by Amber Wyatt
Attracted by the loud music and lights, two dozen zombies piled out of the bus and swarmed towards the barbeque. All Hana remembered was suddenly hearing shouting and seeing a blur of endless, rabid infected pouring out of the darkness. Her friends and neighbors screamed in agony as teeth ripped into them, and men and women went down thrashing and struggling. The banker had grabbed an axe from his garden shed and was cutting down zombies like wheat, but there were just too many of them and after a few seconds he went down under a wave of bodies.
Within the quarantine zone most people openly carried firearms, and deafening gunshots quickly started to ring out, adding to the confusion. Another half dozen zombies went down under the first volley of bullets, but at such close range the others swarmed over the remaining guests before any more shots could be fired. Within seconds everyone was covered in blood, grappling, falling over furniture, and rolling on the ground fighting desperately. It was almost impossible to distinguish between the undead and their struggling victims.
Coming out of her shock, Hana belatedly drew her own pistol and reflexively fired three shots into the face of a woman running straight at her. She had no idea whether the woman was an infected or not. Takumi was panicking next to her, uselessly jerking on the trigger of his uncocked pistol. He screamed at her that they had to run and she followed him as they both awkwardly clambered over the low hedge into the next garden. Hana sprinted across the garden right behind him but got stuck, straddled on the next hedge as he leapt over it.
Takumi finally cocked his pistol and told her to duck. He fired out his entire magazine, missing with most of his shots until he finally dropped the zombie that had followed them and was just about to grab her. But the sound had drawn the attention of the others. Hana looked back, grunting as she shoved the dead body off her leg. There were no survivors left at the other house. Silhouetted against the celebratory lights there must have been at least twenty undead staring directly at her, and every one of them started scrambling over the hedge and running towards the two of them.
The young couple ran for their lives, through a nightmare of pitch-black darkness and patches of light, with the huge horde of infected snapping at their heels. One second Hana would be squinting against the glare of a security light, then in the next black alley, she would be taking half a dozen steps completely night-blind, hoping she did not trip over a trashcan or some other obstacle.
Over the course of three blocks Hana emptied two magazines, dropping zombie after zombie, but there were always more behind them, getting closer and closer. They made it to their house and Takumi sprinted straight to the backyard with Hana following on his heels. He threw open the door to the shed, and as he frantically typed in the code to the hatch to the bunker, she stood in the doorway behind him, covering him with her pistol held outstretched in two hands. Amazed at her own calmness, she lined up her sights on the foreheads of the first three undead to run into the garden from the street, and dropped them one by one. Then the night was full of dark, bloody, predatory figures reaching for her, pouring into their backyard from all directions, and Hana was firing blindly and suddenly the bunker was open and they both dropped in, slamming the hatch shut just as the rush of infected hammered against it from the other side.
The two of them cowered there in terror, panting, squinting against the bright lights of the bunker, listening to the noises from above the hatch, and then as the minutes passed, they both smiled. Then they laughed. And cried. They had made it.
After a while they both put their pistols down and stripped. The clothes were already stiffening up with the blood coagulating on them. Hana retched into her mouth at the thick, coppery stench of it. She had no idea how they had managed to get so much blood on them, but that was not why they were undressing. They went through the drill that every man, woman and child within the zone knew you had to do if you were involved in a double ‘I’: an Infected Incident. They took it in turn to examine every square inch of each other for bites and broken skin, from top to bottom including the soles of the feet, no matter that they had been wearing shoes.
They were both clear of bites.
They started cleaning up. Takumi bagged their ruined clothes in genuine, thick, yellow biohazard bags, manufactured by a medical company in Portland, Oregon, and Hana took charge of sponging them both down with wet flannels. No showers until they could confirm the status of their water stores Takumi told her. Then they pulled spare underwear and military clothing off the shelves and, despite Takumi’s weekly visits to play with his man-toys and make sure that the bunker was apocalypse-ready, they meticulously checked that the bunker was up and running and that its emergency generator, solar charged batteries, air vents, water filtration and sewage systems were all working, before showering properly and getting dressed.
They most carefully kept their conversation on the tasks at hand and did not mention the carnage that they had both just witnessed. Neither of them actually had the words to do so in any case. They were both in shock, and struggling to believe that most of their friends had just been horrifically wiped out. In addition, Takumi had fantasized about this exact scenario on a daily basis for so long, that he could hardly believe that the real thing had actually happened. And Hana had spent so long dismissing the possibility of a zombie apocalypse as a frivolous daydream of her useless husband, that she was in a state of stunned disbelief. This just simply could not be happening. She had a manicure booked the next morning for God’s sake.
Eventually though, she gathered herself up to acknowledge the facts, and to say to her husband words that she had never thought would pass her lips. That he was right. That he had been right all along. He alone had known what was coming and struggled onwards in the face of her never-ending abuse and criticism. She had been blinded to the risks and nagged him constantly for years, but thank God he had ignored her and prepared this place of sanctuary. He was right and she was wrong. So, so wrong. He was not a loser at all. He was a hero and he had saved her life.
“Takumi,” she began, trying to formulate the words to admit that she had been wrong.
She was interrupted by muffled thudding from above the hatch. Gunfire. They both looked fearfully up at the ceiling. Multiple single shots and long bursts of machine-gun fire. Hour after hour. Hana could not tell how long the shooting went on for, but it was a long, long time.
“It is the end,” Takumi said grimly. “The end of the world.”
Outside someone had indeed called 911. Ever since the Galleria incident there had been a federally mandated fifteen-minute response time for law enforcement and first responders to attend to a mass outbreak of infected. Local SWAT and National Guard had arrived in the suburban street within fourteen minutes to carry out their drills for flushing out large numbers of infected. The entire street was taped off, a decoy device was deployed in the middle of the road and then sharpshooters waited from high-sided vehicles to shoot any infected that came out to investigate.
In a self-fulfilling strategy, the sound of gunshots had also added to the music from the decoy device to attract any more undead who might be lurking in the area. Afterwards, a door-to-door check was carried out by soldiers, in case any infected had been trapped behind obstacles, and then when the threat was over, Waste Management had come in and cleared the infected bodies away. From start to finish the whole process had taken about four hours, and by the time the tape was taken down and the street was opened up to traffic again, it was well past midnight.
Down in the bunker, the two of them had no idea that life was carrying on as normal above them. As far as they were concerned the zombie apocalypse had wiped out Fort Lauderdale and the only safe haven was right there in their bunker.
Of course, they had only been living underground for about a week before Takumi got bored. Building a survival bunker and daydreaming about living in it, was very different to actually living in it. By the time eight weeks had passed he was going stir crazy. Hana, on the other hand, seemed more than happy t
o spend the rest of her life in the three small rooms that were now their entire world.
The horror of that first night had caught up with her, and she still woke up most nights sweating from nightmares in which she clearly saw the faces of each of her friends as she killed them over and over again. In some dreams they had turned into mindless, snarling zombies. In others, they were still human, begging for mercy, desperately pleading with Hana not to kill them. Either way, the dreams always ended the same way, with her using a gun or an axe to shatter their faces into a mess of bloody gore. Hana woke each morning exhausted, with nerves ragged from her nightmares. Waking within the secure, cocooned confines of the bunker comforted her, and she showed no interest at all in ever leaving and setting foot outside again.
Takumi privately thought that maybe his wife had had some kind of mental breakdown. She had now fully committed to the survivalist program with an enthusiasm that bordered on fanatical. Her days were full of reading books and manuals, sucking up military knowledge like a sponge. She worked out for hours, practiced nearly forgotten martial arts from her high school days and cleaned and practiced dry-firing drills with the fire-arms stocked in the bunker’s armory.
In the evenings they watched films and soap operas on DVD. Unfortunately, Takumi had spent most of his weekends hanging out in the bunker and had already seen them. The only thing that had made the eight weeks bearable was his wife’s newfound devotion and hero worship. It had revived his fragile self-esteem and for the first time in years they had started having sex again. Mind-blowing sex. Daily. But still if he stayed one more day in this underground box, he was going to go crazy.
“I’m going to go out on a foraging trip,” he announced that night as they swapped DVD sets over to watch the next season of her favorite Korean soap opera. The entire gamut of human emotion flickered across her face. He wondered if she was going to congratulate him for being a hero or rip his head off for being an idiot.
“Don’t be crazy,” Hana had settled on the third option of being scared. “We both know what is up there.” A daily diet of post-apocalyptic action movies and survivalist propaganda manuals had left her in no doubt that the surface world was now a wasteland, populated only by the undead and feral packs of human survivors practicing banditry and cannibalism on each other. Civilization was long gone. They had heard for themselves the gunfire throughout the first night in the bunker, as the undead swarmed out of the darkness and humanity had gone down fighting. Takumi had checked the radio channels on his walkie-talkie for the first few days and nights afterwards, but there was nothing on any frequency. Only static and a chilling silence.
“We have enough rations to last us for another two years and three months!” Hana knew, since she had inventoried every item personally. Their sewage flushed directly and illegally into the municipal sewers. Water came from two linked, self-drilled, off the grid, two-inch diameter wells which were good for fifteen years and had cost them five thousand dollars and almost their marriage at the time.
“Our supplies will not last forever,” he tried to sound reasonable, “and we need to restock before they start running low. We don’t know how long I might have to search for before finding another source of supplies.”
They discussed it back and forth but to his surprise Hana was far less argumentative than he had expected her to be. The truth was that she no longer trusted her original instincts, afraid that they were just the ignorant prejudices of her past mentality. She reminded herself constantly that no matter how stupid her husband seemed to be, and sadly she had also discovered in the last few weeks just how mind-numbingly boring he actually was; when it came to survival matters, he undoubtedly knew best and she should not try and second guess him. If Takumi said that he needed to go to the surface to go scouting and foraging, then he needed to go, period.
And so it was that the next morning Takumi pulled on his equipment, checked his pistol and rifle were ready and grasped the rungs of the ladder. He realized that his heart was thudding and his palms were sweating. He paused and swallowed, pushed his spectacles more firmly back onto his nose, and checked his pistol again. Maybe he was being a bit hasty about this. Perhaps he could actually wait another day or two.
He looked back and saw Hana looking at him with a curious mixture of worry and hero worship. He loved that look in her eyes. Respect, that was the word he was looking for. He loved to see that respect for him in her eyes. And he felt a twinge of lust as he remembered the feverish lovemaking of the night before, immediately after he had announced his intention to go on his scouting mission. Come on Takumi. You’re the hero. Be the hero. This is just what a US Navy SEAL would do. He gritted his jaw into what he imagined was a suitably heroic expression, gave her a comforting smile and climbed up the ladder.
By the time he had reached the top of the ladder he was no longer feeling heroic. He was feeling absolutely terrified, if he had to be honest. He remembered with crystal clear precision the bloody faces of the zombies charging towards him the last time he had been at the top of this ladder, before he slid down it, shouting at Hana to follow him, her screaming as she fired out her magazine, hot brass bouncing everywhere and the gunshots deafening him. Takumi wondered if those zombies were right now stood around the hatch above him, motionless and waiting only for the right stimulus to burst once again into ferocious, undead life. Sweat poured down his face. He used one hand to push back his spectacles again, then undogged the hatch and opened it just a crack.
Nothing happened. Takumi peered all the way around before pushing the hatch open fully and popping his head up. He scanned amateurishly around the inside of his shed with his pistol, imitating the tactical military videos he had seen on the internet. It was empty. He awkwardly climbed all the way out and pushed the hatch down. He caught one glimpse of Hana’s pale, worried face below before the hatch slipped shut on silent hydraulics. He paused to catch his breath. He had never really moved around in all his gear and weapons before and he was surprised at how heavy and clumsy it all was. Then he holstered his pistol, checked the safety catch on his rifle was off and slowly opened the shed door.
Bright sunshine lit up the empty garden in front of him. A dog barked in the distance and he froze, then he slowly moved out, scanning left and right. He stopped puzzled. Where were the bodies of the zombies from the night they had fled into the bunker? Then his blood ran cold as he realized what he was hearing. That familiar noise, so familiar to his unconscious mind that he had not even registered it for what it was. Traffic. That background noise was traffic. He ran heedlessly down the side of his house to the front driveway and came to a dead stop, stricken with horror.
In front of him was a beautiful, normal, sunny September day. Cars rolled noisily past left and right, and the heavy brakes of a bus hissed as it pulled into the bus stop down the block. Some kids got off the bus and ran away from him up the street. An attractive soccer mom in leggings jogged past, plugged into her headphones, and the old couple opposite him pulled out in their chocolate-colored SUV. The old lady waved at Takumi as they drove off. Dumbly he waved back, his mouth hanging open.
Takumi staggered back to his porch on suddenly jellified legs and slumped down, sitting to face the road. His mind struggled to believe what he was looking at. Not a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Just his perfectly normal, suburban neighborhood with lawns, dogwalkers, traffic… No zombies. No bandits. He went blank for a moment and leaned back to enjoy the sun on his face and the beautiful smell of grass and car exhaust. Two months. God, two fucking months! Stuck in that stupid bunker with Hana.
At the thought of his wife Takumi bolted back upright. Hana! His heart literally stopped, then went back into overdrive, adrenalin pounding through every artery in his body.
Ho.
Lee.
Shit.
His stomach flip-flopped with awful dread. When she found out that they had been living down in that hole for no reason at all. For two months. Thinking that he was some kind of hero. Jesus
Christ. She was going to go absolutely batshit crazy. And the sex! The sex down in the bunker had been amazing, but when she found out what an idiot he had been, she would never go near him again. What was he going to do? Takumi put his face in his hands and realized that his whole body was shaking.
He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. There was no real choice. He was going to lie to her, of course. That was what he was going to do.
Chapter Two
Skeleton In The Closet
Another four months passed and life in the bunker had settled into a comfortable routine. Every few days Takumi would go off on his foraging expeditions although now he was often gone for two or even three days. He explained to Hana that he had now searched through all the easily accessible buildings in their neighborhood and was now having to range further afield.
He had told her that he could not travel by night. The risk of walking into a zombie in the dark was too high, so as dusk fell, he would find somewhere to hole up for the night and then return home in the morning. Sometimes he would come back with bags full of treats. Sometimes his bounty was just a couple of candles or a bottle of water. Whatever it was, Hana was just as excited at what came out of his backpack, and was always grateful that he had come home safely to her.
She was intensely aware that on every trip he was risking his life for the both of them, and each and every trip she fretted sleeplessly until he made it back safely. Takumi also often went out of his way to find things that she would like. On Christmas day he had come back with no food or drink, but a single, red rose for her. Hana had cried inconsolably for an hour. She really did not deserve such an amazing man and she felt a constant guilt that she had taken him for granted for so long.