The Enduring: Stories of Surviving the Apocalypse (10 page)

“And there was no one around?”

“Not a living soul…” Mike said pointedly. “There was an old truck parked beside a little shack, but the truck was up on bricks – it had no wheels and its bed was rusted out. It could have been sitting there for years.”

“No one in the shack?”

“No,” Mike shook his head. “There were some dirty plates in the sink. The plates were covered in maggots and the floor was thick with rats,” he paused for a moment, frowning. “Best guess? Whoever had been in that shack had left days earlier.”

“And the boats? Tell me about them?”

Mike shrugged his shoulders. “They were little sailing boats,” he looked at me with irritation – as if there was nothing more to explain. “The jetty was up off the ground. It was a ramshackle mess of palings and posts. It must have been high tide. The water was lapping just twenty feet from the shack.”

“So you took one of the boats?”

Mike nodded. “We abandoned the car and transferred everything we had onto one of the boats. There was lots of loose rope lying around on the jetty. It might have been from another boat,” he shrugged. “I don’t know. It looked useful, so we took it too.”

“Anything in the shack?”

“It had been cleaned out,” he said. “There was nothing left in there worth taking.”

I wrote everything down, made sure I had Mike’s story faithfully recorded. I re-read everything twice before I looked back at him.

“But this didn’t end with a simple escape, did it?”

“No,” he said. “You read the journal.”

‘Firefight in the boat yard, but we got away.’

“Tell me what happened.”

Mike Jackson looked suddenly disappointed. “I still can’t work out how they found us,” he admitted. “We were quiet as we could be. There was no shouting, no revving engines… and yet somehow they must have heard us – or maybe sensed us…”

“The ‘Afflicted’?”

He nodded his head. “A dozen of them – maybe more. Danita and the girls were at the end of the jetty, waiting for me. We had the boat loaded up. I was back at the car. There were a couple of bags of clothes – the last things to pack aboard the boat. I heard them behind me. I heard the sound of them running, the shrieking howl of them as they came through the gates. They were like savage animals. They were monsters, drenched in blood and guts, clawing and snarling. They came at a run, incensed, maddened. I dropped the bags of clothes and snatched the AR off my shoulder. I shouted to Danita to untie the boat from the jetty and cast off.”

“You opened fire? Where were you exactly?”

“I was half way between the car and the boat. I was just at the little ramp up onto the jetty.”

“And they attacked you?”

“They came like berserkers,” Mike said. “It is the only way I can describe it. They were just insane – inhuman.”

“How close did they get?”

Mike paused and turned his head slowly. The rush of his words died on his lips for a long moment. “Too fuckin’ close.”

“You ran?”

“For my life,” he admitted. “I put down four or five of them with head shots. They were close range. The others kept coming. I hit a couple in the chest. They went down in the dirt and then got up again. There was simply no stopping them. Even with another dozen guys by my side, I doubt we would have been able to hold them off. They were an enemy unlike anything we have ever encountered before, or ever been trained to confront in combat. They had no morale. They had no feelings. They were just insane, blood-crazed monsters. They can’t be stopped any way other than killing them outright.”

“What was happening on the boat at that time?”

“Danita had got the mooring ropes loose. The boat was just starting to drift away from the jetty. She was firing at the ‘Afflicted’ but she was as much danger to me as she was to them. The girls were screaming, hysterical. I turned and ran along the jetty and leaped for the boat.”

“They chased you?”

“Yes,” Mike nodded. His mouth curled into a snarl. “We didn’t have the sails set – we were just drifting as the tide started to ebb. The only thing that carried us away from the shoreline was our initial momentum. One of the ‘Afflicted’ leaped across the gap and landed on the boat. He flailed an arm at my daughter, Andrea, but didn’t infect her. I blew the ghoul’s head off and the body was flung over the side of the boat.”

“Your daughter was lucky.”

“Yes.”

“And the others? The other ‘Afflicted’ I mean?”

“We were twenty feet away from the jetty by then. We were in the mouth of a river. There were mangroves along the far bank. They wouldn’t make the leap. They hung off the edge of the jetty, but they didn’t go out into the river. I set the sail and finally got up steerage speed.”

I threw down my notebook, raked my fingers through my hair and drew a deep breath. Mike got to his feet and kicked his boots into the dry dusty dirt. I handed him back the precious little journal but to my surprise he shook his head.

“Danita said you can keep it if you want – to help with your book maybe.”

“She doesn’t want the journal?” I was surprised.

“No,” he shook his head solemnly. “We lived through it, Mr. Culver. Whether it’s written down or not, we’ll always remember it. The horror is burned into our minds and memories,” he tapped the side of his head, “and the girls… well they will probably suffer nightmares from all we saw for the rest of their lives. We don’t need the book as another reminder. Take it.”

* * *

Grafton, West Virginia:

There were still blood stains on the walls of the house; dark brown smears that seemed to have been burned like a hot brand into the siding. The scars of old blood were spattered against the windows and around the frame of the home’s back door in crazy hectic dashes and running rivulets. Dead patches of grass surrounded the home as though worn into the earth by the frantic stomping tread of a thousand feet. I’d seen that scorched ground before. It told the tale.

The home had been surrounded by the undead, the poison of the ‘Affliction’ scouring the ground of its ability to sustain life.

I walked a circuit of the house, shaking my head in slow amazed wonderment. When I got back to where my car was parked, Chad Delloma was waiting for me. He was a man in his thirties with a ready smile and a couple of days of unshaven stubble that had turned his jaw to the color of gunmetal. He was wearing a faded baseball cap, pulled down low over his eyes. He looked fit, competent.

I was still shaking my head in disbelief.

“You defended this place?” I asked.

Chad nodded. “Me, my girlfriend, Iris, and young Colton.” He held open a small wooden box he had brought from inside. It was a kind of jewelry box with an ornate hinged lid. The inside was lined with felt and divided into little trays of space. In one of the corners was a red velvet bag, secured with a drawstring. Chad took the bag from out of the box and opened it.

“Hold out your hand,” he said.

I upturned my hand and he emptied the contents of the little bag into my palm. I stared down and then slowly gaped.

There were two fingernails and a tooth in my hand – but they weren’t ordinary. The tooth was like an extended canine, pointed at the tip, yellowed and beginning to rot. It was at least an inch long, with a mangle of sinew and tissue at the stump where it had been ripped from the mouth of…

“From one of the ‘Afflicted’?” I asked in a shocked whisper.

Chad nodded his head. “And they’re fingernails,” he said. “Look at them.”

They were unusually long; pointed like claws and hooked like talons. They were crusted with dirt, cracked and brittle as parchment.

“Incredible,” I gasped. “Where did you find them?”

“They were in the window frame,” Chad said casually. “After the ‘Afflicted’ had attacked the home and we drove them off, we came outside to inspect the damage and make repairs in case they came back. These were buried in the timber, right beside one of the windows at the back of the house.”

I studied the tooth and fingernails carefully and then dropped them back into the velvet bag. Chad closed the lid of the box and set it aside. He thrust his hands into the pockets of his jeans like he was waiting for me to ask a question.

“So you defended this home against the ‘Afflicted’. How many were you up against?”

Chad lifted the baseball cap off his head, scratched at his close crop of hair, and then set the cap back in place. “A dozen or so,” he said, and his expression became thoughtful. “They came down along the gravel road you used to get here.”

“And you fought them off – killed them all. Just you, Iris and a boy?”

“Yes,” Chad said and stared me frankly in the eye. “That’s what happened… but it’s not how things started.”

I nodded and drew the notebook from my pocket. I flipped open to a fresh page, then looked up. Chad was frowning. Maybe he was wondering what I was going to write – how those who had endured would remember his story. He started talking, his eyes flicking back to the notebook often, to be sure I was recording his tale of survival accurately.

I was.

This interview is what happened to one family in the small community of Grafton.

“That day was like any other to me,” Chad began. “The only difference was that I had worked the cateye shift through midnight at Loveridge Mine, and then driven almost three hours to visit with my mother,” his voice softened with compassion. “A few months earlier she had found out that she had stage four cancer. I made the effort because when me or my brother, Brian, visited, it seemed to give her strength, you know?”

I nodded my head sympathetically but said nothing.

Chad grimaced. “Watching my mother go from healthy to… to how she was at the end…? It was cruel, man. I used to think cancer was the most horrible disease someone could contract… until the ‘Affliction’ scoured America.”

“So you heard about the outbreak at your mother’s home?”

“No,” Chad shook his head and blinked, dragging himself back from the melancholy of reflecting on his mother’s passing. “The night before I was hearing talk on the news channels. I listened to the regular news services, but I also listened to a program called Info Wars. No matter where I tuned the radio, everyone was talking about the contagion. Back then there wasn’t a name for it – it was just a kind of formless panic fueled by wild rumors. Info Wars said what no one else was saying – they were calling it a plague.”

“What was your reaction?” I asked.

Chad made a kind of futile expression with his hands. “I didn’t do anything – it was just a warning on the radio; talk about a contagion sweeping up from the south. There were cases being reported across Florida, Alabama and Louisiana. I listened. I paid attention. Mentally, I guess I was preparing.”

“So tell me again when you actually first learned of the outbreak?”

“The following day,” Chad said. “When I was driving back from my mother’s house. I was about thirty minutes away from my home when I turned the radio on.”

“Just because? I mean was it a stroke of luck that you just happened to hear something on the news service?”

“No,” Chad said again. “I was curious. Along the interstate I kept seeing police cars and fire trucks rushing on both sides of the highway. They came in clusters – three cop cars and then a few minutes later they were followed by a couple of fire trucks. Ten minutes further down the road a couple more black and whites flashed past, sirens wailing, moving like they had to be somewhere in an urgent hurry. I switched the radio on to Info Wars to see if I could find out what was going on. I thought there might have been an accident further along the interstate…”

“And you heard the news that the outbreak had reached Virginia?”

“Once my phone stopped buffering the channel and the news shot through the speakers, that sinking feeling of dread in my guts turned into cold fear,” Chad admitted. “The host, Alex, was stammering and shouting like an evangelist preaching about Armageddon. Nothing he said was making much sense. He said the infection was proof that the government was pushing their World Order policy and thinning out the population for a one-world government. On the surface, it sounded like crazy stuff.”

“But in hindsight…?”

Chad shrugged his shoulders like he was wary of saying too much. “It makes a man think,” he said elusively. “Now, two years after the ‘Affliction’ burned itself out, no one still really knows what caused the contagion, do they?”

I said nothing. Chad blew out his cheeks with a breath of air and scratched the stubble along his jaw. “There were choppers in the sky by then,” he went on with his re-telling. Military and civilian. They were crisscrossing the sky, flying low. I was just a few miles away from town.”

“What did you see?”

“Smoke,” Chad said simply. “But there was a kind of hysteria in the air. I know that sounds weird, but it’s true, I swear it. There was something frantic about everything; the noise of the sirens and the helicopters… all the smoke. People were driving erratically.”

“Any shots fired?”

“Not that I could hear – not right then. I wanted to call Iris to see if she knew what had happened. She worked in the emergency department registering patients at UHC hospital and I knew there must be ambulances somewhere down the road if the police and fire brigade had been called in. If they were transporting patients from a crash, they would have taken them straight to UHC.”