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Two nights ago: Twilight

Carl’s emotions welled up inside him from deep down in his guts rolling and boiling like a rotten meal about to be purged.  Mounting like a great bubble of despair filled with the last eighteen months of horrors and atrocities the likes of which the world had never known.  A great black ball of fear and angst and loneliness churned up his belly finally reaching the back of his throat, and there mixed with the tangy taste of gun oil and the position of the barrel pressing hard against his tonsils the hazardous combination nearly forced him to vomit but instead ushered in a violent fit of dry heaves.  He pulled the gun from his mouth and fell to the ground sobbing and convulsing in unison until the spasm subsided.  The only thing that had saved him was the fact that he hadn’t eaten anything in the last three days.  Three days of all consuming depression, that combined with another seven days of chaos and uncertainty had made this the worst ten days since all of this started.

This, of course, was the resurrection of the recently dead, but not just the rising but the rising with the most horrific of intentions; to feast upon and devour the flesh of all whom they encountered:  Indiscriminately, unswervingly, unemotionally, and unavoidably.  The end of days, they said, the rapture, the day when the creator judged his people and passed down sentence from on high.  If that was the case then the news was bleak and we as a race had obviously failed miserably and needed to be punished… and punishment came swiftly and mercilessly.

It seemingly started over night with weird and curious stories popping up here and there on the national news stations first from around the globe and then from our own backyards.  Like the story from Georgia about the mortician who allegedly cheated countless bereaved families by not properly disposing of the deceased bodies charged to him, but instead burying the bodies in a shallow, mass grave on a few acres of wooded land located just behind the mortuary.  And while the story explained the dozens of corpses now present and laid side by side like so many fallen soldiers it didn’t explain the sounds of gunfire reported by nearby neighbors, the hundreds of spent shell casings or the fact that only the mortician was taken into custody and by all accounts he was alive and well with nary a scratch on him.  This story and so many like it raised the red flags for most people enough to start to believe that the wool was being attempted to be pulled over their eyes.  Ultimately the government should have been forth coming to the public in the first place even though they had no real idea what they were dealing with because once the public found out that they were being lied to…well…that was the end of it.

Carl had seen it coming, well not the dead rising thing…but something.  There is a fine line between paranoia and preparedness and he walked the razors edge daily.  Truth to tell he never had any real reason to doubt the government until those cover-ups were exposed, but once they were he and so many like him were vindicated because these were big ones.

Once the deceptions were uncovered, preposterous and impossible explanations started to come flying in from all angles.  A brain trust of doctors from the private sector evidently did some research with a number of "live" subjects and gave the plague a name; Schizophrenic-mental abnormality or the shambles, but this never broached the topic of the case study’s imperviousness to all wounds except traumatic brain injuries (an exception that proved the rule as far as the private doctors were concerned).

With the advent of these new classifications the religious right saw their opportunity to chime in which made sense because people were confused and people were scared and the ones who didn’t look to science for their answers looked to God, so religion was seeing a resurgence which it hadn’t experienced since probably around the time of the inquisition. 

James Royce, a popular and acclaimed televangelist of the day, heard these new hypothetical scientific explanations and saw an opening to reinvigorate his spiritual congregation by tearing down and mocking these new, varying scientific hypothesis’.  He procured himself a "live" test subject of his own and on live television, in front of a live studio audience of hundreds proceeded to carve up a disheveled an extremely animated and agitated middle-aged man who for some reason or another didn’t need his stomach intact to survive and snapped and slathered like a mad dog whenever Royce came close.

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