“What the jiminy fuck is going on?” he yelled as he got out of his bed. It was pitch black in his bedroom. The windows were boarded up with wooden planks. From the cracks, in between the rafters, he saw light, yellow light pulsating vividly in the wake of whatever the hell this crisis was, everywhere. Had the sun come out finally after its month-long hiatus behind the thick cloud of smog? Roy did not want to know. He wanted to go back to sleep. His head ached in throbs and vision had not yet returned to him after last night. He was seeing double now, which was an improvement, but those doubles only served to agitate his headache. He struggled to his feet but the woozy nausea threw him unkindly back on the bed, where he hit his head on the wall.
“Jesus please-us!” he cried out in pain and held a hand to his head. Convenient. He was bleeding now. This day could not get any worse than this, he thought. He thought wrong. In his dazed state, he scurried for the second time to his feet, actually succeeding in this attempt. The pain emanating from his head cleared some of the hangover that had prevailed from last night’s excessive drinking session. He drank a lot. Whiskey, brandy, beer, moonshine; whatever he could get his hands and his mouth on, he drank like the chronic drinker that he was.
And then the screaming came. Loud wailing noises from outside of his house made him realize that there was something inconveniently wrong with the world today.
“God! Please no!” a woman shrieked from not far off, and then an orchestra of screams resonated with hers, sounding like the soundtrack of a cheap horror movie.
“Help me!” another man chimed in rather grotesquely.
“Fuck the police!” someone yelled above all the noise.
What the hell is going on? Roy thought as he drained the beer bottle at his bedside. The beer was now stale and flat, but that never stopped Roy from punishing his liver. With shaking hands and half a will to find out what was happening, he took his pistol from the bedside table. Roy checked it for bullets. They were there, sure as ever. He grimaced a smile of certainty. He knew nothing could go wrong, more wrong than it already was, as long as he had his gun with him.
You see, unlike other people, Roy Robertson took pride in the fact that he was always, always, well prepared. He was twenty-nine bordering on thirty, and had nothing to show for his life in the contemporary sense, save for his schizoid level of preparation. Money? He had it stowed away safely (three million dollars in cash, don’t ask don’t tell). Weapons? He had a whole arsenal of them, stowed together with the money. Booze? Food? Clothes? Cigarettes? Condoms? Yes, yes, yes, yes and yes, he had them all, safely supplied and hidden in a bunker not far from his home.
Roy Robertson was a prepper. And being a prepper meant that you had to remain prepped for any and all manner of calamities. And by the looks of it, a calamity had surely struck outside. What other reason could there possibly be for the hordes of people screaming, airplanes flying, choppers circling and sirens wailing? Perhaps nothing was wrong and he was imagining it all, perhaps it was just the rush hour traffic outside, and the airplanes were actually construction workers handling their equipment, and the helicopters were just loud trucks wheezing their engines, and the sirens were just from the ambulances, and the people who were screaming were just regular Massachusetts folks going about their business. Perhaps it was his anarchic mind being way over-impressionable, being too ready to be tricked into believing that there was something wrong.
Oh, but there was.
There should not have been any people here, nor were there any roads to accommodate the traffic. He lived in the godforsaken outskirts of the city, away from people, away from population and the post-modern toils and troubles that it posed. There was only the road that led to town and back. So why the fuck was there such a ruckus outside? He did not know. But as he put on his sandals and his trousers, his grip on his handgun tightened. He had neither the inclination nor the time for any of the shit that was going on outside. Perhaps it was something serious, perhaps it was his mind playing tricks on him. Alcohol never suited him. He learnt this lesson the hard way during his first year at college. it was in fact his only year at college, because the events that transpired led him to be shamefully dismissed from the institute and pretty much made sure that he had no other educational avenues to turn to. It was not as bad as he initially thought it would be. Not having a college degree did not turn out for the worse. Granted, he had been doing the same dead end job for the past eight years, but it paid okay and just about enough for a single guy without anyone to take care of to get by on a day to day basis.
He drank for the first time in an end-of-semester party. His family were Mormons. Naturally, that meant that if he drank, or even so much as touched a cigarette, let alone one laced with weed, a flogging would follow. He was wise. He did not want to get flogged, scolded or reprimanded in any way by his parents. They were his everything. They paid for his college, for the duration that he stayed there, and they took care of everything that he’d ever want.
On that night when he first drank, he sensed that he was not getting drunk like the other kids were. His mother’s stern face literally started hovering in front of him.
No drinking, Roy! What did I tell you? The phantasm had said.
What followed for Roy that night was a series of deluded and psychotic actions which he would completely forget the next morning. But his university fellows would not. The faculty member upon whose car he took a shit would not, and the dean, upon whose door he inscribed in drunken writing ‘death to all Nazis’ would certainly not. The dean had a moustache like Hitler’s, which was his only resemblance to Nazis.
When the psychiatrist let him go after a seventy-two-hour hold, he told Roy two things. One: he was expelled from college. Two: he was very prone to drug induced psychosis, and alcohol came under the title of drugs. If he wanted to live a life free from mental disorders and craziness, he had to lay off booze, buzz and cigarettes.
What kind of fucking sick punishment is that? He had asked the shrink as she let him out.
After getting kicked out of MIT, he did what any other person in his position would do. He got a job at the local Burger King. Ever since that day he held the same job, made the same minimum wage, and lived in the same forlorn shack outside of town. His parents died sometime during those nine years in a brutal car crash. But he did not go to the funeral because what would his relatives say? Son of a millionaire businessman and a philanthropist woman gone to shit and working at Burger King? Oh, how far the apple has fallen.
Last night was a different night. He had thrown his caution to the wind and drank his way through the meagre supplies of booze he had in his home. His boss had fired him. It would have been less humiliating if his boss was not eight years younger than him, and it would have been even less humiliating if he had been fired under different conditions. But no. It had to be that way. The bridges, they burnt of their own accord, makings sure that Roy’s life went completely to shit that day. He was supposed to give ice-cream to an elderly woman, and it was no one’s fault that when he handed it to her, it fell to the ground and slopped all over the floor.
“You fucking bitch!” he said under his breath but it turned out that the woman had sharp ears for her age. She complained to the manager and then shit just snowballed from there.
He came home and buried his depression at the bottom of the bottle. Or bottles.
So, it was safe to say that whatever he was experiencing right now was his body reprimanding him in the absence of his parents. The people crying outside were really just beggars asking for alms. The helicopters and planes was just his overhead fan spinning creakily. And the other noise was just the hangover.
But that was not it. He took his gun and opened the door to behold the spectacle that made it clear that it was not his psychotic imagination.
There was only one notable building near his house and that was a gas station a quarter mile away down the road. It was on fire. Dozens of cars were clustered all around it. And there were, s
ure as day, people screaming about everywhere. Some, he saw were screaming from inside the safe confines of their cars. Whatever could their problem be, he thought groggily as pain throbbed like a humping hound in his head. He tried to make out what was happening.
There were planes in the sky, and by the looks of it, they were all military. The helicopters had the crest of the United States army on them too. And then he saw something that made it perfectly clear to him that this was not any visual delusion.
A huge airplane, a 747 apparently, zoomed downwards at a dangerous angle towards the skyscrapers in the distance. Roy followed it with his eyes as the plane descended dangerously downwards and then boom! It hit the Millennium Tower, the tallest building in Boston, and exploded in the scariest possible display of fireworks.
This sobered him up. Something was wrong and it was wrong colossally. He shifted his attention to the anarchy playing out at the gas station. People were getting out of their cars and seemed to be chased by more people. Except, these new people, from this far away, looked like they were impossibly faster and rabid. They attacked the fleeing men and women and began beating them.
Holy shit! It’s a goddamn riot! Roy thought and tightened his grip on his gun. He saw a horde of people break in through the windows of the quick-mart of the burning gas station and swarm the entire building. The screaming intensified.
“I have to get to my base,” he said out loud deliberately, making it clear to himself that this was not the time to dilly-dally. What he had been prepping for his entire adult life had come to pass and this was code red. And he had to get to his base before he got caught in the crossfire of this outbreak. There were people approaching his home. They looked ravaged, torn and crestfallen. Roy knew in that moment that he had to leave this place for good. He still had no idea whatsoever what was going on, but it demanded that he leave. He looked back at his house with a longing sigh and then closed the door behind him. There was no time to be wasted. He had to get to his base.
Roy had a bunker, an underground one (however cliché that may sound) where he had stockpiled everything that a person would need in the case of a global disaster. It was his baby, his magnum opus, his pinnacle of everything. He had been doing this solely for the past nine years. His previous shrink, the one who gave him the news about his expulsion and his unfavourable drug induced psychosis condition, might say that the alcohol had befuddled his mind permanently and his survivalist need to forage, store and prepare for a calamity that was never going to come was the manifestation of his mental sickness.
“Well doc. Wherever the fuck you are, I hope you’re not laughing, because the jokes on you. The world, it looks like, has done a one-eighty spin. It does not make sense. I’m not sick. The world is. It was always the world that was sick,” Roy said to himself as he sneaked past his shack into the woods behind. He had always believed this. He knew that he was an outcast from society once he had been expelled from college. It was not a rash decision on his part when he bought this lonely shack, with one room and one bathroom and nothing else (there was no kitchen, but then again, he worked at Burger King so he did not need much in the way of a kitchen). It was well thought out. The restaurant where he worked was two miles away from his home. Even though he jogged every day to work (and then later took a shower in the employee’s bathroom and changed into his uniform) he was still a little fat. He had a nice potbelly going on and, as much as he hated to see himself in the mirror, he cringed with fear and anxiety whenever he saw that he was balding and balding fast. Fast for a twenty-nine-year-old. His potbelly was the result of sitting on his couch for uninterrupted periods of time, during which he did anything from watching the latest episode of The Walking Dead to shooting down Turks in Battlefield 1. He had a PlayStation 4, and it was his only prized possession, apart from all the things he had in his underground bunker. He would game for hours and hours without end, drinking nothing but Red Bull, and eating nothing but Pringles, until the time came for his work shift. He’d then go to work, skate along the day, keeping his eyes open thanks to the cheap but strong coffee the general store at the corner sold, and then come home and crash into his bed only to wake up a few hours later and spend the night progressing his campaigns in his video games.
There was a huge lake behind his house, farther in the small woods. And his bunker was near it. This was a wise decision on his part because he knew that whenever he would need to use his bunker, he would need a large amount of water to see him through his stay in there. And the lake had tons of water. Nature was the best nurturer. Trees abounded in the area around his bunker, which bore fruit all year around. Grass carpeted the ground and trees canopied the sky in that pristine quietness. He made his way down there, sticking to the rough trail that led towards his bunker. He had made that trail himself, in such a way that no one would be able to recognize that it led to some place tangible, let alone a bunker. It was not very far from his house. Only fifteen steps away. But the thicket of the trees made the place look bigger, deeper and longer than it was. If you asked him where his bunker was, he’d never tell you, but if you were a friend or if you had him drunk enough, he’d tell you that it was in his backyard. Roy considered the entire woods behind his shack to be his backyard. And why shouldn’t he? It was not like the zoning commissioner was coming here anytime soon to establish new colonies. This place was far enough from the city and not once in ten year did anything develop anywhere near to his house, save for the highway and the gas station. It was quiet. It was lonely. Just how Roy liked it.
His underground bunker was discernible by a haphazard Stonehenge-like arrangement of rocks in the middle of the woods. He saw the rocks and ran towards them, knowing that he’d be alright in there, in that deep and dank underground haven.
He had everything in there. Except for a PlayStation 4. He had enough food to last one person five years, all tinned and stocked in a cold corner so that it would never get old or bad or expire. Drinks were plentiful too, and not all of them were soft fizzy drinks. No sir. He had the alcoholic equivalent of a French vineyard stacked right next to the food in the form of Budweiser beer cans by the thousands. It had taken him five years to stock them all. There was finer stuff too, like whiskey, brandy and vodka and he was not picky about their brand names.
Other than the almost infinite supply of food and drinks, he had weapons. He had five AK-47s in there, along with ample ammunition for all five. There were ten handguns, (ammo with each of them), a crateful of grenades, a bazooka and one heavy machine gun that had been out of commission since world war 2. But it worked. Oh, it worked all right. He had tested it out right here in the woods and you could still see the bullet marks in the trees.
“Don’t you dare come closer!” he said. But the thing would not stop. It looked humanoid alright. Roy had a comical thought as the thing neared him. Maybe it was an alien, like E.T, only wilder and viler.
But that thought went out of his head as soon as it came. The thing was two yards away from him, and approaching faster than a truck on the highway, when Roy saw it in the sliver of sunlight in the woods. It was human, but only anatomically. There was nothing human about his behaviour or his impossibly fast speed. It had arms, legs, a torso and a head, but its arms were limping, his legs were dragging, his torso was grotesque and his head was fearsome. His eyes were red. Red like blood. And he had his mouth opened up in a hungry grimace.
Roy pulled the trigger and watched as the bullet whizzed towards the man. He might have been a great shot in Call of Duty, but in real life, his aim sucked. The bullet hit the trees instead and the zombie kept approaching, now only an arm’s length away from him.
He had no time to think, but if he had, he would have taken his chances with the gun again. He might have hit the man at point blank range, but that thought did not cross his mind. Instead he picked the heaviest rock up from the ground, brought it up above his head with both his arms, and just as the wild man was about to grab him, Roy brought it down on the man’s hea
d, crushing his skull like an over-ripe squash.
The man fell to the ground, limp and dead as a log. Its head was burst wide open like a piñata, but in place of candy, there was brain everywhere, sticking to the wild grass like poorly done watercolours on a last-minute art class project. The man’s clothes were charred. He had been through that burnt up gas station, by the looks of it. The smell of smoke and soot came off of him in wafts, only to be followed by the disgusting stench of burnt flesh and splattered brain. His arms, even in death, writhed and his legs jerked about comically. Roy was overcome with adrenal exhilaration. He used the boulder again to make sure that the job was done right. He smashed the boulder on the dead man’s torso with all the might his hungover body could muster. The rock hit the chest of the dead man with a squish, and made a crack sound. Those were his ribs breaking and his lungs puncturing under the weight of the rock. The writhing of arms and the flailing of legs stopped.
“Oh fuck!” Roy screamed and the next thing he knew, he was puking his insides out beside the dead body of the man he had just killed. He saw, to his horror, that he was puking blood along with the undigested remains of the King-sized Cheeseburger he had stolen from Burger King last night as a one last fuck you to the establishment that had made him so miserable for nine years. Blood was mixed up with booze in his vomit, and it looked like the world’s most disgusting concoction of Bloody Mary. That sick thought made Roy puke again. Pain erupted from his stomach, through his diaphragm all the way to his heart and then he knew nothing but darkness.
With a thud, Roy fell to the ground, close to the dead man he had killed, there he remained, unconscious.
*
“Don’t be a pussy, Roy,” Clarence Clearwater said to him. He was sixteen, standing under the bleachers with the rest of the rugby team. They were all prodding him to try the beer that Simon had stolen from his dad’s fridge. The beer had had a very weird effect on all of them. They were ruder than usual, cruder than usual. Normally, they left Roy alone and never bothered with his weirdness, but today they had surrounded him, demanding that he fulfil the right of passage that would make him a stone-cold American: underage consumption of alcohol.
The Golden Horde and the Zombies (Zombie Conflict Series Book 1) Page 7