"Who's cowering? I am just being realistic. I can deal with the creatures; other people are what worry me. The creatures are more like a force of nature, just mindless eating machines with no signs of higher intelligence or purpose. It is easy enough to keep them at bay and stay alive. But if we find human beings out there and let them in here with us and they don't have our best interest at heart we will lose everything."
"But David –"
"Amy, please. For my sake can you just at least for now not try to communicate with anyone?"
"Okay, for now, for you."
"Thank you. I think that we should get a move on and go out on patrol. These last couple of days it seems like the creatures have been massing, as though they are planning something."
"I thought that you just said they were like a force of nature, mindless eating machines with no purpose or intelligence."
"I did, but I am willing to consider the possibility that I could be wrong about that. Even swarms of insects have some degree of intelligence and group organization, and I think that even these mindless creatures might have some type of horde intelligence, like a pack of rabid animals."
The two of them went out on their patrol. Much like David suspected he found more and more of them massing in the city than he had previously thought.
"I do think that I am right, they are planning something," he said as they burned a bunch of cocoons in a local gymnasium.
"What exactly do you think they are planning?"
"I don't know, but I feel like they are probably planning some type of full frontal assault. I have been keeping them away for a long time but it seems like they always keep coming back in larger and larger numbers. I am afraid that they might try to besiege the White House."
"Do you think that they could possibly know that that is where we live?"
"Again I don't know what the limits are to their intelligence, but the fact that every night the White House is lit up with high-intensity ultraviolet lights must signal them to the fact that there is some type of creature or intelligent being living there. I don't know if they have the ability to make attack plans or to strategize, but all of this has me deeply on edge. I am thinking we should probably be getting back to the White House to prepare for the worse. It is already beginning to get rather late."
"I think that I just want to check out some books on biology from the library. Maybe if we could get a sample of these creatures without it dissolving we could learn some strategy for attacking them. I mean I am no biologist or a virologist like my former fiancée was, but knowledge is power, and anything that we can learn about these creatures could be useful in finding a way to defeat them."
"Okay, but I really think that maybe this could wait. Try to be as quick as possible. I will meet you back at the White House."
"Don't worry I will be okay."
Amy proceeded to go to the library and began doing some heavy reading on biology, including the biology of decomposition and the biology of blood drinking creatures. She figured it was as good a place to start as any. But as she continued searching through the archives she found herself getting more and more tired. Her space fatigue was beginning to set in again and she thought that she had better just gather up her books and get back to the White House, because it was almost sunset.
As she gathered up a large bag of books and slung it over her shoulder in a satchel, she began to feel a bit dizzy and soon everything was spinning once again. Before she even realized what happened she had fainted and was completely out like a light once again.
"Amy!" David shouted as he shook Amy on the floor. "Wake up." Fighting against all of his instincts he pulled down his face mask and began performing CPR on Amy and she quickly woke up.
"David, what happened, what are you doing?"
David turned to the side and began spitting and coughing before covering his face up once more. "Where have you been?"
"I guess I must have collapsed."
"We have to get out of here, it's already sunset."
"Don't worry; I am sure that we will be able to get back before –"
Amy was unable to finish her sentence before they were both interrupted by the sound of a loud ear piercing shrieking.
"That can't be good," she said.
"It must be the creatures. We really have to get out of here."
The two of them started walking towards the entrance to the library only to find that at the door was an entire horde of the creatures smashing their way through.
"Well shit," said David as he lifted up his flamethrower and began burning them in large numbers. As he was doing that they heard some glass shatter behind them and saw more of the creatures coming through the windows. David began burning them as well but they just kept coming.
"I think we're surrounded," said Amy as she drew her gun and began firing at the creatures, getting a few head shots in, but only taking down a few of them.
"And now I have just lit our only refuge on fire," he said as he pointed to all the burning bookshelves around them. "Why couldn't you have listened to me and just gone back to the White House?"
"David I'm sorry," she said as she grabbed his arm, which he quickly pulled away. "I didn't mean to. This is all my fault. I just wanted to learn more about these things."
"All you need to know is that they are monsters and that they must be destroyed." David continued firing the flamethrower at the creatures as they tried to charge to the entrance. By now the entire entrance was blocked off by a thick wall of flame.
"What are we going to do?"
"I don't know, we just have to hope that –" David said before screaming.
"Oh my God David," shouted Amy as she saw one of the creatures come up and bite him on the arm. Without hesitating she drew her gun and shot the creature right in the head, causing it to fall to the floor and begin disintegrating.
"The bastard bit me!" David shouted as he grabbed his arm.
"Let me see, is it bad," Amy said as she grabbed for his arm that he pulled away to reveal that there was a huge gash in it, gushing a large amount of blood. As soon as Amy saw that she began to tear up. "David I'm sorry."
"Get out of here," David said as he waved his other arm at her.
"I can't just leave you here."
"I'm infected, I'm done for. I will try to hold them off with the flamethrower as long as I can. You go out the back and try to run to the White House. I will cover you."
"I can't just leave you here to die."
"You don't have a choice."
"David, please –"
"Go!" David shouted as he pointed to the back.
After hesitating for a moment Amy began to run with tears streaming down her face. She could hear David screaming in the background as she heard the hiss of the flamethrower and could see the library going up in a blaze behind her.
She ran as fast as she could, stopping every few moments to fire a few shots at the creatures in pursuit of her, but they just kept on coming. Through her tear blurred eyes she could just vaguely make out the White House in the distance illuminated by the ultraviolet light that would be her salvation. Suddenly a phrase she had heard before started playing in her head "just go towards the light." She listened to it and managed to run on to the White House lawn and into the protective ultraviolet light that caused the creatures to stop in their tracks.
Regaining her composure she turned around and began firing at the creatures to try and kill as many of them as possible. "You bastards!" she shouted as she continued crying hysterically before throwing her empty gun down and bolting for the entrance of the White House. As soon as she was inside she ran down the hallway before falling down and collapsing.
She had now lost two men named David who meant everything to the world to her, who were her entire world. Now she was alone once again.
Chapter 19
June 10, 2028 5:30 PM Eastern standard time.
Amy woke up to find herself in the hallway sweating furiously and tasting vomit.
She very slowly got up with her legs trembling and wobbling, causing her to fall down several times before slowly managing to pick herself up.
"I must have been out all day," she said as she noticed that the sun seemed to already be lower in the sky. She checked her watch to see that it was already 5:30 PM, and even though she had been unconscious the entire day she still felt like she barely had the energy to stand up.
When she started remembering David she began to sob hysterically. "I found another survivor only to get him killed within a couple of weeks of meeting him. Now I am completely alone again. I have to go back and see if he is okay."
Amy started preparing to go out on patrol but she still felt weak in the legs and her heart was racing. She managed to stumble back to her room where she took out her medical kit and took her blood pressure and pulse to see that everything was highly elevated. She was breathing really heavily and felt that she might be having some type of reaction. She thought it might just be stress related, but she couldn't be sure and she was getting worried.
"My space fatigue hadn't been this bad before," said Amy as she laid back in bed, continuing to feel her pulse and realizing that she was still sweating profusely. She took her temperature and found out that it was at a high of 100.5°.
Not feeling up to eating anything, Amy decided that she would take another bath in hopes of getting her temperature down and perhaps relaxing her a bit, or at the very least getting off the huge layer of sweat and filth that she felt left over from last night.
As she sat there soaking in the bathtub she gradually felt better but was seized with overwhelming feelings of loneliness. To have found another survivor only to lose them so quickly seemed like a cruel tease by the universe. First she lost Anatoly and Maria, then had to kill her fiancé, and now caused the death of another man with the same name. But as much as she didn't want to admit to herself she had to. "I killed him, it wasn't the universe, it was my fault," she said aloud as she began to cry again.
She had read about survivor's guilt and she never quite understood it until now. Her guilt was compounded by the fact that she was the one who left him behind. She cowardly saved her own life and didn't even go back to see if he survived. They didn't know for a fact that being bitten by the creatures would turn you into one, that was an assumption more than anything else. Why did she let him stay behind like that?
"I have to go back to look for him," she said as she started to get up from the tub before falling backwards and causing the water to splash onto the floor.
Amy got out of the bathtub slowly and got dressed and began to prepare to go look for David, but then she looked at the time and realized it was already 7 PM. In a short amount of time the sun would be going down and the creatures would be coming out. She hadn't even gone on patrol all day and didn't know if they were planning a major attack for the night. But then she had to admit to herself. "There is no way he could have survived. The entire library was in an inferno and he was severely injured. Even if he somehow survived that he would have been home by now had he survived, it has been nearly a day now, there is no chance that he could possibly be alive."
Resigning herself to the fact that David was gone for good she decided she had better prepare for the night. After forcing herself to eat just a little bit, she made sure that the lights were calibrated to go on automatically like they did every night. But she wasn't taking chances, she made sure that she found the other flamethrower and that she had several assault rifles and rocket launchers fully loaded and ready to go.
Just like she expected shortly after sunset the creatures began to mass outside of the White House. They didn't venture beyond where the ultraviolet light lay, but she could see that there was a larger crowd of them than usual. David had been right, the creatures were growing in number, and even if the lights managed to keep them at bay for a while, she couldn't rely on this forever. She would have to leave Washington DC.
Then a terrible thought occurred to her. Did she somehow bring these creatures there? David had been perfectly safe on his own for two years in Washington DC, but then shortly after she showed up all these creatures seem to be massing in greater numbers. What if they came and followed her from New York City? What if these creatures could communicate across large distances and track their prey like that?
"I guess I can't worry about that now," she said as he took her binoculars and looked at the creatures from a distance. "There are probably hundreds or even thousands of them. It's almost like a mass protest and here I am, the first lady, cowering in the White House."
As she zoomed in and looked closer she saw one of the creatures that was right at the gates and pressing against them, standing just outside the field of ultraviolet light. That was when, to her horror, she recognized that creature. "David!" she shouted. She wanted to deny it, but she couldn't, although he looked like he was now beginning to decompose, it was clearly David. He was wearing the same outfit he had the other night completely bundled up from head to toe, except now his face mask had fallen off.
She began to get watery eyed once again. "This confirms it, getting bitten does turn you into one of these horrible creatures," she said as she gripped the binoculars with an iron grip, causing her fingers to almost bleed. "I condemned you; I left you, to a fate far worse than death, the exact thing you most feared. I know what I have to do."
Amy got one of the assault rifles and a bunch of other weapons and went out onto the White House lawn. Looking in the crosshairs of the assault rifle she zoomed in on David's head and went to squeeze the trigger but stopped. "No, you know you have to do this, eyes open." Slowly and reluctantly she pulled down on the trigger and blew David's head away, causing him to fall down onto the floor and began dissolving.
She put the gun down and began sobbing but then something welled up inside of her and she picked it up again. She got more of the creatures in her crosshairs and began firing across an entire line of them, causing them to shriek as they started dissolving. Then she picked up the flamethrower and began walking forward as she roasted the creatures alive. "Take that you bastards!" she shouted. "Die, die, die!"
Suddenly she found herself in a trance. She just picked up a weapon after weapon emptying its contents into the shrieking mass of undead flesh. And as she did so she felt better and better, and before she knew it it was almost sunrise and the creatures were beginning to retreat.
"That was for you David," said as she slowly went back into the White House, dropped her weapons on the floor and fell face forward and collapsed once again.
Chapter 20
Amy woke up the next morning still feeling lightheaded but was pleased to see that she was still alive. It took her a few minutes to remember what had happened and when she did she began to cry again.
"But I can't sit here wallowing in self-pity," she said as she tried wiping away her tears and getting up. "I have to find some way to get out of the city as soon as possible. The creatures will keep coming back in larger and larger numbers and I have to find some way to find a new safe haven. Living in the White House has certainly been fun, and it feels pretty good to be the first lady, but I can't stay here forever."
She knew that David would not approve but she turned on the communication device once again hoping to try and raise someone on the radio, only to have the same results as every other time – nothing. If there were any survivors out there like her they weren't transmitting. But that left her with the next decision to make, where exactly should she go next.
After thinking it over for a while she thought that Houston might be the best option. She knew several people who lived there who worked at the space center and she felt that that was as good a place to look as any. Odds are that they would have suffered the same fate as everyone else, but she couldn't really put her mind at ease if she didn't at least check it out.
Amy took what she could from the White House but figured that if she found other survivors it was possible that someday she would be back. She decided
to leave a message for whoever might find it that she had gone to Houston to look for survivors and listed her radiofrequency, as she planned to bring the communications devices with her, along with the ultraviolet lights and a large stock of weapons. She loaded all of this up in her trailer attached to the Humvee and decided she had better get a move on as she only wanted to travel during the day while it was light and the creatures were in hibernation.
Keeping only to the off roads and areas with the least amount of cities it took her about three days to reach Houston in the early morning hours of June 14. She carefully made her way to the space center which looked just as abandoned as any other place.
As she made her way through the space Museum a feeling of deep depression began washing over her. All it could remind her of was that humanity's glorious history of space exploration had basically ended with her and wouldn't be resuming anytime soon. She felt that she was pretty much visiting a graveyard for human accomplishment, and that was almost as sad as everything else she had already experienced.
As she looked inside one of the displays of the lunar landers she saw what looked like one of the creatures hibernating. She so wanted to light it on fire but she didn't want to destroy the space capsule that it was hibernating inside of. She also didn't want to risk waking up any of the other creatures, who fortunately seemed to be in a pretty deep sleep throughout the day. She made sure to leave the room as quietly as possible.
As she walked into the next room with a big display of the international space station she couldn't help but shed a tear. That station had been her home for over two years, during which time she had watched the entire destruction of the Earth from above. She was starting to wonder if she made the right decision leaving it. But she figured that the space station was running down, so it wasn't exactly as though she had a choice. But still just seeing an image of it brought up a whole new wave of emotion.
The Last of the Living Page 10