The Enduring: Stories of Surviving the Apocalypse (2 page)

“When the ‘Afflicted’ attacked the police officers at the hospital I knew it was the beginning of the end,” she said forlornly. “I think we all knew. Everyone at the barricades ran. It was the insanity of fear. People became inhuman. They pushed others out of the way, they trampled on anyone who fell. It was the instant we stopped being people and became…” she shrugged her shoulders, “… like them.”

“But you made it to safety.”

“Yes. I got to my car and headed back here, into town. Wade – my husband – was shopping with my daughter. He was off work for the day and Savannah was on summer break. I drove as fast as I could.”

“What happened when you got back here?”

“I parked in front of the Post Office,” Stacie said with a humorless grin of irony. “Right where all that rubble is now.”

“What was it like in town?”

“Normal,” Stacie sounded surprised. “They didn’t know yet. No one in town knew what was happening until the rest of us who escaped from the hospital arrived back. Suddenly car horns were blaring, alarms were wailing. Two police cars went racing away towards the hospital with their sirens howling. Everything went from calm to chaos like that.” She snapped her fingers. “Something in the air changed,” Stacie frowned like she was trying to understand at the same time she was explaining. It was like she was talking through a problem, groping towards an improbable solution. “At the time I didn’t really think about it. I was in a panic. I was driven by fear… and that’s what was in the air. It was like the vibration of the world changed – from soothing laid-back music to a deafening screech.”

She looked at me, her mouth wrenched into an expression that was almost like pain. “Does that make any sense?”

I shrugged. “I think so,” I said quietly. “You believe the fear and terror spread through everyone in the town.”

“Yeah…” she said vaguely, not quite satisfied with the words I had offered, and still frowning. “Without any screaming or shouting – the panic spread. It became contagious. Suddenly people were running, scrambling. Cars screeched out into traffic and there were a couple of collisions. Fistfights broke out and a couple of the grocery stores were looted. We were a community up until that moment. Then we became something less noble. We became survivalists. It was each man for himself.” She sounded almost ashamed – as though she had expected better. I was sorry for her.

I wrote down everything Stacie said, taking my time – giving her a few moments to gather herself. “We lost our humanity,” she muttered softly and lapsed into a dark brooding silence.

“Everyone did,” I said simply. “Your story is not unique. I’ve heard it time and time again from those that have endured the Apocalypse. There is a moment – an instant – where suddenly everyone forgets civility, compassion… all those things that bind us together as people. It gets lost, and in its place we revert to the kind of animal instinct that is required to survive. It’s not polite – it never is, Stacie. It’s crude and raw and callous… and I guess, when you peel manners aside, it’s what mankind is. We’re desperate survivors.”

The wind came up again, rippling the dirt that lay across the blacktop and whipping up a swirling cloud of dust. I closed my eyes and turned my back against the gust. We were outside the door to the burned out bistro. I plucked at Stacie’s elbow and we went inside. There was no roof – I guessed that it had collapsed in upon itself at the height of the fire. The floor of the structure was littered with blackened wooden beams and little mounds of gritty dirt. In one corner was a pile of broken chairs and tables. We found a corner of the building where the intersecting walls still stood. Overhead the sky was turning sunset yellow.

“You stayed in your home throughout the Apocalypse, right?” I asked.

Stacie nodded. “I found Wade and Savannah on the main street and we drove home in convoy,” she said.

“What about others – the other people around this area who survived?”

Stacie shrugged. “Some were prepared like us,” she admitted. “The others fled up into the mountains.”

“The mountains?”

Stacie nodded. “The terrain around these parts is perfect for survival,” Stacie explained. “There are wide open spaces where you can see anything coming from miles away, and there are old abandoned mines and cabins in the hills that people turned into their homes. There is plenty of firewood – plenty of wildlife…”

“Did you consider taking your family into the mountains when the ‘Affliction’ spread?”

Stacie shook her head. “Our home was well prepared.”

“How?”

“Mr. Culver, this is Wyoming,” Stacie said as though that explained everything. “We’re not city folks. Out in these parts, most people are self-reliant. Our home has a full finished solid concrete basement with only four windows, and each of them is too small for a person to fit through. The upstairs windows are high off the ground and they’re all constructed out of vinyl for energy efficiency, not glass. They’re virtually unbreakable and can be locked from the inside. The basement was fully stocked when the ‘Affliction’ broke out. We were prepared for anything.”

“So you could have fled into the mountains?”

“Sure,” Stacie gestured irritably, like the question was pointless. “We have tents, a gas operated generator and lots of candles and kerosene lanterns. But the food and water was all stockpiled in the basement. It made more sense to stay in a well-defended home than it was to head up into the mountains.”

“By well defended, you mean guns?”

“Of course.” Stacie looked at me like perhaps I was crazy. “We have several different rifles and a couple of shotguns as well as handguns with plenty of ammunition. We also have an axe and a chainsaw if you want to know.” There was an irritated edge coming into Stacie’s tone – perhaps driven by the naivety of my questions, or maybe she was stung by her own sense of frustration and despair. I sensed that at any moment, she might simply turn on her heel and walk away, ending the interview.

“Did you ever have to use the weapons to defend yourself?” I asked.

Stacie’s eyes turned cold as steel and a hectic rush of color flushed across her cheeks. Her mouth pressed into a thin line. “Once,” she said softly.

I said nothing. I sensed that there was more Stacie needed to say. I listened to the sound of the wind moaning and watched the shadows lengthen across the wrecked floor of the old bistro.

Her shoulders slumped a little and she seemed to deflate slowly. Her bitterness became a kind of melancholy. She shuffled her feet in the dust and scraped a tendril of hair from her face before she met my eyes.

“The Apocalypse largely swept past us unnoticed,” Stacie said in that far away voice I had become accustomed to. “We stayed inside the house for three and a half months – long enough we figured for the ‘Afflicted’ to move on, decompose… do whatever the undead did, and for the government to come into Wyoming and restore order. In that entire time only one of the ‘Afflicted’ came to our house.”

“And…?”

Stacie’s expression changed again, filling with grief. “It had once been a little girl,” she said ominously. “Before she was ‘Afflicted’. I knew her. She was one of Savannah’s school friends.”

“And she came from out of nowhere?”

“She must have sensed us inside the house,” Stacie’s voice quavered a little. “She began pounding on the door, shrieking like a demon. She was inhuman. Her strength was… was incredible. She was drenched in dry blood. It was down her chin and in her hair, and splashed across her dress. She saw me through one of the windows…”

I said nothing. I stayed perfectly still, my notebook forgotten, hanging in my hand.

“…Her eyes…” Stacie shook her head. “They were filled with savage hate and fury. The whites of her iris were bloodshot red, and the pupils were just black little pinpricks.”

“What happened?” my voice dropped to a whisper.

“She tried to break in through the windows. There were bloody streaks down the vinyl from where she ripped shreds of her flesh off her knuckles. Then she came back to the front of the house. She was screaming and kicking at the door. It was vibrating against the lock. She was just a kid but the ‘Affliction’ had turned her into a monster.”

“What did you do?”

“I had one of the shotguns…” Stacie said ominously, her voice becoming dark and filled with foreboding. “I unlocked the door and flung it open. The little girl was crouched on the ground, like some creature out of a nightmare. She was snarling at me. Her lips peeled back and I could see little scraps of flesh stuck between her teeth. There was blood in her mouth. She was crouched down in the dirt, but her body tensed like a wild dog about to pounce. She clawed in the dirt and then threw back her head. Her tongue hung from the corner of her mouth. It was hideous what the ‘Affliction’ had done to her.”

“You shot her?”

“Yes,” Stacie said at last in a long pained breath. “I fired both barrels of the shotgun at her. Afterwards, my husband Wade burned the body.”

The wind had begun to turn cold. Sunset was slowly turning to dusk. A rat scurried across the floor and disappeared through a crack in the crumbling brick wall. In those few quiet moments Stacie Morton composed herself, thrusting away the dark demons that haunted her – for the moment.

“Take me back to that time when you finally left the house,” I said, deliberately changing the topic to touch on hope. “What did you find?”

“Decomposed bodies,” Stacie said. “They were all along the road from our home, into town. Some were slumped by the roadside, the carcass still seething and heaving with maggots. Others were just withered skeletons propped against walls or laying in the gutter where they had fallen. The sky was black with crows and carrion birds, wheeling endlessly overhead for weeks.”

“But eventually…?”

Stacie shrugged a shoulder. “Eventually we met others,” she whispered and her eyes became shiny with welled tears. “Other people who had survived in their homes. Some folks came down from the mountains.”

“How many survived?”

“Maybe fifty of us, out of ten thousand,” Stacie said.

We stepped back out onto the street. With the approaching darkness, the wind seemed to have died away, as if even it was scared of the night. Stacie Morton hunched down into her coat and I slipped my notepad into my pocket, her story recorded.

We shook hands on the sidewalk and I watched her all the way to where her car was parked amidst the wrecked and burned out shells of other vehicles that still littered the street. She never turned back once – never stopped to wave, or to wish me well. She walked stiffly, as though her emotions were barely being restrained.

When I think about her now, I wonder, more than anything else, about what she did when she drove away from our meeting.

Did she sob? Did she let loose the shackles of everything that was pent up inside her and cry?

I don’t know. But if I had to guess, I’d bet she drove back to her family, her chin thrust out and defiant, her expression grim, and her gaze on the distant horizon that offered nothing more than an uncertain future.

* * *

Concordia University, Seward, Nebraska:

“Is this the place?” I looked up curiously.

“The place?”

“Yes,” I frowned. “Where you killed the first of the ‘Afflicted’?”

Zane Francescato stared at me and his friendly affable expression seemed to crumple with distress and dark memory. He was a young man – not yet twenty, with the kind of cheerful nature that would have made him popular amongst his classmates. It was only his eyes that gave his character more dimension. They were old eyes. Weary.

Eyes that had seen too much bloodshed and horror maybe to ever sparkle again.

Zane nodded his head and I saw him swallow hard and look up into the wide blue Nebraska sky. “It was over there,” he pointed. “I had stopped at my storage shed where I keep all my survival supplies. As I was loading my Jeep, it came towards me.”

I jotted a quick note into the pad I was holding and then went towards a line of small iron sheds, stretched out in a long line. I walked with my head bowed. The concrete was stained with oil and mud – and then a gruesome spatter of something that looked like brown paint.

But it wasn’t paint.

I looked back at where Zane waited. He was standing with his arms folded across his chest like he was reluctant to come closer. I pointed at the ground. “So this is the place?”

He nodded. His lips were pressed in a thin pale line. I walked slowly back to where he waited and drew a deep breath.

“Want to tell me what happened?”

Zane shrugged. “From the beginning… or about what happened here?”

“Tell me about this first,” I said, staring frankly into the clouded expression of his face. “Then we can backtrack to the first moments you found out about the Apocalypse.”

Zane unfolded his arms and thrust them deep into the pockets of his trousers. He looked at me, but not directly at me. His gaze focused on something just beyond my shoulder and his eyes seemed to darken and then dilate. “I didn’t know the person,” he began, faltering a little with a trace of anxiety. “It was a girl. She had probably been one of the campus students. I don’t know. I’d never seen her before.”