped so. It hurt too much to think about so many good, innocent people just ceasing to be.
I’d been alone for a very long time. Even so, killing someone who looked like a person that I loved still affected me more deeply than I could express. I sometimes wondered if it would be easier to feel nothing at all, but the pain kept me grounded in reality. They weren't monsters, they were people. Just like me, just like my family, just like everyone else. The day I stopped feeling something towards them was the day that I became the monster.
Years ago, I made myself a promise: if the day ever came when I stopped feeling grief and remorse for what I had to do to survive, then I would put my gun against my head and join my family in the hereafter.
Chapter Two
December, 2013
Fresh from school and full of energy, I pulled open the front door, trotted inside and flung my school bag into its usual corner by the door. It landed with a heavy ‘thunk’, full of books and all the other junk I had to bring home at the end of the school year.
"Mum, I'm home!"
My voice echoed down the hall as I headed for the kitchen in search of something cool to alleviate the summer heat. Although it was only mid-December, it was hotter than Hades and muggy to boot. The cheap polyester of my school uniform clung in all the wrong places, and it did not breathe at all.
I yanked open the fridge, and relished the wave of cool air that smacked me in the face like a glorious arctic ice floe. When my mother didn’t respond, I glanced over my shoulder and called her again. "Mum?"
After grabbing a can of lemonade from the top shelf, I shouldered the fridge closed and went off in search of my missing parental unit. I wasn't worried, but I wanted to talk to her and she was always home at this time of day to greet me. It was a family tradition for us to hang out for a couple of minutes after school and work, just to talk and catch up on the day. I was always bursting with gossip, and she was happy to listen. That’s just how my mum was – she was a listener, and she was always there for me no matter what.
I stuck my head into the stairwell and called out to her again.
"Mu-um?" I paused, waiting impatiently for a response.
"She's not he-ere." The reply came in my father’s voice. My curiosity was doubly-piqued now – Mum was out and Dad wasn't at work? My home environment was usually very organised and wel
l-ordered; it was unusual for things to be out of place. Following the sound of his voice up the stairs, I made my way into his office.
"Why aren't you at work?" I asked, curious.
"Why aren't you at school?"
"Dad, it's after four." I laughed and shook my head. "School let out an hour ago."
His brow furrowed into a look of confusion. I glanced over his shoulder at the computer screen behind him, and caught a glimpse of some gruesome photographs on what looked to be a current affairs website.
As soon as he realised where I was looking, my father spun and switched off the monitor, then turned back to give me an awkward smile.
"I guess I lost track of the time."
"Uh-huh. You know they talked about that thing in school, right? You don't have to hide the photos." I layered on the sarcasm, the way I always did.
Dad bolted from his chair and grabbed me by the shoulders, a movement so sudden that it startled me right out of my cavalier mood. "They did what?"
"T-they talked about the thing happening in Africa." I stared up at my father wide-eyed, shocked by his vehemence. "We got a big lecture about hygiene and stuff in the final assembly today. I don’t get it. It's just another SARS, it'll blow over soon enough."
My confusion must have been written on my face, because his expression softened as he looked down at me. Finally, he released me and turned away, rubbing the bridge of his nose between finger and thumb; a familiar anxious habit of his.
"I don't think so, sweetheart. This is different." He glanced at me again; the look on his face was one I’d never seen before, and that scared me.
My heart skipped a beat.
"Daddy?"
"Go get out of your uniform, Sandy. I'll make us some smoothies and then we'll talk. Okay?"
Dad always knew how to get my attention, and he knew I loved a good smoothie.
"Okay," I agreed, happy to put the morbid conversation aside. I left the office and crossed the hallway to my bedroom door, which stood ajar to reveal the mess within. The sight struck me as strange, because my mother usually picked up after me while I was at school. Perhaps the impending ‘talk’ I was about to get from my father was the one about how I was old enough to clean my own damn room.
The Survivors (Book 1): Summer Page 1