When the Dead Read online

  As the day disappeared and night came, things were falling apart fast as the spread of the infection continued from one complacent and unprepared house to another. In Northgate strange noises filled the air, mixed with relentless emergency response sirens. Isobel turned off the television, filled the bathtub with water just in case it stopped running, cooked some pork chops and drowned out the horrible cacophony with her mp3 player.

  Slowly she fell asleep. Around one in the morning the gunshots picked up and tore her from her rest. Unable to regain unconsciousness over the noise, Isobel turned the television back on. The dead weren’t just coming back; they were definitely coming back hungry. Her mind returned to the bicyclist. He wasn’t lashing out in anger; he was trying to bite her! The confirmation was terrifying. The attacks had spread so quickly that the infection had reached uncontainable levels. With one eye open, Isobel barely slept at all the rest of the first night.

  The Second Day

  The second day of the plague was noisy. All this death is so much nosier than the daily grind of life, Rob Pace thought. Midday brought a motorcycle accident in the street out front of the building. He heard the bike speeding up the street, then a horn honk, some metal crashing on metal, and then yelling.

  Rob looked outside. He saw the motorcyclist lying on the ground a few yards from his bike. He was dragging himself along the ground; his legs made useless in the crash. Rob noticed he wasn’t yelling from the pain. The dead people that had appeared on the street overnight were slowly moving towards the maimed man.

  “Get away! Stay back!” Rob heard him yell. “I have a gun!” And he did. The biker pulled it from inside his jacket and started recklessly shooting into the growing crowd. He took two down easily but he realized he wouldn’t have enough bullets to kill them all. He turned the gun on himself.

  “No!” Rob yelled from his apartment balcony. The man pulled the trigger before he was killed by one of the undead.

  “What is it Dad?” Gabe, his seven-year-old son, had run to his side. Rob quickly threw a hand over his eyes.

  “Something you shouldn’t see.”

  “But I want to see it.”

  “You are only saying that because you don’t know what it is.”

  “Well . . . yeah.”

  “And you’ll never know.”

  Rob found it within himself to laugh as he pulled his son away from the window.

  Tissue Thin

  It was easy to stay inside if you were anyone other than Jeff Brown. He hadn’t been out of the apartment for almost a week due to the combination of a nasty cold he’d caught and then the infection that everyone else was catching. His desk job, providing technical support for a major software company, always drained his energy. He should have felt rested from the time off but he was tired.

  His marriage to Sheila was crumbling; if you could call it a marriage to start with. She’d forced him into it ten years ago and he’d regretted that every day since. There was no communication and his wife loved her dog more than him. All this he was ok with though. The issue lay with being stuck inside with her for a week and for an indefinite length of time to come. He blew his nose into one of the last tissues they had in the house.

  “Do you have to blow your nose so loud? It’s disgusting!” Sheila yelled from the other room.

  He could feel his patience grow thinner with every remark she made and every tense conversation they had; thoughts tugging at his brain of leaving or asking her to go instead. She could take her untrained dog with her, he fell asleep on the couch dreaming of it, used tissues scattered across his sick body.

  The Devil’s Work

  “We just have to survive this. Please be patient, Edward. Life has thrown us more difficult things in the past,” Moira tried to comfort her husband who had been pacing their first floor apartment for two days.

  “Have you looked outside today? There’s blood on the street and people everywhere.”

  “They aren’t people anymore. Maybe you should stop looking if you don’t like what you see.”

  “Folks on the radio are saying we should try to get somewhere safe.”

  “No place is safe! The army bases started turning people away and now they are dying at the closed front gates. The mega churches asked their congregations to gather for mass prayer in order to cast out the demons that possess everyone. Then they all got trapped in the buildings with the infection. The pews are covered in blood just like the street. NPR said the best course of action is to stay inside and lock the doors.”

  “That isn’t action; that is inaction.”

  “So we don’t change a thing then. Sit down and read your book.”

  A Promise

  Ben had been waiting for his girlfriend since yesterday. She lived a few cities away and he’d asked her to stay with him. He waited to hear the front door buzzer all day. He heard it a lot but when he answered the phone to see if it was Anna it was someone else. Today, all he heard was growling.

  He waited without hearing from her the entire day. The sirens grew further and further apart. How many ambulances were still capable of responding? How many paramedics now needed medical help themselves? Ben imagined a lone ambulance racing from incident to incident; brave medics fighting to save lives and to stay alive themselves but eventually even that siren stopped wailing.

  He hoped Anna made it safely to him. He had insisted that she come. She had made him promise that everything would be fine. He had.

  Coping Mechanism

  Molly Mathay was out of the program. She’d completed it and was eating healthily for almost six months. But she was still on probation in a sense. A mentor would come by once a week to check on her. Now things were getting more difficult than she’d ever imagined they could. The treatment center staff hadn’t trained her how to handle apocalyptic situations and she knew that her mentor wouldn’t be able to come by with the plague that was spreading.

  She was alone with it and the thought of losing easy access to food made her anxious. Her anxiety made her more food obsessed. She started to binge and purge again to cope.

  Her apartment wasn’t stockpiled with food; she wasn’t allowed to shop for more than one normal week at a time. She wanted to ask for help but she barely knew anyone in the building. She’d spent a small amount of time with Rob Pace and his son but that was an awkward situation for other reasons.

  It would be difficult if not impossible in the new world to find either enough support or food to settle the urge.

  The Plague in Pixels

  Markus was left with his mind, filled with endless questions, all of the second day. He sat around and browsed the internet to try to distract his busy brain. The infection was everywhere though and he couldn’t escape it. YouTube had terrifying first-hand accounts:

  A father’s hands trembled as he recorded his wife eating their son in the backyard. Two minutes passed by and his wife started to come straight at the sliding glass door for him. The double-paned glass protected him and she could only paw at the slider, desperate for her next meal. The video ended with a tribute to the consumed child: “R.I.P. Elijah.” Comments showed that viewers were touched by the heartache, others disgusted that the man posted such a violent video detailing the death of his child.

  A video shot from a high window showing a street in Everett full of bodies. Someone with a sniper rifle across the street was taking out the infected as they wandered into the area. Markus watched the video until the end where he saw that the shooter didn’t discriminate between infected and uninfected people. Trigger Happy was the video’s name. A comment listed the street address of the shooter and a warning: “Don’t travel this street unless you want to die.” Comments included minute markers in the video for viewers’ favorite kills, mostly the headshots.

  One of the last videos Markus watched was of two teenage boys, both around 15 years old, looking for the infected and then messing around with them. Pouring soda on them, taunting them to chase after one of the boys, tripping
them, etc . . . It was kind of funny to him - almost like a prank show he’d seen on MTV- until the taller boy recognizes his mom in a nearby group of infected and the recording ends. Comments listed request after request for more “episodes” of “They’ve Got No Brains!” (Which Markus thought was a clever title they’d given the video). Many offered suggestions for content.

  Twitter too had been infected. It was full of sad stories, told in snippets. Never before had 140 characters or less been so depressing, so full of the woes of a nation and world.

  Markus didn’t feel so lonely and he felt much better off when he read what others were tweeting.

  @ncallaway: My dad's got a fever and his feet are numb. I looked it up on WebM.D. and it says he might have lupus. Anyone dealt with anything like that?

  @Jen_is_Twenty: I went to class yesterday but half the kids stayed home. I wonder if anyone will come back. Should I even go in tomorrow?

  @heismine43: stay away from the hospitals. My husband contracted the infection at one and never came home. It was a madhouse.

  @lordLover2010: Jesus will come for me and my fellow Christians. Fear the rapture, praise the Lord! Your time is now, you sinners, burn in hell!

  @margareet: I have a few extra swords and weapons if anybody needs them. I'm in McMahon Hall at the University. Safest place I know. Stay safe friends.

  @haro_kitei: Trapped in my room because my sister is trying to kill me. I don’t know what to do. Can any of you guys send help? I can pay you.

  How could anyone help? No one even knew where she lived, what her house looked like, who her sister was. And pretty soon, no one would care.

  Twitter was full of tweets with the simple words: the infection is here. With a search for ‘#infection’ one could track its spread and if you really paid attention, you could tell when someone was exposed to it. They would tweet less and less, perhaps more desperately. Some would say their goodbyes and most would say their “fuck yous”. They’d end up typing gibberish as their hands went numb and then they’d disappear. The last tweet gathering digital dust as time continued without them.

  Ben on the Third Day

  The phone lines cut in and out on the third day or maybe, Ben thought, they were just flooded with calls. Ben had tried to reach emergency services off and on all day but he either got a busy tone or nothing.

  Anna had made it to him in the late afternoon but she’d been attacked along the way and had a wound on her leg. She needed help but due to the spotty phone connection and his anguish at seeing her hurt, he wasn’t able to help her very well. He had her on the bed in the second bedroom of his place with the injured leg elevated and he kept trying to feed her but she was getting sicker and sicker.

  A knock on his door pulled him from her side. He was surprised to see that it was Isobel, the neighbor from down the hall, because she was only an acquaintance.

  “Hey,” Isobel said, looking lonely and hoping for an invite inside.

  “Hi, Isobel. How are you holding up?” Ben asked her. He kept the door mostly closed. There was some blood in the entry from Anna’s leg that he didn’t want to explain to Isobel. Besides, Anna was a jealous person who’d get the wrong idea if she knew another woman was at his door looking for company. The blood loss and shock would only have made her more temperamental. Ben was about to give Isobel a gun and tell her to go back to her apartment when Anna stumbled into the living room.

  “Who -” Anna mumbled.

  Ben rushed to her as she collapsed. Isobel opened the door enough to see the blood on the floor.

  “What’s wrong with her?” She asked.

  “Stay there! Don’t come in! I’ll be right back.” Ben picked Anna up and carried her back to the bedroom. When he returned he gave Isobel a handgun.

  “What happened to her Ben? Is she infected?”

  “I don’t know yet. She’s not well, that’s for sure. Stay safe Isobel. Don’t come back here.”

  He closed the door on her.

  Anna was dying in front of his eyes. Ben had heard news reports of how bad the hospitals were and even though Northwest was just up the road, it would have been a death sentence for him. If he wasn’t injured on the way, there were bound to be hundreds of wounded on the hospital grounds, all seeking similar aid. Casualties there would be high. Ben decided that Anna would fare much better with his one on one attention in the secure environment of Willow Brook.

  The topic of people-eating people is never very appetizing and the stress of taking care of Anna had kept Ben unaware of his growling stomach. He had some toast and juice. The television was the only distraction that Ben had from Anna’s moaning. That evening it confirmed to him that the infection was contagious. Bite wounds were fatal and the disease could be spread through saliva and other bodily fluids.

  “Fuck,” he said aloud as a thought occurred to him, I have to find out if she was bitten.

  The Fourth Day

  Isobel hadn’t heard a single gunshot all morning long. She’d sadly become used to the *pops* here and there. The silence gave her the nerve to finally take some more glimpses outside.

  Her apartment looked out onto a street usually busy with vehicles but now there was only a slow parade of dead people wandering with no determined direction. All they do is shuffle unless provoked and yet that is enough to instill in each of the uninfected the fear that this is actually the end of the world. They would take my life if I let them, Isobel reminds herself, and that makes them very dangerous.

  *Pop* *Pop*Pop*Pop* *Pop*

  Finally someone alive is trying to keep living! Isobel felt a little less alone but she got worried when she realized how close the shots sounded.

  Behind Closed Doors

  In Jeff’s defense he hadn’t been thinking straight from the excess amounts of cough medicine and the infection spreading through the city. His wife, Sheila, was a controlling woman that he’d grown to despise. With the turn of world events she had become increasingly hard to deal with. Louder and crazier by the day which made her dog, a standard poodle named Bianca, crazier and louder too.

  On the fourth day, Sheila lost it. Jeff had fallen asleep on the couch again and his wife woke him up by screaming and throwing the car keys at his face.

  “We need some more FUCKING dog food Jeff. I told you to buy extra when you went shopping. What the FUCK is wrong with you?” Her words echoed in his ears along with the sound of the canned goods she was pulling from the cupboards in her desperate search for canine nutrition. Jeff tried to answer calmly but the dog had started to bark.

  “You know what Sheila? NOTHING is wrong with me! The only issue I see with myself at this moment in time is that I am still putting up with YOU and that fucking dog!”

  This took Sheila’s anger to another level. She looked for the nearest can and chucked it at her husband’s head. He ducked and sensing she was out for blood he knew it was time to end this. He was much larger than her in stature and probably stronger but she was always so much stronger emotionally, mentally. He ran straight at her and lunged, his hands connecting with her neck. Jeff squeezed for all he was worth, knowing if she survived the choking she would kill him instead. He was stronger than her and he was proving it; defeating her and ending her cruel words.

  He wasn’t proud of it, but he did the same to the dog. It wouldn’t listen to him and besides, they were out of dog food.

  He had dumped the bodies off the deck and sat down to read. Something he’d been unable to do in the noise of his former life; with the presence of his former wife. Gunshots had been fired across the hall while he was finishing a chapter but he was so relaxed for the first time in years, he didn’t care at all.

  Imagination Infected

  Rob had a difficult time raising his son on his own. His wife had died four years ago in a car accident and Gabe, then only three, had survived. It was a miracle for sure but one that pained Rob every time he looked at Gabe, watching him grow older without a mother; wondering if he was doing enough on his own.
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  Now that something bigger was happening, bigger than what to cook for dinner each night, bigger than the pressure of teaching his son how to know right from wrong, bigger than untied shoelaces, it all seemed a bit more manageable.

  Unfortunately, now it looked to his seven-year-old like monsters were real. For the last three nights Gabe had been waiting in fear that one of them would come out from under the bed.

  The morning presented more terror. Gabe was trailing crumbs around the apartment from his breakfast pop tart as Rob had coffee and eggs. He almost dropped his cup when he heard a gun being fired inside the building. Rob went to the front door and watched through the peephole. He saw Ben, the stocky man that lived to the left down the hall, walk past his door and further down the hall towards Isobel’s place. He hadn’t stopped at all and he had blood all over him. Rob was pretty sure he saw a gun. Instinct to protect his child kicked in and Rob locked the deadbolt, moved a chair in front of the door and went to check on Gabe.