First Activation: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller

by D. A. Wearmouth

  We told them about what had happened on the roof and what we saw in the parking lot while we all ate cold tinned tomatoes.

  Lea was in little doubt about what we should do next.

  “We should head out into the countryside today and find ourselves a quiet place with good all round views. I know a nice farm in Orange County. I visited it last summer with my partner, I’m sure it will be well stocked.”

  “I know Orange County,” Bernie replied, “but we don’t have to leave the apartment for at least a few days.”

  “I think we should go now,” Jack said. “It’s coming up to three days since this thing first started and there is no end in sight as far as I can see. Let’s get out of here.”

  If we stayed in the apartment, there was a risk of being trapped. Killers could have already been heading our way after hearing the shots from the roof. If we had to shoot more of them, we might run out of ammunition and be sitting ducks. Personally, I agreed with Jack and Lea. We might go undetected over the course of a few days, but it was probably wishful thinking.

  Lea’s idea was appealing. The countryside would surely be quieter. If we found a decent house in a remote place, then we could build it up defensively and our prospects would be better. The risk was that we would have to travel a reasonable distance and would almost certainly have to tackle some killers on the way.

  In the end, I sided with Lea. “You’re out-voted three to one, Bernie. I take it you are still coming with us?”

  “Of course I’m coming with you. We’re a team aren’t we?” Bernie replied irritably.

  I was glad that the vote hadn’t been split right down the middle and Bernie was willing to go with the majority. For now though, we had to prepare for a trip to the countryside.

  “Lea, where’s the farm?” Bernie asked.

  “It’s just outside Montgomery when you exit the highway, near a big old white house. Do you know it?”

  “I think I know exactly where you mean. We drove past that house a few times when visiting Linda’s parents and always talked about living there. It was our dream place.”

  “What’s it like for us?” I asked.

  “Great, it’s big, surrounded by a large garden, and it’s just off the main route. I think we should go there and not the farm.”

  “How far is it from here?”

  “About seventy miles, not far,” Bernie replied.

  “Okay, it sounds good. We can take a car from Queens Boulevard and drive directly there.”

  “Guys, I know the way there, nearly the entire route is on highways,” Bernie said, sounding more enthusiastic about leaving the apartment.

  “I still think we should go to the farm. It’s going to be better for supplies,” Lea replied.

  “We don’t know that. Besides, we’re leaving today for Orange County and the farm will be close by, at least give Bernie a choice of location,” I said.

  “Yeah, give Bernie the choice. He’s agreed to come along,” Jack added.

  “Fine,” Lea said rolling her eyes. Bernie smiled.

  “Right, let’s get ready,” Jack replied.

  I checked my weapon, put yesterday’s shopping in my backpack and moved towards the door, “Come on then, there’s no point hanging around.”

  Once we left the apartment and started heading towards Queens Boulevard, I knew we had made the right decision. The air was thick with the stench of death. It would only get worse in the more heavily populated areas. Most corpses were now three days old. I looked at one whose skin was beginning to become discoloured; the body looked unnaturally swollen in the morning sun. The city would be unbearable in another two days.

  Once on the road and heading away from Manhattan, we approached a right hand drive SUV that had pulled to the side of the road. Two people were sprawled outside the passenger door. One with gouges in his face and neck, surrounded by a pool of congealed blood. The other, with blood all over his hands had vicious red-scarred flesh around his mouth and a can of lighter fluid near his hand.

  Jack found the keys on the ground next to the driver’s feet. The ignition key was crusted in blood and had a piece of twisted flesh hanging off it. He used the driver’s sweater to wipe the key clean and started the vehicle’s engine. It rolled over smoothly and the dashboard indicated that the fuel tank was three quarters full. Bernie drove again, I took the other front seat, Jack and Lea jumped into the back.

  I surveyed the scene on the opposite side of the road as we turned on to the Long Island Expressway, this was new territory, but it had a similar feel to Queens Boulevard. Some cars had been used as weapons, others had pulled over, and corpses were spread in and amongst them. I stared at a man with a shredded face, his upper torso was hanging through a car windshield and a hawk was sitting on his head. Bernie brought the SUV to an abrupt, screeching, halt, causing the hawk to fly away and I felt myself strain against the seat belt.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, looking for signs of danger.

  Jack poked his head between the front seats, “What is it, Bernie?”

  “Guys, look down there to the right, there’s two men standing outside Aldi.”

  “I can see them, they’re carrying shotguns.” Lea pointed from the back seat.

  I looked down to the right of the vehicle and saw the two men staring over at us. They were about seventy yards away in front of the store entrance. Around thirty corpses were piled in the middle of the car park close by. The shotguns were pointed in our direction.

  “What shall we do? Do you reckon they’re like us?” Bernie asked.

  “At this range, they could still be dangerous, I have a feeling that if there are two just standing on guard, then others will be close by,” Jack said.

  “I don’t know. Remember that man on the bridge I told you about? He killed two people and ran away. There are other bad people out here,” Lea replied.

  Lea’s earlier revelation suggested that not everyone had been affected in the same way. We thought we had the pattern worked out, kill-suicide, perhaps there was another trend we were yet to discover. The one common theme was the need to kill, but the men below weren’t showing any signs of this.

  “I’m going to get out and call over to them; we should at least give them a chance,” I said.

  “I’m coming with you; it will show them there are two of us,” Jack replied.

  “Are you sure about this guys?” Bernie said.

  “Let’s go,” I said, and detached my seatbelt. Jack did the same.

  I exited the SUV and walked to the side of the road, Jack joined me. We were in an elevated position above the two men, whose shotguns were still aimed in our direction. I heard the noise of electric windows being lowered behind us.

  “Lower your weapons, we don’t mean you any harm,” I shouted over.

  “There’s four of us here, we’re not trying to kill anyone,” Jack added.

  One man lowered his weapon, and I felt a rush of excitement. He said something to the other man, and then walked towards us, holding out the shotgun to one side in his right hand.

  “Did you fly from Manchester?” he said. I was just about to reply when the man shouted, “Hey, you’re those two guys from the plane, the ones that went to the terminal, but never came back.”

  “We did come back, you didn’t wait long enough,” Jack replied, I could hear slight anger in his voice.

  He walked further towards us and stood beneath the road around twenty yards away. He spoke in a British accent, was quite short with brown hair and a faded tattoo on his right forearm.

  “It’s been crazy since we left the airport. Thirty of us split from the main group after someone drove at us in a fire truck. I don’t know where the rest of them are.”

  “There’s thirty of you here?” I asked.

  “There’s only twenty two of us left.”

  “What happened to the others?” Jack replied.

  The man looked down for a moment.

  “They didn’t make it here. W
e barricaded ourselves in the store. A few people tried to break in, but whenever someone else showed up, they fought each other to death. We haven’t seen anyone for the last few hours.”

  “How did you manage to take a store?” I asked.

  “We just rushed in, locked the doors, and secured the back entrance. There was only one person alive in there, she slashed Morgan across the eye, but he managed to beat her brains out with a small fire extinguisher.”

  “He was that dick in business class, brown blazer?” Jack said.

  “Yeah, that’s him. He figured that somewhere with supplies would be the best place to hide out. Nobody will get through the back and we can see anyone coming from the front. We started moving the dead an hour ago.”

  Without warning, the man crouched and aimed his shotgun to the left, a plastic bag drifted along the concrete past him. He looked back at us and puffed his cheeks.

  “Do you have any idea what’s happened?”

  “I was about to ask you the same thing,” Jack replied.

  I gestured to Lea and Bernie. They joined us at the edge of the road.

  “Did you hear all that?” I asked.

  They both nodded.

  “Hey,” The man called up in greeting.

  “Sounds like you’ve had a rough time. Do you plan on staying here?” Bernie replied.

  “Do you have any better ideas?”

  “We’re heading away from the city…”

  Bernie paused and looked towards the store.

  Two men were carrying out a corpse. I recognised one as Morgan; he was wearing a makeshift eye-patch. Morgan noticed us, let go of the corpse, and its head hit the ground with a dull thud. He came striding over to where the armed man was standing.

  “Who are you?” he barked, looking up at us.

  “I’m Harry, that’s Jack, Lea, and Bernie.”

  “You’re those two cretins from the flight. Thanks for nothing.”

  “Are you serious?” Jack replied.

  “Mister Morgan, come on, these…”

  “Oh shut up, Harris, I’ll take the negotiations from here. Go and help Tweedle clear the store.”

  The man took a step back behind Morgan, looked up, shrugged his shoulders, and then walked away.

  “What do you want?”

  “We’re not here to negotiate anything. I’m just happy to meet others who are alive and not trying to kill us,” I replied.

  “What are you doing here then? Where are you going?”

  Morgan’s tone was irritating me and his attitude was surprising, considering the situation we were all in.

  “Away from the city. Can we get some supplies?” Lea asked.

  “I thought you said you weren’t here to negotiate anything?” Morgan said, looking at me.

  “Fucking hell, Morgan, get a grip, why…”

  My reply was cut short by Morgan’s reaction. He took a pace back, his eyes widened, he turned, and sprinted for the store entrance shouting, “Harris, Harris.”

  Jack looked at me and frowned, I heard footsteps below us.

  A woman appeared from underneath the expressway holding an axe above her head. She was slow but chased Morgan, who disappeared into the store entrance along with the other man who was still outside. They must have locked the door as the woman rattled it a few times, and then chopped at it with the axe, cracking the glass panels but not breaking them.

  She paused, turned, and looked directly at us.

  “Holy shit,” Bernie gasped.

  I glanced back at the SUV. Something moved in my peripheral vision. I looked along the road in the direction we had come from, around two hundred yards away, a figure darted from behind one car to another.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I shouted.

  Jack had turned and noticed as well, “Move!”

  He aimed his rifle.

  “That woman’s coming,” Lea screamed.

  We jumped back into the SUV, Jack and Lea pointed their weapons out of the open windows from the back seats. I looked across and saw Bernie struggling to get the key in the ignition, his hand was shaking.

  “Drive, Bernie, bloody drive,” Jack shouted.

  “I’m trying,” Bernie frantically replied. The engine turned over and the SUV quickly jerked forward.

  I looked back through the rear window as we moved away. A short, fat man had abandoned stealth and was now running towards the SUV; luckily, Bernie managed to pick his way through the stationary obstacles on the road faster than our pursuers speed. He stopped when he arrived opposite the Aldi. He must have seen the woman with the axe as he jumped off the side of the expressway. For now, the immediate danger had gone.

  “We need to make sure we keep our guard up at all times,” I said.

  “Yeah, imagine if the woman with the axe didn’t turn up? How close would he have got?” Lea replied.

  “I would have taken him out,” Jack said.

  Perhaps Jack would have, but it was an important lesson for us to remain vigilant.

  We drove in silence towards Interstate 684, we had agreed for the time being that we shouldn’t stop again unless it was an emergency. I was maintaining a careful watch outside of the SUV, as we slowly picked our way through stationary traffic and over the occasional body along the Hutchinson River Parkway. Once there, the vehicles thinned out, which allowed Bernie to increase our speed out of the city.

  “Fucking Morgan,” Jack eventually said.

  “What’s wrong Jack?” Lea asked.

  “It’s people like him that likely caused all this, and there he is trying to take control and create a little empire. We should go back and take him out.”

  “What? And start killing everyone we meet who annoys you?” Bernie said.

  “You know what I mean, Bernie. If there are people left, we should be working together or the world will end up like a Mad Max movie.”

  I stayed quiet; even though Jack had a fair point, we couldn’t start taking the law into our own hands. Who were we to make the rules? If by some chance we managed to make it through the next few weeks, then we could start trying to piece together a community with other survivors. It’s human nature though to create a pyramid and at the top are always the wrong people. Lions led by donkeys was the First World War epitaph, but the truth lies somewhere in between. In any social group, even a hippie commune, there will be a group who try and control things. I couldn’t think of the sociology we faced, so I changed the subject.

  “So what’s Orange County like then?”

  “It’s a great area to live,” Bernie enthused, “I’ve always felt at home there away from the city. Have you ever been to the fair, Lea?”

  “No, I haven’t really spent much time there, but I agree it’s a great place for us to head now.”

  “What places have you been to?”

  “Forget that, someone’s following us,” Lea replied.

  I looked back and saw a blue car snaking through the traffic about a hundred yards behind us.

  “We can’t let it follow us all the way to Montgomery, can we?” Bernie said.

  Jack had his rifle aimed out of the back window.

  “Try to get a bit further ahead. We can stop and have time to find some cover. Maybe we can ambush them,” I replied.

  “Wouldn’t they see us stop and guess what was coming?” Lea said.

  “So what? They either want to speak to us or kill us. We handle both exactly the same way, with caution and force if needed,” Jack said.

  Bernie increased our speed. By the time the driver of the blue car reacted, we had gained enough ground to stop and set up our safety zone.

  “Stop here, quickly,” I shouted.

  Bernie slammed on the brakes and we came to a halt just behind what appeared to be a head on collision between two cars.

  We took cover behind a red car that had stopped in the outside lane. The windows were so spattered with blood, that we could only just see outline figures inside the car. The blue car came to a stop a
round thirty yards away. There was a single woman inside and no sign of any weapons.

  She exited the vehicle, put her arms in the air and cried out, “Please, help me. I’m on my own.”

  The woman was in her twenties and was wearing jeans and a vest. Her hair was matted with blood; she didn’t appear to be armed with anything and dropped to her knees with hands in the air.

  “Where have you come from? What have you been doing in the last three days?” I said.

  She looked at me and seemed to be shaking with fear.

  “I don’t know. I’ve been in a car accident. The last thing I remember, is a car skidding in front of me and smashing into it. I must have been unconscious for a long time. When I woke up a few hours ago, all the cars around me on the road had stopped.”

  “The cars had just stopped? No dead people around? Have you come across anybody else?” Bernie asked.

  “No, I haven’t seen anybody. And of course I have seen fucking dead people. How could you miss them?”

  “Is this an acknowledgement of events, or a killer’s attempt to give us what we want to hear?” I whispered to the group.

  “I haven’t a clue, but I don’t want to go near her,” Bernie replied.

  “Ask her more questions,” Lea said, without breaking to look at any of us.

  “Why did you follow us? What’s your plan?” Jack asked.

  “I don’t have a plan. I just wanted to find somebody who was alive. If you doubt me because my car isn’t wrecked,” she pointed back towards the vehicle she had approached in, “this isn’t my car. Mine couldn’t be driven after the accident. Check the documents inside if you don’t believe me.”

  “The documents don’t prove anything,” Bernie shouted back.

  “I’m not sure how we are going to resolve the situation,” I whispered.

  The woman remained kneeling on the road.

  “She could come along with us, but we keep her under armed guard until we build up some trust,” Lea replied in a lowered voice.

  “No way. Why risk letting her get close to us?” Jack said.

  “Please, guys, stop fucking around,” The woman cried.

  “Why don’t we send her away in the opposite direction? It might give us enough time to shake her off,” Bernie said.