Zombies' End: Aftermath

by Feren, Todd C.

  I took one last look at Terrence—he was a really great guy.

  He didn’t deserve to die like that. Nobody did.

  I made my way to the bathroom door we first came through and opened it up, and guess who I saw?

  That’s right. The fucking Corgi.

  She was just sitting there— licking Jason’s bones clean.

  I couldn’t see the alpha anywhere. He might have gone to try and get into the other room, or he might have left for good, I didn’t care.

  I didn’t care about him anymore. I wanted that fucking corgi dead. She looked up at me and licked Jason’s blood off of her lips. She snarled and took a step towards me. I angled myself towards the room that led to the stairwell we originally came up.

  That fucking corgi started to run at me and I dropped the shower rod with a clang. She jumped through the air, and I caught that bitch by her throat with my bare hands. She tried kicking and biting, but I fucking had her. I held her tight by the throat and punched her as hard as I could right in the face.

  Then, I said fuck it to leg pain. I put everything I had into throwing this thirty pound fucking corgi through the window. I stepped onto my bad leg and used every ounce of strength I had to throw that flea bag as hard as I could.

  She hit the windows sideways and smashed clean through. If there is a God, he or she must have used that moment to slow down time because I saw everything at a thousand frames per second.

  Her golden fluffy body was frozen in midair with thousands of shards of sparking glass exploding around her. She turned her head to look at me as she cleared the thick wooden windowsill.

  It felt so good to see her look back at me in the air with that “oh shit” look on her face.

  I collapsed to the ground right after that moment because more bones in my leg broke.

  I was on my back for maybe a second, when I felt the weight of the alpha as he landed on my chest. I instinctively shoved my hands up against his chest, trying my hardest to keep him away.

  He was strong—And I was weak.

  I tried to grip his skin as tight as I could.

  As I struggled with his bulk, I saw a bloody scar around his neck. I hadn’t notice it before, but It was thick.

  The more I looked at it, the more I realized that it wasn’t a scar at all. It was his collar.

  His collar was cutting into his skin, and it looked like his skin was now growing over it.

  His teeth kept getting closer and closer to my neck, and I could feel his breath, and hot drool raining down on me.

  I reached for the collar that was covered with dried blood and scabs from his body’s attempt to absorb the foreign material. He jolted when my hand gripped the collar, and for a second, I saw something different in his eyes.

  I pulled on it, and it started ripping out of his skin.

  It was fucking awful.

  He doubled down through the pain and snapped at my throat.

  I refused to let go of my grip on the collar. More and more of it broke through the skin as he struggled to break free from my grasp.

  Then, a shimmer of light caught my eye. There, on his collar that was now halfway pulled from his neck, I saw a tag flipping backwards and forwards as we struggled against each other.

  One side had an address: 218 Oak Street.

  As the other side flipped into view, I saw just one word.

  Apollo.

  He snapped at me again.

  That chomp was so close I could actually feel his teeth grazing against my skin.

  I shouted as loud as I could, “APOLLO!”

  And he stopped.

  Just stopped.

  He sat up and cocked his head to one side. My hands never left his neck, but my grip loosened

  “Apollo,” I said again. Then, his eyes changed. They went from being filled with hate and rage, to confusion, then when I said his name again, his eyes filled with something else.

  Sadness.

  He moved his head slowly and nudged my hand away from him with his snout. He stepped off of me and looked around the room. I sat up and said his name once more— softer than before.

  “Apollo…”

  He looked back at me with a look that hit me like a ton of bricks.

  This wasn’t an animal from the wild. Apollo was someone’s pet before all this shit. There were probably some adorable pictures of him on someone’s Facebook account.

  Somebody loved all of these dogs at one point. These dogs all probably loved their owners. How long had it been since Apollo lost someone he loved? Who knows why these dogs weren’t with their owners. I remember when I would leave town for more than a few days, my old dog Seymour would howl like a baby every night I was gone. When I’d come back home, she would cry tears of joy because every hour apart was just that painful for her.

  I think that when I said Apollo’s name, something woke up in him. Some memory of life when he went by that name.

  Now, he was just a wild dog trying to survive. But, he still remembered sleeping at the foot of someone’s bed. Someone sneaking food to him under a table. Someone petting him. He suddenly remembered a life where he was Apollo.

  The world had changed. His world had changed.

  He turned and left the room without looking back. His tail was down, and I heard him thumping down the stairs.

  He never came back.

  I stayed in that museum for almost a week. I was pretty sure I would die if I couldn’t make it out of there. Then, I saw people outside scavenging cars. They had kids with them. I screamed for help till my throat felt like it was bleeding. They found me, and I was lucky that they were good people. They took me in and gave me food.

  They even had a doctor as part of their group. He fixed up my leg and gave me medicine for the pain. One day, when he was checking on my leg, I asked him about his life before the zombie apocalypse. I asked him about where he practiced medicine. He laughed at me and told me he worked at the Orlando Animal Clinic.

  Turns out he was a veterinarian. Life’s funny, right?

  I asked him about Apollo, and about the collar in his neck. He said that kind of thing happens sometimes to neglected animals.

  He told me Apollo would eventually die from it. He would probably choke to death if an infection didn’t kill him first.

  It took about two weeks before I could walk on crutches, and even then it still hurt like hell. I found Oak Street on a map we had—It was only a few blocks over from the museum.

  I convinced one of the guys from the group to go with me to find Apollo’s home. Nobody in the group wanted me going.

  It was stupid, I know. Every time you leave your safe house, you’re risking your life. The general rule was, don’t leave unless it’s important.

  I don’t know why this was so important to me, but it was. When we found the place, the door was wide open, and I called out his name, half expecting a crazed pitt bull to charge down the stairs and rip my throat out.

  But, nothing—

  I went up the stairs, and believe me, each step was a fucking nightmare. I found the master bedroom, and there was Apollo, on the master bed.

  Dead.

  He wasn’t alone. There was a corpse on the bed too. Looked like someone shot themself. The gun was still locked in the corpse’s hand.

  Next to the bed was a picture of a family.

  Husband, wife, and Apollo.

  Looking around the room, I saw pictures of vacations to every national park, and tourist attraction you could imagine. In every single picture, there was Apollo—looking as happy as any loved dog could be.

  There was this one picture that I took with me. It’s Apollo with his head out the window in the back seat of a minivan.

  I don’t know why I kept it. This dog tried to kill me. He killed Jason, and who knows how many others he killed.

  But, in this picture, he’s not a killer.

  He’s a dog. He even looks like he’s smiling. Yeah, we’re all just trying to survive. We all did stuff we di
dn’t want to in order to survive. Apollo—he was just trying to survive too. But, in the end, he went home.

  He just wanted life to be like it was. He even made it back to his bed with the person he loved most. Isn’t that what we all want? To be back in our own bed with someone we love? To be back to a time before we all became something we never wanted to be?

  We all just want to go back to a time to before we became survivors.

  Closing thoughts

  The stories I heard that night and into the following morning were hard to listen to.

  It was just as difficult transcribing their words from my recorder.

  It was heartbreaking to relive their stories line by line, and yet through their hardships and pain, an underlying message was becoming more and more clear.

  Humanity wasn’t finished.

  People were grieving—will continue to be grieving—over the incidents that they were forced to endure over the four-hundred and ninety-one days of the “zombie apocalypse.”

  The word apocalypse is defined as “the complete and final destruction of the world.”

  Is that what we encountered?

  I mean, we’re still here. Sure, our numbers have dwindled, but humanity persisted nonetheless.

  Seventy thousand years ago, an event called “the Toba explosion” brought mankind’s population down to between one and ten thousand total inhabitants.

  And yet, humanity persisted. Not only did it persist, it thrived.

  Maybe the greatest tool that humans have in their collective folder is their ability to endure after catastrophic events. Our superpower is the ability to bounce back from near extinction level events.

  What fuels that ability in us to thrive and flourish after a nearly world ending event?

  That being said, there are still precautions that need to be taken.

  There are people screaming to reopen society at breakneck speeds because of a need for familiarity. People want so badly for life to be like it was before the outbreak, that they don’t care about the risks involved with moving so quickly.

  In nineteen-eighteen, Americans were growing weary of a quarantine from the Spanish flu. While colloquially referred to as the “Spanish flu,” the new strain of influenza didn’t necessarily originate in the Iberian Peninsula.

  Spain had remained fairly neutral during the first world war, and while the Allied and Central Powers nations had begun censoring all news coverage to prevent any appearance of looking weak to adversaries, the Spanish free press was allowed to share the horrors of the pandemic as they were experiencing it.

  Cases had been reported around the world, but due to Spain’s honesty, many countries began labeling it as the “Spanish-flu.”

  As American citizens became more and more frustrated with being quarantined, the war ended. Thousands of American people took to the streets to celebrate the end of the war.

  This excuse to celebrate in the streets was a much needed mental break from quarantined life. The people were so excited to finally be out of their house, so they broke quarantine.

  The following weeks saw the second wave of the pandemic, and it took more lives than the war itself.

  What happens when a world who is so ready to forget about the past in order to move forward lowers its guard for an instant?

  What happens when another drifting army of the dead wash up on any shore of the planet?

  The odds are that there are more “zombies” out there in the world. We haven’t eradicated the threat, and as of this moment, we don’t have a vaccine, nor the infrastructure to create one anytime soon.

  If we are to move forward from the global pandemic that literally ate its way through the human population, it’s going to take time.

  It’s not going to be easy.

  But there is a brighter future for us if we are willing to work through the last of it.

  When you’re running a marathon, or pushing yourself through a workout, the most important goal to push towards is a little more than halfway.

  Once you’ve gone a little further than halfway, it’s easier to make it the rest of the way and harder to go back.

  The world has made it out of the “zombie apocalypse,” and a little more. We’re fifty-one percent finished with the threat. In order to make sure we go all the way, we can’t let our guard down now just because we need to taste a Big-Mac.

  The desire to “return to normal,” is understandable, but if we don’t take the precautions that could prevent this virus from returning, we’ll never get to where we were.

  Maybe we shouldn’t be “where we were before.”

  Maybe we should be better.

  Maybe we can be better.

  I urge you to take the stories of those who have suffered and learn from them. Rediscover what the important things in the world are.

  There are other people documenting various aspects of the world in this time. Some are focusing on the geopolitical effects of the virus, some focusing on the military strategies, and others are researching the cause of the outbreak.

  All of their work is important and needed. As for me, I will be visiting other regions of the world and documenting other stories. The human stories are the ones that speak to me the most. The “average” person faced with extraordinary situations.

  Although, I think there is no such thing as an “average person” anymore.

  Humankind has risen to the occasion, and I hope we continue to rise.

  In closing, I’ll say this— The caterpillar didn’t suffer the end of the world when it became a butterfly.

  We’re not suffering the end of our world either— we’re in the process of changing.

  What will we be when we come out?

  Only time will tell.