Brink of Extinction

by Nicholas Ryan

  “A little indulgent theatre,” he said as if to excuse his part in the melodramatic panic of the house. “But the purpose was to make visitors aware of what it was like in the days of the apocalypse for those who were left behind, trapped. What you are about to see, though, is true. It’s real footage of an undead attack in all its raw unedited terror.”

  For the first time the man became aware of their new surroundings. It was a small room, no larger than a bedroom. The walls and ceiling were white, the floor bare concrete. On one of the walls was mounted a large screen monitor. There was nowhere to sit. The tour guide lowered the lights and stood back away from the screen with a final word.

  “Everything you have experienced so far has been supported and enhanced by props, sound and lighting effects to create a realistic sense of what the apocalypse was like to live through. But what you’re about to see needs nothing to underpin its impact. This is brutal and real…”

  An image exploded on the screen, vague and blurred, and for long seconds the man had no idea what he was looking at. He frowned, puzzled. There was nothing except a swirl of color and a scuffle of jarring noise.

  “This was recorded on a cell phone,” the tour guide gave the man the clue he needed to understand what he was seeing. “Apparently it was filmed through the cracks of a boarded-up window. Watch.”

  At last it began to make sense, and the man felt himself drawn closer to the screen. Now he could see the dark borders of the image, their roughened edges like a frame. Inset, between the foreground of the boards was a view of a street, coming quickly into focus as the person holding the phone adjusted his position.

  It was daylight. The man saw a two-lane section of suburban blacktop in front of a row of dilapidated double story homes. The lawns were overgrown and choked with weeds. One of the houses had a white picket fence. The gate was swinging open in the wind. Just outside the gate the corrupting corpse of a man lay. His body was bloated with gases, the hideous mortal wounds oozing maggots.

  “That’s old John Daly,” a voice said quietly. “Shot three days ago.”

  The cell phone moved again until it was focused on the house, showing the building in slow, close detail. All the downstairs and upstairs windows were boarded, the guttering across the front porch sagging with ice, and there was a thin powdering of snow across the pitched roof and on the dead branches of a garden of shrubs.

  The image wavered, then swung wildly. For long frustrating seconds the picture dissolved into another shaky blur. Then the focus was back – the image sharp and stark and shocking.

  Recorded on the soundtrack the man could hear a stranger’s voice, hushed and sobbing fretfully. “Oh, my God!” the person croaked in terror. “Oh, my God, they’ve found them. They’ve fucking found them.”

  A swarming crowd of undead appeared, surging over the fence of the property and rushing across the grass. They were grey and hideously disfigured, dressed in grubby rags, splattered with blood and gore. They moved like a pack of wolves, baying and screeching in shrill cries of madness. The cell-phone image began to shake.

  “Sweet merciful Jesus!” the voice on the recording moaned.

  One of the undead began tearing at the boards across the front window, clawing with mindless insanity. It was the figure of a woman, one of her legs dragging from beneath her shot away torso. Her lower body was drenched in the thick brown gore that had been the contents of her intestines and bowels.

  Others joined in, and the first board splintered away from the window. The undead howled. One of them smashed his fist through the glass and withdrew its mangled hand still clutching at a blood-stained drape. Others were on the front porch, pounding savagely at the front door. The muffled sounds of high panicked screams slashed across the wailing undead, piercing and petrified.

  Another board was wrenched from the window and one of the undead thrust his mutilated head into the opening. The ghoul was retching blood, painting the wall in gushing gore. There was the whip-cracking sound of a gunshot, and the zombie was suddenly hurled backwards into the long grass. More took his place.

  Another shot rang out, this one louder, the echo seeming to reverberate and bounce off the clouds. Another of the undead was tossed sideways. It fell kicking and flailing, thrashing on the ground; it’s gruesome body heaving as if gripped by spasms. The other undead trampled it into the soft grass.

  At last the door gave way under the hammering blows of the ghouls. It crashed inwards in a cloud of dust and the image jerked, then refocused into a shaking close-up. The man could see zombies pouring in through the doorway like storm troopers ending a siege situation. More shots rang out, and there was a brief strangled scream of utter terror that was cut abruptly short into bloody silence.

  The cell-phone camera kept recording for several seconds longer, overlaid by the distraught monotone of the recorder’s voice, now dull and defeated.

  “They’re all dead,” the voice muttered. “There was a whole family in that house – a whole fucking family.”

  The voice broke into ragged sobs and then came back again, fading in and out as the emotion strangled in his throat.

  “There were kids in there. And now they’re all dead.”

  But they weren’t.

  Suddenly the wooden boards that had been nailed over the upstairs window exploded outwards, and then a slim dark-haired woman appeared, clambering onto the pitched roof. She was white-faced with shock, blood spilling down her cheek from a gash. The woman was wearing jeans and a torn pink blouse. She teetered for balance, edging across the slick roof tiles like an inexperienced trapeze artist with her arms spread wide, and a black handgun dangling from stiff fingers. She reached the edge of the roof and stared down, swaying and made precarious by her terror.

  A shrill roar, rising to a primal snarl of triumph, came from behind her. The woman shot a fearful glance over her shoulder and saw one of the ghouls hunched in the window frame, thrashing and clawing as it stalked out onto the roof. The woman cried out in abject terror. She turned back to the abyss, took a deep breath, and then threw herself off the precipice of the roof.

  She landed in the grass with an agonized scream of pain, rolled several times on the ground and came up limping heavily. She climbed awkwardly over the fence that ran alongside the house, dragging her leg and clutching at her ankle. Her eyes were huge in her face, her mouth twisted out of shape in a cry of helplessness. The undead came rampaging back through the front door and saw her as she tottered into the middle of the road.

  The woman turned round to face the horde of undead, throwing up the gun before her face so that it shook and wavered. She backed away, one whimpering step at a time.

  “Stay away from me!” the woman shrieked, the sound of her terror translating clearly on the audio recording. “Stay the fuck away or I will shoot.”

  The undead spilled out across the road, the mass of disfigured writhing bodies seeming to heave and surge. They charged at the woman and she fired, the recoil of the weapon wrenching her hand high over her head.

  One of the undead was flung sideways, struck in the shoulder, or perhaps the chest. The ghoul’s arms were flung wide and it spun in a staggering circle, and then fell to its knees. It’s snarling head recoiled and then it hissed like a snake.

  The zombies swarmed over the woman, and the roar in their throats became hoarse with the killing frenzy, ululating as they tore the woman apart, flailing the skin from her body with their clawed hands.

  The cell-phone footage shook violently and then blurred to become a close-up of the distraught face of a stranger who was holding the phone at arm’s length. He was only young, his features pudgy and streaming with tears. His eyes were ghastly, his mouth a slack slash of red across the pale flesh.

  “That house belonged to the Harrigan family,” the person said. He was gulping in gasps of breath, the words quavering. He dragged the back of his trembling hand across his mouth and nose then sniffed as though he were on the verge of tears. His voice lower
ed to a petrified whisper. “We’re all going to die…”

  The image dissolved to crushing black.

  “That was one person’s experience of the apocalypse,” Bill paused, studying the effects of his words on the man and the boy. “The next piece of footage is of a zombie swarm. It was filmed from on top of a building in Springfield, Missouri. At the time, the Army was defending the outer suburbs. This footage was never broadcast on the media. It was confiscated by the military. Only visitors to this museum have seen what you are about to see.”

  The screen came back to life, blurred for a moment, but then overlaid with a ‘Top Secret’ warning and three lines of military code. After several seconds the picture cleared to show a distant horizon, with the blue of the sky darkly scarred by a blooming haze of black smoke.

  The undead were uncoiling, spilling down across the distant hills in long ragged tentacles as those who were faster raced ahead of the mass. It seemed like an endless tide, moving down off the crests and onto the plain like the passing of a storm across the skyline.

  Then the artillery barrage began and the mid-distance erupted into huge fountaining gouts of brown earth. The camera swung in a slow pan across the fields, showing the entirety of the battlefield, the undead like a million grey soldier ants, and then the lens lowered to show the waiting soldiers in their trenches. The barrage was relentless – a hailstorm of explosions until, dramatically, the field fell silent.

  Except it wasn’t a real silence, for in the camera’s microphone the man and the boy could hear the insidious sound of the undead – the ululating shrieking wail as they reached the Army’s thin defensive line and then crashed against the tangled nests of barbed wire. At the point of impact the sound of the swarm changed to become a growl. The snarling insanity of the undead.

  The sound was like the haunting memory of a nightmare, and the man felt his skin begin to prickle from the stinging insects of his fear. They crawled across his body and along the taut wires of his nerves so that he felt the palms of his hands begin to sweat and heard the tiny shudder and rattle as his breathing became tight. He tried to look away, but his eyes were drawn back to the screen with loathing fascination.

  For several minutes it seemed as though the barbed wire barrier and the flail of Army fire might hold the undead army. They dashed and broke against the wire like surf on a reef of black jagged rocks. They drew back, and then surged again. The camera zoomed in to a section of the trench line and the undead bodies lay like bundles of litter after a street parade.

  Then the weight of numbers and the maniacal madness of the undead became a flood. The barbed wire was choked so thickly with the dead that those following behind used the snagged entangled bodies like a bridge. Flamethrowers spouted great gouts of dragon-like fire – but it was too late. The zombies poured into the narrow line of trenches and the battle disintegrated into confused and terrified skirmishes – a maelstrom of panic and horror that was relentless.

  Directly below the building from where the camera filmed, crisscrossed a maze of narrow suburban streets. There had been no sanitation services in the city for many months. Rubbish and sun-blackened dead bodies clogged the sidewalks, the cadavers bloated and swollen and swarming with maggots. The undead tide washed over the roads, clawing fleeing survivors to shreds in howling packs, their gait shuffling and unsteady. Watching the footage, the man tried to estimate their numbers but it proved impossible – the undead were sweeping through the city in a snarling surge, crashing upon the horrified survivors like an avalanche.

  Recorded with the footage, the sounds of the chaos carried clearly through the museum’s speakers. The man could hear the high piercing screams, the terror in the voices of those who were hunted down. The camera zoomed close to a street corner, then panned wide to capture the vast carnage as a building erupted into flame. The hectic jerks of the lens gave the scene an added sense of chaos, no longer steady and detached, the view became horrifically close and intimate as the cameraman followed a knot of zombies rambling along a footpath. They came across a car and stiffened, lifting their hideous faces to taste the air. The lens zoomed to full magnification and then slid sideways to reveal a young boy cowering in the back seat of an old silver sedan. It was a Buick, low on its suspension, the paintwork faded and dull with dust. On the screen was just the white face of the child, a terror-stricken blob, and then the swarm of undead obscured the view. The boy was being pulled through the smashed glass of the car’s window and there was a tremulous terrified scream: a sound like a kettle boiling. The child was thrown to the ground and as the cameraman pulled back with ghoulish fascination, the zombies fell upon him.

  The screaming stopped abruptly and the image on the screen cut abruptly to empty black. It felt as though something evil had left the room.

  The man and the boy stood in silence. They said nothing.

  * * *

  The next room was a static display, more in keeping with the exhibits of a traditional museum. The man and the boy followed Bill who stood in the center of a carpeted room, the square walls of the area broken up by wooden partitions that cut into the space at unusual angles. All of the walls were covered with photographs and framed memorabilia, and there were two wooden glass-topped cabinets on either side of the door they had just entered through, standing like silent sentinels – guardians of history.

  “This area is dedicated to the women and children who were evacuated north as the apocalypse spread across America,” Bill explained. “It seeks to record their stories through the photographs, letters and other displays we have gathered.” He paused then for a long moment, and glanced around the exhibition space as though he had never seen it before. “At the height of the apocalypse over eleven million Americans were living in temporary camp accommodation along the Canadian border. Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota… North Dakota. Those states became home to the bulk of the refugees, but every northern state shared the burden.”

  The man and the boy drifted across the room, both of them drawn towards a giant photograph that covered the entire length of one wall. It was a massive black and white image of children, standing in a long line on a train station platform. Behind them waited an old railroad coach, the paintwork flaking and powdered with grime, the windows drawn closed with pale round faces pressed to the glass. In the foreground of the photo stood two young girls, both of them about ten years old, holding hands and staring into the camera lens with brave little faces that teetered on the brink of tears. They were dressed in bulky winter coats, and one of the girls was clutching at a small bag, the knuckles of her hand strained bloodless white. The children’s eyes were huge with fear and anxiety, the pale shock on their faces emphasized by the lack of color in the photograph. Behind the two girls stretched a line of similar children that seemed to extend for a mile. Some of the children were weeping, their mouths twisted in the agony of their cries. Most stood solemn and somber and still, with fatalistic acceptance drawn across their innocent expressions.

  In the background of the photograph, standing behind an iron barricade and guarded by soldiers with their weapons slung, were deep crowds of people frantically waving white handkerchiefs in farewell. They were distraught mothers standing on tiptoes to be seen, and women clinging to each other in shared heart-wrenching grief.

  Bill came quietly up behind where the boy was standing. “This photo was taken at the very outset of the evacuations. Massed train loads of children were the first to be transported, but ultimately every child and woman within direct threat of the spreading apocalypse was ordered to the northern camps,” he explained quietly. “For the most part they were transported by trains that ran non-stop until the power grids collapsed, and in many areas fleets of school buses were used. Tens of thousands of children were separated from their families and many were never reunited. Those kids became ‘the lost souls’ – an entire generation of America’s youth displaced from their parents, their families, their brothers and sisters.”

  “No men?�
� the boy asked, never taking his eyes from the photo. He was studying the faces of the children closely.

  “No,” Bill said. “The camps were for women and children only. At that time our Army was exhausted and broken. Every able-bodied man was needed to fill the trenches, to fight behind the barricades or in the towns as they were overrun.”

  “You mean like a militia?” the boy asked.

  Bill nodded. “Kind of,” he agreed. “Some areas formed their own citizen militias but they were never formally organized or recognized. The men just banded together into collective units and fought side-by-side to defend their towns. Many, many more went their own way – escaping into the mountains and forests to survive. It was too chaotic for any organized response, and the military were too finely drawn to provide skilled leadership. But some claim today that America’s fascination with gun ownership helped to stem the surging tide of the apocalypse. At the time of the outbreak America’s population represented five percent of the world’s people, and yet we owned somewhere between a third and a half of all the guns in private ownership worldwide,” he shook his head as though the numbers still staggered him. “Our instinctive mistrust of Government, and our constitutional right to bear arms may have altered the course of the apocalypse and prevented our extinction,” he admitted, and then quickly added a caveat. “But now,” he shrugged, “the world we live in is lawless, governed without reason, by rogue justice at the point of a gun.”

  “What about all the old people?” the boy asked quietly. At last he had realized what was missing from the wall-sized photograph. He could see no grandmothers, or grandfathers in the crowds of waving bystanders.

  “The elderly and the frail… were left behind,” the tone of Bill’s voice dropped suddenly and dramatically, sinking into heavy sadness, “because no room could be spared for them in the camps, and transportation was impractical. We lost millions of elderly Americans who were too frail or infirm to be transported to safety. Children were the priority, and then the womenfolk. The elderly were deemed by the government to be too great a drain on food and water supplies, and would place too heavy a strain on the refugee camps where medical facilities were primitive and space was a premium. Everyone aged over sixty-two was ineligible for evacuation.”