by Max Danzig
Steve stayed that way for a while, then jumped to his feet and rushed into his mom and dad’s bedroom. His dad wasn’t there. He ran to the living room and looked out the front window. His father’s GMC Yukon wasn’t in the driveway. He had gone to work. Steve took out his phone and dialed his dad’s work number with quaking hands. There was no answer. It didn’t even go to voicemail, it just kept ringing. He tried several times, but his dad never picked up. He cursed his father for not making himself available and not calling home. Steve thought as long as he hasn’t heard from him, his dad was okay and was trying to get home. He called Marcus's phone. Marcus picked up, but he didn’t speak. Steve heard Marcus crying then hang up.
Steve wondered about his sister Heather who was at school in Keene, in the western part of the state. He found her number in his contact list and dialed it. It just rang. He tried her cell phone—same thing. He tried calling all of his friends’ cell phones and their home phones, but no one answered any of them.
Steve went back to the bathroom and tried to close Sarah’s bulging eyes to make it look like she was sleeping but they wouldn't stay shut. He didn’t want to leave them there, but he didn't want to stay either. Steve kissed his Mom on the head goodbye and placed towels over her and Sarah’s faces.
He folded Sarah’s stiffening legs into the bathroom and closed the door. He couldn’t find any of the cats, so he opened the deck door wide enough to let them escape. Steve left the house, locking the front door behind him, and walked up the street toward Marcus' house.
When he got there Marcus was already gone. The front door of the Wakefield house stood open like the black silent maw of a tomb, inviting him into the cold darkness beyond. Steve shuddered and stepped back out onto the road.
He noticed a fresh strip of burned rubber in the blacktop leading up the street. He knew Marcus had sped off to his father’s house in Manchester. Steve didn’t envy him knowing what he’d find when he got there.
Steve spent an hour ringing door bells and knocking on doors. All the while he passed bloodied dead bodies on the road and in front yards. Their faces etched in screams for help that would never come.
The only thing that met him at every turn - was death and silence.
Chapter 3
Peter Crawford stood on stage in front of fifty businessmen and women from the local Rotary Club in the Adam’s Memorial Opera House in Derry, New Hampshire. Nervous, Peter thought he might puke. His boss sent him from their Manchester office to present their services to the club members to help them run their businesses more cost-effectively. Although he lived locally, he had never been in the Opera House nor met any of the business owners that now sat before him. Peter hated speaking in public at larger venues and hated being up on stage. He preferred being in front of smaller, more intimate groups.
Even worse, he hated knowing that if he didn't do a good job his month end bonus would be jeopardy. Management believed their middle-managers were the figurehead representatives of the company. In reality they were just there as a cheap form of direct advertising for the company. He didn’t know it, but his presentation wouldn’t last long.
He had made index notes on his phone, which he now held in front of him like a shield. Peter felt calm, but the way the phone shook in his hand, it gave the attendees the impression he looked nervous. Some of them picked up on that. The people attending were familiar and comfortable in each other’s company. Everyone was talking, joking and laughing. Peter knew if he coughed, tripped or fumbled a word he’d lose their attention.
“Hello and welcome.” Peter began, “The work we do at Computer Consulting Associates is diverse and interesting. We're responsible for...”
“Hey,” a man said from the middle of the room, waving his hand.
“Yes?”
“Where’s the coffee?” he asked. “How do you expect to keep us awake through this?”
Laughter rippled through the audience. This stopped Peter cold. He never expected a so called professional to act like this. He looked over at the club president standing at the side of the auditorium. As soon as he made eye contact with her, she turned and looked out the window. There was a small smile on her face.
“As I was saying,” he continued, “we work with a wide range of clients, from sole proprietorships to large multinational corporations. We provide business analysis and consultation on which software applications meet your needs, the hardware systems to invest in and...”
Another interruption. A man and woman in the back row were engaged in a heated conversation. Although loud, he couldn’t make out what they were saying.
“Bobby?” the club president said to the two people, who now turned to look her way. “Mr. Barron, anyone would think you didn't want to hear what Mr. Crawford has to say.”
As if the behavior of the attendees weren’t bad enough already, now the club president was being sarcastic. Peter didn't know whether she meant it to sound that way, but that's how the rest of the audience took it. Stifled laughter moved through the room, hands were over mouths punctuated by loud giggling. Within seconds the whole room burst into uproarious laughter.
He didn’t care that much about his month end bonus. This humiliation wasn’t worth it. Peter collected his materials and got ready to leave when it happened.
A woman in the front row started coughing. At first Peter though it was because she had been laughing so hard, but it grew louder and became a hacking cough. It sounded as if it was tearing the lining of her throat apart with each convulsion. Peter took a few steps towards her then stopped. Other than her phlegm-choking coughs the rest of the room became quiet. Peter watched as her head drooped down and thick strings of ropy blood and spit dribbled into her cupped hands. She looked up at Peter, her eyes huge with panic. Then she started suffocating and was gasping for air.
Peter again looked at the club president. This time she stared back at Peter with fear and confusion etched on her face. At the back of the room, the man the club president called Bobby started to cough and wheeze. Fear painted his face as he too began choking on his own blood. A woman in the middle of the room whimpered and went into a coughing fit. The club president started walking towards her but stopped as she also began to cough and spit. In only a minute every single person in the room was coughing, choking and bleeding tearing at their throats fighting to breathe. Every single person, except Peter.
He didn't know what to do or where to go to get help. Numb with shock, he staggered down the few steps into the main auditorium. Peter picked his way along the center aisle towards the front entrance passing rows of people screaming, retching and vomiting blood.
Peter tripped over a laptop bag and grabbed onto a nearby seat to steady himself. A young man grabbed his hand. The man wore a pressed white Oxford shirt now soaked by the blood gushing out of his mouth. Peter stared into his face. Starved for oxygen, the man's face turned blue as volumes of blood ran down his chin and his head lurched backwards as he gasped for precious air. Each uncontrolled spasm of his body forced more air out of his lungs than could enter.
Peter tore his hand away from the man’s grasp and ran for the door. In a blind panic he groped for the door, fumbling with the knob. He pulled on it with all his might while looking over his shoulder at the chaos behind him. In desperation, he pushed on the door and it swung open. Peter ran out into the main lobby.
The deafening screams from the auditorium joined the desperate screams from offices in the front of the building. The air reverberated with sounds of dying people, all of them choking to death on their own blood. By the time he made it through the front doors outside, it ended.
The Opera House went quiet.
Shell-shocked Peter descended the front steps in a daze. At the bottom of the stairs was the body of a girl sprawled face down on the ground in a pool of fresh blood. She looked to be only eighteen. He crouched next to her and touched her neck to feel for a pulse and pulled his hand away when it contacted her clammy flesh.
Pet
er forced himself to control his fear and disgust. He grasped her shoulder and rolled her onto her back. Her face was pale white and smeared with blood and yellow mucus. He leaned down as close as he dared and put his ear next to her mouth. Peter held his breath and waited to hear even the slightest sounds of breathing. There was nothing.
He stood facing the sun on this cool October morning, not being able to grasp what was happening around him. Peter walked to his car parked on Broadway. Utter chaos was everywhere. Whatever happened in the Opera House had happened outside. Everywhere he looked bodies littered the sidewalks, parking lot and streets.
Not knowing what else to do, he got into his car and drove home. His mouth hung open and his eyes were large and wild. He was only three miles from home, but the drive was difficult because his arms and legs trembled so much from shock and adrenaline. It took tremendous effort to steer around bodies and crashed cars strewn in the streets and intersections. When he got home, he sat on the couch in his living room trying to calm his mind and make sense of what was taking place.
Hours later after it began, Peter saw no one else alive through the window of his living room. With no sounds of passing cars, leaf blowers, or even barking dogs the silence only added to the horror. He turned on the TV to see the reports of what was happening. Every channel was dark, or showed the message, ‘We are experiencing technical difficulties. Please standby’. Peter tried calling family members and friends. Most calls went to voicemail, while others made no connection at all. He also couldn’t connect to the internet.
His own house was secure, but it didn’t feel safe. Peter knew he couldn’t stay there and that he’d have to go out looking for others. He can't be the only one left.
He was never so scared in his life.
Chapter 4
Rachel Morris wasn’t feeling well. She decided to skip her shift at Parkland Hospital and stay home. She had a scratchy throat, a headache and felt too rundown to do anything. She just wanted to rest, and tried reading a book for a while but gave up when she realized she was reading the same paragraph five times in a row but didn’t even know what she read.
Amber, her roommate, hadn't been home for two days. Amber called last night so she knew Rachel was sick. She promised to pick up soup and a bottle of ginger ale on her way home, but Amber didn’t come back. It’s a good bet she stopped by her boyfriend Gregg’s place as she’d done in the past. Rachel cursed Amber as she searched the cupboards for something to eat, but found nothing to eat. She accepted that she’d have to pull herself together and go shopping herself.
Wrapped in a scarf and ski parka, she sniffled and headed out. She buried her face into her coat with the collar turned up against the cold and walked fast with eyes downcast along Franklin Street to the store at the end the block. Rachel realized she forgot her phone back at the apartment. She stopped trying to decide if she should go back. ‘Forget it,’ she thought. She’d only be a few minutes anyway.
The few minutes it took to get to the Cumberland Farms gas station and convenience store on Broadway, left her feeling drained, pathetic and sorry for herself.
She entered the store and noticed three other customers in her periphery, but paid them no attention at first. She stood in the aisle mumbling to herself trying to decide between the chicken noodle soup and the chicken and rice soup when an old man lurched towards her. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw movement. The man reached out and grabbed her arm.
Rachel recoiled, “What the hell!?”
He was gasping for breath. Although a nurse for only a year, to her it looked like man was having an asthma attack. His face turned blue and the grip he had on her arm tightened. Rachel tried to twist her arm away from the man but she couldn't get free. She dropped the soup cans and tried to pry his bony fingers off her arm.
A sudden noise came from behind her. She looked back over her shoulder to see another customer collapsing into a display rack, sending bags of potato chips, dip and salsa crashing to the ground. He fell onto his back and lay among the bags of potato chips, coughing, clawing at his throat and flailing around in agony.
The grip on her arm loosened, and she turned back to look at the old man. Tears of pain and fear ran down his weathered cheeks as he fought to catch his breath while sinking to his knees. He wheezed as if his throat closed, but she couldn't tell by what.
Rachel’s brain clicked into gear and she loosened his coat and shirt and got him to sit down. Before she could do anything, the man opened his mouth wide and blood flowed down his chin in a thick crimson flood, spattering on the floor in front of Rachel. The man fell over on the ground at her feet. Despite her training Rachel froze. Something was wrong, but she didn’t know what as she watched his body convulse and shake.
She looked back at the other man lying on the floor, thrashing his arms and legs. Rachel ran to the back of the store to find the store manager to call the police. By the time she found him in the back room he was already dead. The store manager had been sitting at wood veneer and metal desk when he had fallen and lay next to an overturned chair. He lay on his back with his head in a puddle of blood, his face twisted in agony. Rachel ran back to the front of the store. Both of the men she’d left fighting for breath had died.
Rachel ran out of the store, shielding her eyes against the bright early morning sun. She saw dark shapes lying close to her on the ground. As her eyes adjusted, she saw the dark shapes were bodies. They were everywhere.
“What the hell is happening here?” She yelled out to no one.
Two people lay on the ground by the gas pumps and the sidewalk, she noticed whatever killed the people inside the store, killed everyone outside too. They had all choked to death on their own blood. Every face contorted in pain, with their mouths and noses dark with blood.
Rachel looked towards the intersection of Broadway and Birch Street where three cars had crashed. No one moved. There was no police, fire department or ambulance. Everything stood still. The only thing that changed was the color of the traffic light as it switched through red, yellow and green.
Bodies lay everywhere, and it was quiet and still. Rachel went numb with shock. She stood rooted to the spot as rising panic gripped her.
Her paralysis broke, and she ran across Broadway and down Birch Street to the hospital a few blocks away. As she ran, she side-stepped and hopped over bodies, and dodged around cars that had run up on the sidewalk into fences, buildings and other cars. The horns of some of the crashed cars still blared.
On her run to the hospital, nothing moved along any of the streets, no cars, and no people. Nothing.
She ran into the hospital parking lot toward the Emergency entrance, it all looked too still, too quiet. She stopped when she reached the door. The door slid open, and Rachel took a reluctant step forward. She took a deep breath, stepped through the door and into the hospital.
The air inside was cool and all the lights were on, but it was dead quiet. No phones rang, and she heard no voices. Beeps sounded from the nurse’s station beyond the main door, but nothing else. She caught the normal smells of disinfectant and bandages, but underneath was an odor of something vile.
When she turned the corner into the waiting room, she was horrified by what she saw. There were a dozen people slumped in chairs, or lying in huddled piles on the floor all of them soaked in pools of blood and vomit. A new wave of horror hit her when she realized all of these people were lying dead in the waiting room, and no emergency personnel were attending to them.
Rachel took tentative steps entering through the double doors into the triage area. Patients lay dead in their beds, people who came with them crumpled on the floor around the beds, and nurses and doctors lay scattered all over the emergency area. There were pools of blood on the white tile floor with grey flecks. Areas of the floor were smeared with grotesque crimson snow-angel patterns from victims thrashing around in the last moments of their lives. It looked like a slaughterhouse.
Rachel came close to hyperventilating a
nd thought she’d pass out. She backed into the main door, her hands fumbling behind her pushing the bar to open it and exited the room. Rachel’s eyes were wide with shock, her brown skin took on a faded pallor and she moved stiffly. Her arms rigid at her sides, her fingers splayed, she edged her way back past the waiting room, through the sliding doors and back outside. Once the sunlight and cool air hit her face, her paralysis broke, and she ran. She ran in a blind panic, back up Birch Street, her arms and legs pumping, her coat open and flapping.
As she ran, she weaved her way around corpses, not allowing herself to look at them or think about what had happened to them. Terror and fear filled her; she thought she was going crazy. Rachel wondered if this was a terrorist attack, or some sort of poisonous gas. If so, why didn’t it affect her? She decided she didn't want to know what killed the people around her and she didn't want to know why she was the only one left. She just wanted to go home and call the police.
Fumbling her keys in shaking hands, it took several tries to open her apartment door. When she did, Rachel burst through and slammed the door shut behind her. She locked the door and ran to her bedroom, grabbed her phone and rolled the mini-blinds shut.
Rachel climbed into bed while dialing 9-1-1, but only got a busy signal. Rachel dialed several more times with the same result. She tried calling her mom, but there was no answer. She tried calling her grandfather in Manchester, then Amber and several other friends and family on her contact list, but not one person answered.
Rachel lay curled in the fetal position wrapped tight in her comforter. She wanted to forget what happened and wanted to get back into her dream so she could wake herself from this nightmare…