by Rand, Thonas
“There has to be a way outta this shit!”
“I’m trying,” Milla answered.
They went through a maze of destruction for another few blocks before they came upon a large horde at the intersection ahead of them.
“Goddamnit!” Derek gasped.
Milla turned away from them and most of the horde ran after the car, but they couldn’t keep up with it. She easily left them in her dust. At the next intersection, it was much worse; they saw another huge horde or the tail end of the same horde, blocking the entire intersection.
“Oh no! Fuck!” Milla cried.
They headed right for hundreds of them and she only had seconds to react—
She yanked the wheel and the parking brake, the SUV burned rubber sideways and spun right into the mob, sending many of them into the air on impact. Derek’s seatbelt didn’t catch right away and he instinctively put his hands up to stop himself, one hand hit the radio and turned it on—Karen Carpenter’s sweet voice filled the car:
“Rainy days and Mondays always get me down…”
Milla hit the gas, but the car wouldn’t go, the tires burned in place—
The dead had a hold of the car’s rear.
“Derek, they’re holding us!” she shouted. “Guns in the back seat!”
Derek turned back for the guns as the car’s back window busted apart and the dead reached for him as he reached for the bag. He was able to grab a compact machine gun and he let lead loose.
BA—BA—BA—BAM!
Bullets sprayed all of the back windows as Derek moved the gun left to right, he killed the ones holding onto the car and they broke free. They sped back the way they came and saw the horde they left behind a minute ago; it was now ahead of them.
“Oh God, Milla!”
Karen’s voice continued, “Funny, but it seems I always wind up here with you…”
She turned the car hard right and busted onto the sidewalk to avoid them. The speeding SUV rammed through café patios and blasted a magazine stand into splinters and shredded paper. The street corner was up ahead, but was blocked by a group of corpses; too many to drive through them, but the glass front of the corner department store was empty—
“Hold on!” she shouted.
She turned into it and the SUV shattered the plate-glass and destroyed the expensive clothing displays. They burst out the other side and launched into the air—hitting the sidewalk and continuing down the next street, which was not as thick with the dead . . . for now. They didn’t turn off the radio because they were too overwhelmed with what they were dealing with.
“Nothin’ to do, but frown, rainy days and Mondays always get me down…”
“Huh, it’s actually Monday, isn’t it?” Derek asked.
“Yeah.”
“That’s funny,” he said with a grimace as he looked at the dead out his window. “I didn’t think radio stations would still be on.”
“That’s my iPod.”
“You like the Carpenters?”
“You know I do.”
“Yeah, that’s right, yeah,” he said dryly.
They were only able to get another two blocks before reaching the end of the road.
“Give us a break!” Derek cursed.
Ahead of them, past the next intersection, they could see the street was filled with the dead. Milla took a left turn and then stopped the car abruptly—
The dead filled the street at the next intersection so she turned the car around and sped back, but that intersection was blocked as well. She turned toward the way they came—
A horde was coming from that way, too, and that’s when they realized they were trapped.
She stopped the car in the middle of the crossroads.
“Derek…?” she said in desperation.
“The buildings! Let’s run into that one!” he said.
“That’s a death trap!” she answered.
They were out of ideas and they had minutes to live as the dead approached them from all four sides. Milla grabbed a gun, loaded it, with tears down her cheeks.
“I’m not letting them get me alive.” she said.
“I know, baby. Me neither. I’ll do it.”
She handed the gun to him.
“Close your eyes, darlin’.” he said.
“No, I wanna see it.”
“Baby?”
“Do it!” she insisted.
Derek had no choice—he placed his finger on the trigger and smiled one last time for her. She smiled back as best she could. Derek raised the gun toward her head and then he happened to look down and saw—
“Manhole!” he shouted.
Milla’s attitude changed, “Go! Go!”
Derek jumped out of the car and tried to pry open the manhole cover with his hands, but that was impossible.
“Damn it!” he shouted. “Cover me!”
Milla was already out of the car and fired her first shot as Derek called to her.
A dozen slow movers and creepy crawlers with no legs or arms surrounded them, in close proximity, but she didn’t fire at them first—it was the several fast movers that were close by—they came at them from all directions. Derek used the barrel of his machine gun to pry the manhole cover open, but it wasn’t easy. Milla remained calm as she fired her pistol methodically, hitting every dead piece of shit that came their way—
She turned behind her…
Fired—hit!
She turned to the left…
Fired—hit!
To the right, squeezed the trigger…
Bang!—hit!
“Come on, Derek, we’re running out of time here!”
Her gun went empty, she ejected the magazine and slapped in a fresh one.
A fast crawler zipped up to her and she slammed her boot down on its head twice, brains splattered the pavement and she kept her boot on it as she fired…
To the left…
Single shot—hit!
“I’m trying!” Derek answered.
Milla looked at the horde approaching from all four streets. It was nothing but running corpses from one side of the street to the other, times four.
“Try harder, goddamnit!”
Derek jammed the gun barrel into the manhole pry-slot and pushed on it so hard that he bent the barrel, but finally got the heavy iron cover up. He tossed the gun away and pulled the cover off, revealing the dark shaft below. He grabbed a flashlight from the glove compartment and shined it downward. From what he could see, it was clear down there.
“Let’s go!” he shouted as he
grabbed their gear from the car and tossed it down the shaft.
Milla got there, still firing with every step. Her gun went empty; she reloaded, and continued to fire.
“Get in there!” Derek yelled.
Milla climbed into the shaft, still firing as she went down, but then she stopped and tried to come back up.
“My iPod, I forgot my iPod!”
“Are you serious?” Derek questioned. “Get down there!”
He pushed her down by the top of her head and then he climbed in. He pulled the cover over his head and two second later—
The horde of thousands got there and covered the intersection, the car, and everything else in moving, clawing, reeking death.
Milla’s iPod still played:
“Funny, but it seems that it’s the only thing to do, run and find the one who loves me…”
“Rainy da—and Mond—always get m—”
They tore the car apart…
DAY 201:
CONFESSION AT THE LAST SUPPER
THE HOSPITAL CAFETERIA AT SAINT ANGELES WAS QUIET. Candles and flashlights were the only things that kept the night’s reach at bay. They sat together solemnly, considering the knowledge that another country would use a nuclear weapon on their own soil, even in these dark times.
“The Russians, huh?” Joe asked.
“That’s what we heard,” Bear answered.
“Did you see a lot of actio
n, Ardent?” Tom asked.
Ardent, still lost in the memories of his mother and the Ronald Reagan, didn’t hear Tom.
“Yeah, we saw enough,” Bear answered for him.
“More than enough,” Milla added.
“I’m trying to forget,” Derek chimed in.
Maggie was still looking out the window into the endless night and listened to all the dead outside their walls, “How do you suppose this all started?” she asked whoever.
“What, the first break out of the infection?” Anthony said to her.
“No, the actual infection itself, where do you think it came from?” she said.
“Who knows?” Tom said. “It could’ve been a natural occurrence.”
“I doubt that,” Lauren said.
“Where then?” Maggie inquired.
“I remember when the news first called it an ‘infection outbreak’. I’d gone to the store to buy some water and canned goods and they had a TV on,” Joe said from memory. “The lines were incredibly long. People were already starting to panic and fights broke out as they fought for the last of the food and were cutting in the checkout line. I was waiting my turn, with about thirty people before me and the guy in front of me started talking to me. He totally looked like one of those ex-military, doomsday prepper, whack jobs,” Joe looked at Tom. “No offense.”
“None taken,” Tom said.
“Anyway,” Joe continued, “he told me that the Koreans or the Chinese were responsible for this, that it was a biological weapon they developed to attack America.”
“I doubt that, too,” Milla said. “This has gone global, why would any foreign government, no matter how much they hated us, create something that would kill the world?”
“Hey, some of those countries don’t have governments,” Derek added. “It could’ve been one of those places, like Korea, that are run by a dictator named Kam Dum Drop, Little Kim, or whatever the fuck that dude’s name is, where they manufacture the granny smith computers in the sweatshops.”
“China,” Bear said. “They made those computers in China, but not anymore.”
“You know what I mean,” Derek stated.
“It probably came from Africa, like AIDS,” Alan said.
John was quiet as he sat there by himself and listened to them.
“Maybe it’s another version of AIDS?” Donnie said.
“That’s stupid,” Maggie said.
“Why?” Anthony asked her.
“Because it was never proven that AIDS came from Africa. It’s a mystery,” Maggie said.
“The first recorded cases of the disease were in Africa,” Tom added.
“But that doesn’t mean it started there,” Maggie counterpointed.
“Then from where?” Anthony put to her.
“I don’t know,” she answered.
“Exactly,” Anthony smirked.
“You’re stupid too,” Maggie said defensively.
“You don’t know the answer and I’m stupid?” Anthony shot back.
John laughed; their bickering amused him.
“What’s so funny?” Maggie asked.
“You. All of you,” John said. “Bickering over something that doesn’t matter anymore. None of it does.”
No one had anything to say to that.
“And what I say or don’t say doesn’t matter anymore, either. Especially things that are classified above top secret.”
Some of them pointed their flashlights in John’s direction.
“What’re you talking about, John?” Tom was intrigued.
They all were.
“AIDS,” John said. “It did come from Africa, but that wasn’t its origin.”
He had the group’s full attention and John just looked at them, moving his eyes from each one of them as he tapped his fingers on the assault rifle resting on his lap.
“Where did it come from, John?” Ardent asked.
Sweat slowly rolled down John’s forehead, not from being nervous—rocks don’t get nervous—but from the heat of the night.
Tap… tap…
Some of his sweat made its way into his eyes, but he didn’t blink as he looked at all of them.
Tap… tap…
He looked toward Ardent, considered his question, and smirked at the thought.
Tap… tap…
“’Project Terminal,’” he said without emotion.
Lauren was glued to his words, but didn’t say anything.
“What’s that?” Tom asked.
Ignoring him, “If I would’ve said that in public before the world went down the toilet, it would’ve landed me in a military stockade and I probably wouldn’t have been seen again,” John said in a flat tone.
“John,” Ardent said. “Do you want to tell us what Project Terminal is?”
Tap… tap…
“Do you really wanna know? All of you?” he said. “Because . . . what does it matter now?”
“Tell us,” Maggie said.
By the looks on their faces—they all definitely wanted to know.
“Yeah, tell us,” Anthony said.
Tap… tap—he stopped tapping.
“Project Terminal was developed in 1961 at a top secret bio-weapons facility run by the Army. The project’s goal was to produce a viral agent that would neutralize the soldiers of an opposing nation and its citizens,” he said and paused for a moment. “After successful tests on death row inmates, a live field test was conducted on the inhabitants of a small African village that nobody gave a shit about. The virus moved quickly through the village’s fifty inhabitants and incapacitated most of them within a couple of months. Most of the villagers were dead or dying by the fourth month, but the Army wanted quicker results so they abandoned Project Terminal and moved on.”
“What do you mean abandoned?” Tom asked.
“They left the area and didn’t look back,” John answered.
“They just left the village with the disease?” Anthony asked.
“Yeah—it spread, and the rest is history.”
“Are you saying that the Army created AIDS as a weapon, infected an African village with it, didn’t like that it killed slowly, so they just forgot about it? Is that about right?” Milla said doubtfully.
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“Bullshit,” Joe said. “Why would they leave AIDS in that village when they knew that it would spread to the rest of the world?”
“Because they had the cure,” John told them. “They didn’t care.”
“Bullshit,” Joe repeated.
“Really?” John shot back. “Let me ask you something; when was the last time that you heard of a high profile politician or world leader dying from AIDS, huh? Or a rock star? A movie star? Or some overpaid athlete?”
No one said a thing and John continued:
“Plenty of people have died from it, even a few semi-famous people, but the rich and powerful? No. I’m sure you’ve heard of a politician that contracted HIV and a famous athlete in the Eighties and Nineties, but they didn’t die, did they? The public thought that the rich just paid for some magic drug therapy to combat the deadliest disease that the planet had ever seen. Now that’s bullshit.”
“How much did the cure cost?” Lauren asked.
“Last I heard it was around two hundred million, three injections.”
“Two hundred million dollars for three shots? Jesus,” Lauren said.
“Each. Two hundred million for each shot. If you didn’t get all three, it didn’t work,” John added.
“They accidently created themselves a cash cow, huh, John?” Anthony said.
John smirked, “That’s just it, kid, I don’t think it was an accident.”
“What the hell? That’s not right,” Tom said under his breath.
“How do you know this, John?” Ardent asked.
John thought for a moment, choosing his words, “I knew the Director of the Army’s bioresearch division.”
“You knew him? What? You two were drin
king buddies or something? What the fuck does that mean?” Joe said.
Ardent knew, “You’re that John Mandall?”
“Yup.”
“Who are you, John?” Asked Anthony.
“The Director of the Army’s bioresearch division…was my father,” John confessed. “He created Project Terminal and he released it.”
Maggie laughed—an almost hysterical burst—then went quiet.
“That’s fucking great, man,” Alan said. “Awesome for you,” he said sarcastically.
Ardent stood up and stepped closer to John, “When you said that the Army abandoned Project Terminal and moved on, what did they move on to?”
“’Project Bully,’ which was a faster strain of the Project Terminal virus, but it wasn’t designed to kill the host,” John said.
“Wait, so did your father create the undead virus or not?” Bear asked.
“He did,” John replied and lowered his eyes in thought, “but not directly…”
DAY 18:
SAN BERNARDINO, CALIFORNIA
THE CITY OF SAN BERNARDINO, CALIFORNIA, BASKED IN TWILIGHT AS THE SUN WENT TO SLUMBER. This neighborhood was upper class and the homes were larger than in the rest of town. There were no children playing because most families were preparing for dinner, or already in the middle of it, so the streets were empty.
A car came fast down the street, a 1969 Dodge Charger muscle car, painted cherry black, and everything else chrome. It pulled into the long driveway of a very nice two story, prairie-style home and just as the car stopped—a woman, in her fifties, ran out the front door—she blew right past the muscle car and across the street. The driver got a good look at what ran by his window: The woman’s skin was grayish in color and her veins were pronounced purple scars that tracked her skin. Her lips were without lipstick, yet they were dark in color—abnormally dark—and covered in saliva that dripped down her chin. It was her eyes the driver noticed the most, though. He couldn’t believe what he saw in those three seconds.