Author's Note: Okay, this is another part to my short story. It took me a while to finally start writing, but I did finally get on it. I included part one into this because I had done a good deal of editing to part one along with part two and I decided to just put them together. Well, here goes nothing. Please comment in you like, review what you don't, and go away if you hate this. Seriously. Enjoy.
Edit: I'm sorry about the whole name switcheroo thing. I was debating on names, and for a while I completely forgot the name and referred to the story as this, so it kind of stuck. If maybe anyone has other ideas for names, go ahead and shoot me some, I'm open!
When I opened my eyes, there was nothing but light. Bright, blinding light that wouldn't cease its painful barrage on my dull eyes. I began to wonder if I had somehow traveled back in time, back to my birth, back when light was first introduced. I hoped so. At least then I could see my mom and dad’s faces again, even if only for a moment. Nothing would make me happier than to be free of this nightmare that won't even go away when I am awake.
Gradually, the light weakened and I could finally see things. Did I see a doctor in a birthing room or my mother and father? No, of course not. This was the real world, or what was left of it. A dull, rust colored sky that reminded me of a rooster's ass splayed out above me and trees as bare as the girls in those dirty books surrounded me with a false wall of security. A cold breeze gusted through the tree I was hanging in, and I almost thought I could hear music. But that was false security as well.
I slowly sat up right in my hammock and looked around, checking my perimeter in a way. When one was subject to constant threat of being killed by those that were infected, they tend to check their area out of habit. There were dozens of different trees surrounding me. Some were pines (even though they were evergreens, there were still spots that were turning a sluggish-yellow; this was partly because I was on what was left of a tree farm, and the trees had not been taken care of obviously; bad farmer, huh? Ha-ha); some were cotton woods (despite the conditions, they seemed to have taken root and grown taller than all the other trees; in fact, I think the tree I was in was a cotton wood); still others looked almost like overgrown bonsai trees. All the trees were in rows and oddly enough the rows seemed to remind me of Children of the Corn (“Outlander! Outlander! We have your woman!”). I began to listen closely, wondering if children would suddenly appear with knives and cleavers, praising He Who Walks Behind The Rows.
Peter, my pet ferret, had his head poking out of the top flap of my ruck sack. He was looking around as well. Yawning and stretching, he crawled out slowly and in my lap.
“Peter, you wryly little furball, have you been up all morning waiting on me?” Peter stared back at me as if in response. I shook my head at him like a mother would at her child after being caught digging around in the cookie jar. "What am I to do with you?" Eat him? I thought. No, he's too valuable. Life is more bearable with him around.
My hammock was twelve feet off the ground. Plenty high to be out of reach if someone came in the night and tried to attack me. Okay, maybe not, but it was just another one of those false securities that made sleeping easier. After I had gotten out, I untied the lines, tossed the rope hammock into my rucksack and shouldered it so I could climb down. There was a loud crunch of leaves as I finally fell to the ground, landing on both feet, ready to run in the case that I had missed any dangers. No other sound hit my ears except for the sounds of the birds playing cops and robbers (although I was never fully able to recognize a bird by sight like my father used to, I was always able to picture them as cops and robbers, what with the way they sometimes flew around in circles chasing each other, going chirrup! and cheep-cheep-cheeeeep! and even kah! kah! kah! as if shooting each other in escape). I decided to leave.
As I walked out of the tree farm I had bedded in, heading for the field that surrounded it and main rode I’ve been following, I began to think about Z-Poc, the thing that turned Earth, God’s playground, into Hell, as if God took a magnifying glass and just started frying us humans. Except Z-Poc was biological, so it would be more like God taking a vial of small pox and spilling it all over His playground so then the other kids would get sick and vacate, never to return again, giving Him free rein.
Just in case you weren’t in the know, Z-Poc stands for Zombie Apocalypse. Although there were never any real zombies, there were creatures and monsters. At least, so to speak. Let me explain.
Around eight months ago (give or take a few weeks, as my watch had broken a while back), an epidemic swept across the country and finally the world. What this disease did was harrowing; people weren’t zombies, as I’ve said before, but they could no longer be considered remotely human.
This was a virus that affected the nervous system, the cardiovascular system, and the mind. Whoever contracted it (it was contracted easily enough, though most got it through direct contact, it was also contracted through the water and in some cases the air, so anyone and everyone was in danger. Only the truly immune or the severely lucky survived past it) went through different stages, some turning out just fine, or others turning into crazed killers, both of which ending with the victim dying of convulsions that led to a completely destroyed brain, with little bits and pieces of gray Spam practically clinging to the skull cap and oozing out of the ears. A gruesome death, sure, but all-in-all a merciful end to the more ill-fallen.
The first sign was a lack of feeling throughout different spots in the body. The virus was turning off the receptors of pain so then if its victim ever got hurt or had to fight, it wouldn’t stop just from injuries, pretty much ensuring that the host wouldn’t die before the virus finished. Almost immediately after complete feeling left the victim, they would go unconscious. They would then start breathing fast, almost as if panting like a dog, except these weren’t short, sharp breaths; these were full, deep-inhaled breaths like what a professional tuba player might breath in before playing one two minute long note. The heart would also speed up, sounding like a conga drum, until it seemed that the victim’s chest would surely blow out, leaving a heart sized hole right where the heart would’ve be in the chest. The reason for both of these occurrences was simple enough: the virus needed lots of oxygenated blood to go straight to the brain so then it could rewire it for its next feat.
The last feat of the virus was undoubtedly the worst: the victim would slow its breathing and portray all the symptoms of death, giving anyone near false security as the victim lay in wait, ready to kill.
Of course, there were those who weren’t as susceptible to the virus as others. These victims tended to show some characteristics of the virus, but they never went to all-out killer. They just calmed down and died after so long, depending on the person. The only distinction between the two possible effects was that those who weren’t as susceptible did go went crazy, crazy being they had to be either hospitalized in the mental ward or hidden from view. They spoke to people who weren’t there, got paranoid of even the simplest things, and often times multiple “visions”. Many of these victims were killed instantly, whether for safety or for mercy is hard to discern.
I left after about a month of all the plague, anarchy, and riot against the government and the military and took to the wild. Took some simple stuff I knew would come in handy: cans of food, clothes, a blanket, my shortwave radio, a book (needed something to keep my mind off of things, ya know? grabbed Lord of the Flies; interesting book), and, of course, Peter. So many people had died and there was hardly anyone left to watch the stores anymore that I figured if I needed anything else, I could go to a store and take what I wanted without problem. So far, I haven’t had any problems with this tactic.
Tons of people died, but not all of them died from the plague that, on its own, wiped out at least three fourths of the population, or near close to it. Along with the fall of government, there were of course the riots against the military, the public struggles, the raiders and muggers and trespassers and cultist “cleansers” (these guys were probably the worst in truth; they killed the infected and the feared to be infected; if one was healthy and immune, they would force you to join in their ranks, brainwashing you until you gave in, or killing you if you didn’t). Accidental deaths, heart attacks, lack of medications, lack of power for life support in hospitals which were already over-flowing with the corpses of the poor souls that had contracted the soul-rendering virus. I could make a list of all the possible ways the plague could kill someone without even infecting them.
Actually, note to self, write a list of all indirect ways the plague and its consequences could’ve killed people.
The government grasped for control avidly, yet constantly it ended up slipping away like a sly fox. Nothing they did helped. The National Guard flocked to infected towns and cities and “vacated” anyone and everyone who was infected or exposed to the infected, but even that proved too fail. Guardsmen got sick and dropped dead as doornails just like everyone else. Fearing for the worst, the government finally sprung for the ultimate undo button, the error eradicator, the great good-bye from the sky: the atomic bomb. They nuked most of the more problematic areas in the country, sending them off like hotcakes, and hoped that it would choke off the virus long enough for those still infected to die before infecting anyone else.
I speak mostly of America, the U.S. of A., yet I never mention the goings on of the world. I used the shortwave radio I took along with me to listen to the world I was so intently hiding from, keeping a good ear on the “enemy”, and through that was how I first heard of the bombs. I picked up signals from around the world and filtered out what I could understand. I heard a lot of foreign news from Britain, good ole BBC, and found out that the exact same problems were going on there as well, and it was spreading, crossing border lines and learning new languages, so to speak.
In London, England, the queen, of course, had been taken care of, but as for Parliament, a group of crazed, deranged, infected civilians, all strapped with at least a hundred pounds of high-end explosives each to their chests, stormed Parliament while they were in session, and leveled the entire building, killing everyone.
In Paris, France, a religious group felt this was God’s wrath on Earth, and actually hung themselves on the Eiffel Tower. Over fifty bodies dangled limply from the struts and the metallic structure of the tower, seeming almost like wind chimes from afar, or so I heard.
Moscow, Russia: public overthrow, leading to public execution.
Sydney, Australia: boats with bodies lit up in flames and set to sea.
Mexico City, Mexico: mass suicides.
Tokyo, Japan: leveled by one bomb.
Everywhere, no matter where, things were happening. Shit had hit the fan, and everyone had been hit. There was no real safe haven at the point in time. Places were either infected and being bombed, or infected and being taken over by cults and deranged civilians. Fires, bullet shots, explosives, murder, rape, theft, anarchy, military up rise. The world is alike in more ways than people think—or, rather, thought. Death makes people, no matter what language, religion, race, age, or location, act alike: scared, paranoid, worried, thoughtful, impulsive, trustful, willing. Death had become so close to everyone, so of-the-norm, like a friend, a neighbor, a gramma, a walk out the door, a trip to the store, a walk with the dog, a fire in the fireplace, a book on the shelf, soda in the can.
But, like night, it would eventually have to come to an end. And come to an end it did. Or still is.
Eventually there did come a day when nothing would come up on the shortwave. White noise, static, buzz, beep-beep. But no voices. Even Peter became worried at the loss of voices from the magic box.
I kept moving. I never stopped. I figured that I probably traveled close to nine hundred miles total up to now. Always in the shadows, in the tall grass, out of sight, out of mind. I sometimes thought myself to be like a hobo, traveling from one place to the next, never stopping, always moving. Maybe there was a reason I got such a strong itch to leave in the beginning, even with things still gradual. Maybe I was like Guy Montag from Fahrenheit 451. Maybe I needed to survive. Maybe I need to do something important, remember something important from the past, start something, anything.
Maybe life was to restart, starting with me.
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