The Apocalypse

by Williams, T. M.

  I was being watched; I knew it. A part of me wondered if it was the same creature that had stood in the window watching me just a few hours before. The idea of being stalked was crazy, even with recent events. Colonel Richard Tempest explained that the Undead were raw in instinct. Which meant they wouldn’t stalk their prey, that would be too – too cerebral.

  I made it past the barbican and curtain wall to the village path that cut through the lower bailey. Everything was dark, but I knew I wasn’t alone. I just didn’t know if my company were the Undead or Human, and didn’t know if the latter would be accommodating, regardless.

  A large bang startled me into dashing behind a dry well. As my heartbeat pounded in my ears I assessed the situation. It sounded like something had crashed against a wooden gate or wall to the east. Then a familiar sound helped me realize what it was. I listened to the neighing of a horse in the stables and then the same familiar crash against the wall followed. For some reason it was kicking the door of its stall, probably for a reason I didn’t want to understand.

  I peered around the edge of the well, watching the horse move frantically around in its small enclosure, desperate for an exit. Part of me wanting to release it from its misery, another part of me warned me not to.

  Then the beast moved its head and looked in my direction, sensing me somehow, and that’s when I saw the gleaming bloody red eyes and pools of rubescent tears that stained its fur. This is exactly what my newly in-tuned instincts had warned me of. When it neighed again, I heard the underlying sound of a masked primordial growl. I stumbled over myself, falling against the dusty ground.

  The solid ground absorbed the sound and impact of my fall, but somehow the beast had heard me and reared itself against the gate viciously. Now I understood its desperate desire for escape.

  I knew I needed to get out of there, but a shape lurking near the barbican caught my attention just as I began to leave. It dashed behind the brick wall, out of sight, but I had still seen it. I was being stalked.

  I escaped further down the road and deeper onto the castle grounds towards the main bailey. Any moment I expected a creature or animal to leap out at me, but somehow I made it to the castle’s chapel on the far northwest corner unscathed. The refuge of a chapel would have comforted me at one point in my life, but no longer – especially now, when candles lined the walls of the church, some with wicks nearly completely burned out like an ominous symbol.

  I walked toward the altar, drawn by the strangeness of light surrounding the darkness, casting shadows that danced and flickered on the walls and nave.

  I had no idea what lurked in the recesses of the shadows and somehow didn’t care. There was no salvation here - in this noxious chapel. It beckoned the darkness to come forth and part of me wondered if that the darkness were me.

  “You shouldn’t be here.”

  I quickly turned toward the voice but saw no one. Every flicker of light, every movement in my periphery caused me to jump.

  “Who said that?” My voice sounded unfamiliar as it bounced off the stonewalls.

  The young girl stepped into the aisle, half her body cast in shadow. I took an involuntary step back as she took a step toward me. Her brittle, platinum-blonde hair fell around her shoulders and emaciated face. She was no older than ten or eleven, yet every cell in my soul told me to run.

  I glimpsed down at her bare feet on the cold stone floors. She wore simple cargo shorts, white button down shirt, and a lime green sweater. I had no idea if she were a resident of Eltz Castle.

  “Did you come to visit someone?” she asked in her sing- song voice.

  I took another step back and felt my foot hit the step to the altar. The shuffling sound from behind the pew stopped the little girl’s advance.

  “That’s Momma,” she said with an expression I couldn’t identify. Her eyes were so blackened that the whites were gone, mesmerizing me in a macabre way.

  The soft moan sounded distressed.

  “Is your mom okay?”

  I had no idea how the Undead functioned, but making conversation to distract her seemed like the only thing I could do.

  “No.”

  She tilted her head at me curiously, as if she were surprised by my inquiry, almost offended by it – but not for the right reasons.

  “Olivia.” The woman’s voice was soft, strained. I knew by the sound of it that she was still human, unlike her daughter. We were at a standstill. The little girl continued to watch me, uncaring about her mother’s presence.

  “Olivia? Is that your name?” I asked.

  She ignored me, distracted by her mother who was hauling herself to a seated position – half her face missing. I felt the bile rise in my throat and swallowed it back. I suddenly needed to sit down, no longer trusting my ability to stand.

  Her mother noticed me for the first time.

  “You need to get out of here,” she said.

  Olivia was at attention again, watching me like a hungry animal. She narrowed her darkened, blood-filled eyes at me in disgust. I knew I could outrun a little girl, but wasn’t sure if I could outrun an Undead. I had no idea what their abilities were.

  “Not without you,” I said to Olivia’s mother. I couldn’t leave this woman here. Yet, as I spoke the words, I took another step back. Olivia’s eyes trained on my every move. Her gaze was cunning, far more advanced than it should be for someone her age. I wasn’t going to make it, I knew.

  “I’m not leaving my daughter,” she coughed out. “She’ll kill you.”

  Olivia giggled, sending chills coursing through my veins.

  “Perhaps.”

  Olivia’s mother still looked to her daughter with love and I felt my stomach clench. I was going to be sick.

  “Honey, come here,” she said to her daughter and I knew then, I knew she was giving me an escape.

  Olivia giggled again as she took a step toward her mother and I didn’t hesitate. I ran up the altar, my feet feeling heavy as I couldn’t move fast enough through a back side door. That’s when I heard the blood-curdling scream of Olivia’s mother. That sound would haunt me for the rest of my life.

  That was just the beginning of the nightmare for me. I left town immediately and traveled the empty roads for hours. It took me thirteen days to get to Munich. Even until this day, I don’t know how I made it.

  So much for poetic relief.

  By the time I got to Munich everything had changed. I really thought I’d have been killed off by the time I reached Russia, but I was spared of the evil that would want to be rid of me.

  Even though this frozen wasteland in the corner of Russia felt like hell, none of us wanted to leave. We still didn’t know enough about what had happened to risk it. The infection became airborne, yes. However, not everyone became infected and we didn’t understand why some remained immune. I’d watched the President of the United States age considerably over the last few weeks, his skin sagged and his eyes grew heavy and dark with exhaustion.

  Globally, less than half a million people had already been killed. Yet, the end was in sight and even though humans had nearly been completely wiped out, we would ultimately survive.

  Five

  Marcus

  Dallas

  December 15th, 2021

  I really don’t know how long I had been sitting there on the bathroom floor with Emma’s and Marge’s feet resting in my lap. I barely felt the throbbing in my fist from punching a hole through their bathroom wall when I had first found them lying on the floor. A single bullet had passed through both their heads. Marge’s hand still gripped the gun tightly. I would have done anything in the world to take that moment away from her when she’d had to make that choice. Anything.

  The Undead let them be once Marge had shot their brains out. The infected wanted nothing to do with anything that was that dead. Ironic. Thank the God above for that. However, what it meant was that I still sat here with their feet in my lap, their bodies otherwise intact, while I rocked back and forth, cryin
g until my throat became raw. I didn’t know I could hurt this much. I didn’t know pain like this existed.

  “Marcus, the chopper is waiting to take us to the safety camp. We need to go,” Colonel Richard Tempest gripped my shoulder.

  “Yes, Colonel.”

  I kissed poor Emma’s feet one last time, drenching her tiny toes with my tears. My brother would kill me and I hoped to God he would. I covered their bodies with the bathroom towels decorated with little yellow ducks and placed Emma’s doll in her stiff, cold arms.

  It was then that we heard them, the cold, dead, Undead, infected, whatever the fuck you wanted to call the travesty of life that had cursed us all.

  Colonel Richard Tempest and I, both heard the shattering of glass in the other room at the same time the snarling started. We both ran in the bedroom with our rifles drawn just in time to see one of them escaping the bedroom window. Now why the hell were they running away from us?

  Six

  Colonel Richard Tempest

  December 15th, 2021

  My god, that blood-curdling scream made every hair on my body stand on edge.

  That Undead asshole wasn’t running away from us, he was running for whomever was next door.

  “Dammit Marcus! I thought you said you guys had cleared the area!” I yelled over my shoulders as I ran quickly to the house the screams came from. The shrill sound sliced through the night air like a hatchet against dry grass; each scream coursed through my body as if I was being torn in half.

  We both slammed through the window almost at the same time and I could hear two men just behind us yelling to take cover. What the hell?

  Holy fucking shit!

  Whoever she was wasn’t screaming anymore. Her whimpers almost sounded...reflexive. They, the - the Undead were raping her. Not just sexually, but in every sense of the word. Shit, rape isn’t even a strong enough word for what they were doing. They were laughing and mocking her while they tore into her body. Her legs had been split so wide that they had torn straight from the limbs, hanging on by mere veins.

  She lay in a pool of her own blood and - and something oozing from the two Undead that - that’s when my vomiting all over the floor caught their attention, but only momentarily. The bastards didn’t even care that we were there, they just went on doing what they were doing.

  I didn’t even realize what I was about to do until the gun in my hand was already pointing toward the poor woman’s head. I needed to end her misery. I heard Marcus yelling at me to stop; he’d thought I’d lost my mind. But really, what was he thinking? She wouldn’t survive, there was no way. The infection was probably spreading through her as we stood there.

  I missed.

  My arms shook so much that I completely missed her all together and hit the floorboard next to her. Her screams of terror started again and somehow through it all she was not only alive, but also aware of what was happening.

  Shit, shit, shit!

  Marcus jumped me then, throwing me against the wall behind us.

  “What are you doing?!” His face was alabaster white and sweat dripped off his chin. His eyes were completely swollen and bloodshot from the tears he cried for his niece and sister-in-law. If I didn’t know any better, I would have thought he was infected too. No, instead he was infected with anguish and sorrow.

  My two men shot bullets through the heads of the two Undead that ravaged the woman over and over. The sounds of shots caught both my and Marcus’s attention.

  He was hovered over the woman before covering her with a blanket from the sofa.

  “What the hell?” It was one of my men that asked.

  “I heard about this, from one of the guys that’s been in the field all week. He said they’re raping women, children, men - anything they can get their hands on. Completely primal,” the other soldier answered.

  The shiver ran through my bones even though the heat from the Dallas sun was dense in this living room.

  “Let’s get her to the chopper,” Marcus whispered, while stroking the woman’s hair back away from her sweat- drenched face.

  He hadn’t seen the look in her eyes right before I’d tried to shoot her in the head. The look of the Undead that had already infected her.

  Seven

  Marcus

  FEMA Camp 3

  December 20th, 2021

  We weren’t even safe 150 feet in the goddamn ground. Colonel Richard Tempest was a damn fool if he thought we’d be safe anywhere. Seventeen billion - euros spent, wasted, to create this shelter and we were still in the shit hole.

  “Goddamnit,” Harold hissed.

  I watched him as he repeatedly banged the wrench against a pipe fastened to the cinder block wall. He wiped the beads of sweat from his brows with the back of his hand and his tuft of gray hair fell forward onto his face. A seventy-year-old man whom I had never seen lose his cool in my entire life was now committing assault on an inanimate object.

  “Dad?”

  He turned to me and I knew then I had failed. I knew then we had all failed. The weight of the world wasn’t on his shoulders. The weight of the world was gone. He threw the wrench to the ground in defeat.

  “It’s not going to work,” he said,

  “That pipe always breaks and you always manage to fix it.”

  He took a deep breath and ran calloused fingers through his hair. The lines in his face had deepened over the last few weeks. I wanted to reach out and comfort him, the same way he had done when I was a kid -- but there was nothing I could comfort him with. I slid down to the floor, next to my father who was already kneeling down, staring at the cracks in the floor.

  “Remember that bicycle shop on the corner of Fifth and Harbor?” he asked.

  I looked over at him, trying to identify the reason for change in subject. “Yeah, I do. We used to walk by there every day for weeks before my birthday and look at the red Schwinn in the window.”

  “Do you remember why we used to do that?”

  “You said that sometimes if you wanted something bad enough, it would be enough to get what you wanted.”

  He nodded. “I didn’t get you that bike for your birthday.” “No, you didn’t.”

  “I remember the look of disappointment on your face when you woke up that morning and didn’t see the bike. Throughout the day, I watched you and as the day went on you looked more and more disappointed.”

  “That night, you told me that sometimes wanting things wasn’t enough. You said that no matter how bad we wanted things in life and no matter how hard we worked for them, sometimes things didn’t work out. You said that was my gift, the best lesson I could ever learn.”

  He grimaced and I realized then, for the first time, how difficult that day had really been for him. I hadn’t thought much about it since then, but now I realized how much that had shaped my life.

  “I worked over-time for three weeks to get you that bike. That’s the part I didn’t tell you. Then one of the pipes burst in the basement and I had to use that money towards the plumbing.”

  I looked down at the wrench on the ground and felt my throat tighten up.

  “I hated myself that day. I hated what I did to you and I never forgave myself.”

  “It was the best lesson of my life,” I whispered. “It was the worst of mine.”

  We sat there for nearly a minute in silence before my father spoke again. “It was the worst of mine, before today.” I looked at him again and saw the tears well up in his eyes. I had never seen my father cry before and it ripped my heart to shreds. He picked up the wrench and slowly stood up, pain straining his face.

  “Today?” I asked, hesitantly.

  “Today is the day I realized that there’s no hope for us.” Harold went back to working on the pipe. His movements were slower and weaker. I walked back into the dining hall and listened to the sounds of silverware against metal trays and the hushed conversations of strangers. No one was safe. Yet, my superiors refused to admit it. I kept hearing those words in my mind over a
nd over again even though Colonel Tempest had one of his minions announce over the loud-speaker three hours ago:

  This is only a drill. Please gather your belongings and go to levels thirty-seven and thirty-eight, stay away from the outer edges of the cylinder. This is only a drill.

  A drill my ass. The pathetic camp residents had no idea what was going on. We’d led them to believe that this was the only way to survive and that we would. We had it under control, we told them -- all lies. We’d lost communication with the Ozark Camp three days ago and Cheyenne Mountain two days ago. There went the United States, or whatever remained of the United States. Gone, just like that. Super power my ass. We were fucked.

  Yet, I sat here, and I could feel the Colonel’s eyes boring into my skull. Shit, maybe he was infected too. Because, if looks could kill - even if I hadn’t seen him from the corner of my eye, I would’ve known he was staring at me, waiting for me to acknowledge him. I hadn’t apologized yet, and the bruising around his eye was only getting worse. It became a blinding reminder that he could’ve had my ass, throwing me to them if he’d wanted. No one would’ve said anything, no one would care - especially not about me.

  It was the last straw. I had been on a death journey since Dallas. The memory played in my mind like a screeching echo. I could still feel her brown hair through my fingers and the sound of the chopper in the background. We’d been so close. If only he had - let us be.

  He’d shot her in the head as if it were nothing, and I still didn’t understand it. I could even feel the bullet whiz by my fingertips and then her face exploded into my palms. Gone, just like that - at our own hands. Who was worse, us or them? So I punched him in the face. My greatest satisfaction came from seeing her blood on his face from my fist.