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Survival

They hadn’t known each other until the world they thought so secure had come tumbling down around them.  They’d been so content each of them, living their lives, going to work, making love.  It had all been so easy.

Until that one fateful June day when the first corpse had opened its eyes, bitten deep into the arm of a nursing home attendant and started a plague.  No one knew why the dead were rising. Science and the military were at a loss.  All they knew was that these creatures were a menace.  They killed and ate until the victim regenerated then they all shambled off to kill again.  Within a few weeks inter-city travel and communications were gone.  Frantic Governors called up the National Guard and deputized anyone with a gun.  This actually made matters worse as the sudden input of more humanity into urban areas simply gave the creatures more victims, more allies once they were dead.  Of course not everyone came back.  Some were totally devoured, not regenerating until it was too late.  Heads attached to rotting bodies would lie in the street, jaws gnashing and eyes fluttering.  But these were helpless and harmless.

In the inner cities, panic and death were a way of life.  The government tried to set up evacuation sites, areas that could be defended until the people were removed.  Some even worked.  Most didn’t.  Many were overrun even as they were being set up, the defenders simply overwhelmed by the tireless, fearless enemy.

In some states, the cities were barricaded from the outside, bridges blown, tunnels sealed off the inhabitants left to rot.  Anyone trying to leave the city was killed, shot on site for fear they were carrying the disease that the dead carried. It was learned early on that a ghouls bite or scratch, any wound, was fatal and led to one becoming part of the undead hordes that were destroying civilization.

In the suburbs and rural areas, control was maintained with iron discipline.  Farms became forts, small towns were barricaded and anyone hoarding a body for a funeral was given a quick death then joined their loved ones on a pyre.  Priests, Rabbis, Mullah’s, all were killed in many areas, their pleas of ‘believe in God,’ falling on deaf ears.   In other areas, teachers, scientists and doctors went up on crucifixes and pyres.  The dark ages had returned with a vengeance.

Steve Anderson had thought himself in shape until the rising of the dead.  At first he’d remained in Manhattan, disbelieving the stories the survivors were telling, ignoring the shrieks of the police cars as they rushed to another sighting.  Finally when he’d nearly been taken in his own apartment building by two old men, men he’d thought simply bums looking for a handout, even his hard-headedness was defeated.  When he saw that one bums throat was open from ear to ear, but the snarling creature was still trying to claw out his eyes, Anderson became a believer.  He’d barely escaped the two of them.  Fortunately the doorman, getting ready to flee, had heard the scuffle and ended the creature’s existence with a shotgun blast to each of their heads.  That was the only way to defeat these creatures; blow their brains out.  Ben hadn’t even slowed long enough for thanks, merely jacked two more shells into the weapon and left, jumping in a small VW minibus and driving off.

That had been two weeks ago.  In that time Anderson had escaped from the rising tide of the dead only to end up in Brooklyn where, it was said, one last evac point survived in Prospect Park.  He and the people he was with wanted to get there, they wanted to live so badly that little was beyond them.

The bus they’d commandeered had broken down on 17th Street near the now abandoned Gowanus.  Followed by a horde of ghouls, they’d left the bus and ran up Fourth Avenue looking for shelter of any kind.  It was Carrie Rodriquez who had seen the small home, alone on a block of lots, no dead near it that they were now running for.  Steve was about to slow and take a head count when he heard the screaming start.  Freezing, gore spattered baseball bat in one hand, its aluminum surface dented, he stared back down the avenue.

One by one the others ran past him.  Jane Moon, a secretary and black belt, a woman who could make the hard decisions, ran past shaking her head.  She was trailed by Kim Chee Hop, a slight Korean they’d picked up in lower Manhattan.  Swiftly following were Sandra Mackie, an unemployed black woman; Burt Carter a heavy set man with a past that was obvious from the dark look in his eyes.  Lynn Hunter a fearful man whose life in academia had been rudely interrupted.  The last was Carrie Rodriguez who stopped and stared back.  “It’s Viola, they’ve got her!”

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